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 that the counselor who exposes to a client the badness of his case and dissuades him from suing receives for answer: Bring suit, cost what it may!

How explain this mode of action which, from the standpoint of a rational estimation of material interests, is simply senseless?

The answer usually given to this question is well known. It is, we are told, the miserable mania for litigation, the pure love of wrangling, the irresistible desire to inflict pain on one’s opponent, even when it is certain that one will have to pay for it more heavily than one’s opponent.

Let us drop the consideration of the controversy between two private persons, and in their place put two nations. The one nation, let us suppose, has, contrary to law, taken from the other a square mile of barren, worthless land. Shall the latter go to war? Let us examine the question from precisely the same standpoint from which the theory of the mania for litigation judges it, in the case of the peasant from whose land a neighbor has