Rudolf von Jhering

“ The influence of the millions won by stock-jobbing extends even to the poor man’s hut; and the same person who, in another environment, would have tasted, in his own experience, the blessings of labor, feels that same labor, under the enervating pressure of such an atmosphere, a curse, and only a curse. Communism thrives only in those quagmires in which the true idea of property is lost. ”

“ His property is only the visible form which his labor in the past has taken. The lazy peasant, who takes no care of his land or who dissipates his little fortune, is as much despised by other peasants as is the officer who lightly values his honor, by his colleagues. But one peasant will never reproach another because he has not fought a duel, or instituted a suit to avenge an insult; nor one officer another, because he has mismanaged his property. The piece of land which he tills, the cattle which he raises, are to the peasant the basis of his entire existence ”

“ At that point every vestige of the moral idea of property has departed, and there can be no longer question of the moral duty of defending it. Here there can no longer be any understanding of the meaning of property as it exists in the breast of the man who has to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow. ”

“ I do not hold wealth and luxury responsible for this degeneration—in neither of them do I discover any danger to the feeling of legal right of the people—but the love of gain grown immoral. The historical source and ethical justification of property is labor—the labor not of the hand or arm alone, but of the mind and of talent ”

“ The only motive which urges me to go to law to assert my right to my property is the motive which determines me to acquire it, and which determines the disposition I shall make of it—my interest. Whether I shall go to law to assert my right to my property, or not, is simply a question of interest. ”

“ The pain which a person experiences when his legal rights are violated is the spontaneous, instinctive admission, wrung from him by force, of what the law is to him as an individual, in the first place, and then of what it is to human society. In this one moment, and in the form of an emotion, of direct feeling, we see more of the real meaning and nature of the law than during long years of undisturbed enjoyment. The man who has not experienced this pain himself, or observed it in others, knows nothing of what law is, even if he had committed the whole corpus juris to memory. ”

“ The second element in the feeling of legal right, action, is a mere matter of character: the attitude which an individual or a nation assumes towards an attempt on its rights is the surest test of its character. If by character we understand personality, full, self-reliant and self-asserting, there can be no better opportunity to test this quality than when arbitrariness attacks one’s rights, and, with his rights, his person. ”

“ And even under these circumstances, the apparent absence of danger in such a mode of action is possible only because the struggle of law against wrong is, on the whole, not affected by it any further. For, indeed, it is not individuals alone who are called upon to take part in this struggle, but, in organized states, the state-power also takes a very large part in it, inasmuch as it prosecutes and punishes all serious attacks on the life, liberty or property of the individual, of its own motion, thus relieving him of the hardest part of the work. ”

“ The degree of energy with which the feeling of legal right reacts against an infringement of legal right is, in my eyes, a sure measure of the importance which individuals, a class or people, really attach, both to the law in general and to a special branch of it, for themselves and their special aim in life. ”

“ Precisely his largely developed sense of property makes an injury to his property all the more sensitively felt, and the reaction, therefore, all the more violent. The litigiousness of the peasant is nothing but the aberration of the sense of property, produced by mistrust, an aberration which, like the analogous phenomenon in love, jealousy, aims its dart at itself, inasmuch as it destroys what it seeks to save. ”

“ Only through a lasting connection with labor can property maintain itself fresh and healthy. Only at this source is it seen, clearly and transparently, to the very bottom, to be what it is to man. The further the stream is removed from this, its source, and winds into the devious direction of easy and toilless gain, the more turbid do its waters become, until, in the slime of speculation on ’Change and of fraudulent stock-jobbing, it loses every trace of what it was in its origin. ”

“ This mistrust of the peasant, which, in every conflict of law, supposes an evil intention in one’s opponent, finds expression in that law in the form of legal principles. Everywhere, even where there is question of a conflict of law in which each of the contending parties may be in good faith, the defeated party has to pay a penalty for his resistance. The simple restoration to a person of his rights is no satisfaction to the outraged feeling of right. ”

“ But not all legal wrong is arbitrariness, that is a revolt against the idea of law. The possessor of my chattel who thinks he owns it does not assail my person in denying the idea of property; rather does he appeal to it in his own interest. ”

“ The debtor himself is to me on the same footing as the thief. He knowingly tries to deprive me of what is mine. It is the rising up of caprice against law, only it is in a situation to clothe itself in a legal garb. The heir of the debtor, on the other hand, is like the bonâ fide possessor of what belongs to me. He does not deny the principle that the debtor must pay, but only the assertion that he is a debtor himself, and all that I have said above of the bonâ fide possessor applies to him. ”

“ Because he has the right feeling, that the courageous vindication of one’s personality is, for him, more, perhaps, than for a person of any other class, an indispensable condition of his order, which, in its very nature, should be the incorporation of personal courage, and which cannot endure the cowardice of its members without sacrificing itself. With the officer, let us now compare the peasant, who defends his property with the greatest stubbornness, but evinces a surprising indifference as to his honor. ”

