Rudolf von Jhering

“ The disastrous influence which unjust laws and bad legal institutions exercise on the moral power of the nation acts under ground, in those regions which so many amateur statesmen do not consider worthy of their attention; they are concerned only with the stately top; of the poison which rises to the top from the root they have no idea whatever. But despotism knows where it must strike to fell the tree; it leaves the top untouched at first, but destroys the roots. Every despotism has begun with attacks on private law, with the violation of the legal rights of the individual ”

“ In a community in which this feeling, this sense for strict law prevails, we look about in vain for the saddening sights so common elsewhere—the mass of the people, when the authorities prosecute the criminal or the violator of the laws or seek to arrest him, taking his part, and seeing in the state power the natural enemy of the people. Every one knows that the cause of the law is his own cause. Only the criminal here sympathizes with the criminal. The honest man does not. Rather does he lend a willing and helping hand to the police and to the authorities. ”

“ How can the man who thinks nothing of the ideal damage which he suffers in his person and his honor, inasmuch as he abandons his rights, because he loves his ease; who was accustomed, in legal matters, to employ only the measure of material interest, be expected to employ a different measure and to feel differently when there is question of the right and the honor of the nation? Whence could that idealism of feeling suddenly proceed which had thus far never shown itself? No! The battler for constitutional law and the law of nations is none other than the battler for private law ”

“ Every provision which the people feel to be unjust, and every institution which they detest, is an injury to the national feeling of legal right and to the national strength, a sin against the idea of law, the burthen of which falls on the state itself, and for which it has not infrequently to pay dearly. ”

“ For the essence of legal right is, as I have frequently remarked already, action. What the air is to the flame, freedom of action is to the feeling of legal right. Refuse it this freedom, and the feeling dies. ”

“ No one will dare to wrest from a people who, in the very smallest matters, bravely assert their rights, the highest of their possessions, and it is, therefore, not mere chance that the same people of antiquity who attained to the greatest political development within, and displayed the greatest power externally, the Romans, had at the same time the most fully developed system of private law. ”

“ To destroy the feeling of personal liberty in the peasant by means of taxes and services, to put the citizen under the guardianship of the police, to make the permission to go on a journey dependent on the granting of a passport, and the thought of the author on the approval of the censor, to impose taxes according to one’s good will and pleasure—even a Machiavelli could have given no better recipe to extinguish all manly feeling of personal liberty in a people, and to insure despotism an unresisted conquest. ”

“ Hence the principle is ever true: the political position of a people, both at home and abroad, is always in keeping with their moral force; the Celestial Empire with its bamboo, the rod for its adult children, and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants, will never attain, in the eyes of foreign nations, the respected position of little Switzerland. ”

“ But it is our own fault if we understand the teachings of history only after it is too late; it is not its fault if we do not understand them in time, for it preaches them, always, in such a manner that we may understand them and profit by them. ”

“ For the state which desires to be respected abroad, and to be firm and unshaken internally, there is no more precious good which it has to guard and foster than the national feeling of legal right. The fostering of it is one of the highest and most important duties of political pedagogy. ”