“ It is a matter of indifference what the object of the right is. If mere chance were to put me in possession of an object, I might be deprived of it without any injury to my person, but it is not chance, but my will, which establishes a bond between myself and it, and even my will only at the price of the past labor of myself or of another;—it is a part of my own strength and of my own past, or of the strength and past of another, which I possess and assert in it. ”

“ But to experience the pain without taking to heart its warning to ward off the impending danger, to bear it patiently and take no measure of defense, is a denial of the feeling of legal right, excusable, perhaps, under certain circumstances, in a particular case, but impossible in the long run without the most disastrous consequences to the feeling of legal right itself. ”

“ But whatever may be the cause of that weakness of character which the love of ease induces to evade the struggle for legal right, all we have to do here is to recognize it and to describe it as it is. What is the practical philosophy of life which it preaches but the policy of the coward? ”

“ Put them in the jury-box—submit to a jury of officers the case of an injury to property, and to a jury of peasants a question of honor—and see how different their verdicts! It is well known that there are no severer judges, in the matter of injuries to property, than the peasantry. And although I cannot here speak from experience, I have no manner of doubt that if a peasant were to bring an action for damages for assault and battery, for instance, it would be found much easier to induce him to arbitrate than if his action were for an injury to property. ”

“ It is a reminder of the duty of moral self-preservation, such as physical pain is in respect to physical self-preservation.
Let us take the most undoubted case, an attack on one’s honor, and the profession in which it is most sensitively developed—the military profession. An officer who has patiently borne an insult which involves his honor is no longer an officer. Why? The vindication of his honor is every man’s duty. ”

“ An individual with a sensitive feeling of honor, in such a situation, has no alternative but to lower his claims to the level of those of his like or to give up the calling. Only when such a way of feeling becomes general is there any prospect for the individual, instead of wasting his strength in a useless struggle, to turn it to account, in union with those who think as he does, to raise the level of the honor of his class ”

“ But even in respect to those violations of law, the prosecution of which is left entirely to the individual, care is taken that the struggle may not be interrupted; for every one does not follow the policy of the coward, and even the latter takes his place in the line of combatants, at least when the value of the object in controversy outweighs his ease. ”

“ But the thief and the robber place themselves outside the legal domain of property. In my property they deny both the idea of property, and, at the same time, an essential condition of the existence of my person. If we suppose their mode of action to become general, to become a maxim of the law, property is denied both in theory and in practice. ”

“ Every state punishes those crimes most severely which threaten its own peculiar condition of existence, while it allows a moderation to prevail in regard to other crimes which, not infrequently, presents a very striking contrast to its severity as against the former. A theocracy brands blasphemy and idolatry as crimes deserving of death, while it looks upon a boundary violation as a simple misdemeanor. ”

“ His credit is to him what honor is to the officer, and property to the peasant. The maintenance of his credit is, for him, a vital question; and the man who charges him with negligence in meeting his obligations deals him a heavier blow than the one who attacks his person or robs him. ”

“ The person permanently living in the country, who does not keep entirely aloof from the peasantry, will involuntarily, and even when not urged thereto by his circumstances or his own peculiar character, take up something of the peasant’s frugality and sense of property. The same average man, under otherwise entirely similar circumstances, will be economical with the peasant in the country, and a spendthrift with the millionaire in a city like Vienna. ”

“ But in the few pieces of silver which the Englishman refuses and which the Austrian pays there lies concealed more than one would think, of England and Austria; there lie concealed centuries of their political development and of their social life. ”

“ Here each nation is thrown entirely on its own resources. No higher power relieves it of the necessity of asserting its rights, and I need only recall the example given above of the square mile, to show what that view of life which would measure the resistance to wrong according to the material value of the object in controversy, means to the life of nations. ”

“ But it certainly is possible that a person should attack one of these conditions; and it is the duty of the person attacked to repel the attack: for it is not sufficient to place these conditions of existence under the protection of law, represented by mere abstract principles; they must be asserted in the concrete by the individual ”

“ Both sacrifice themselves without reserve. They leave the consequences of their action entirely out of consideration. And this they must do, for, in doing it, they are only obeying the peculiar law of their moral self-preservation. ”

“ But if a settlement is often so difficult to effect; if, as not infrequently happens, both parties from the first decline all negotiations tending to a settlement, the reason is not simply that the calculations of probabilities by the two parties diverge too much from each other to be able to meet, but because each of the parties to the controversy supposes the other to be consciously wrong, moved by an evil intent. ”

“ But a principle which, wherever tested, proves itself completely unthinkable, the dissolution and destruction of the law, cannot, even where, by way of exception, its fatal consequences are paralyzed by other circumstances, be called correct. ”