they cross some selfish or local interest or prejudices is full of
danger, not only to the nation at large, but much more to those who use
this pernicious expedient to escape their just obligations or to obtain
an unjust advantage over others. They will presently themselves be
compelled to appeal to the law for protection, and those who would use
the law as a defense must not deny that use of it to others.

If our great corporations would more scrupulously observe their legal
limitations and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the
unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with
their operations. The community that by concert, open or secret, among
its citizens denies to a portion of its members their plain rights
under the law has severed the only safe bond of social order and
prosperity. The evil works from a bad center both ways. It demoralizes
those who practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by it
in the efficiency of the law as a safe protector. The man in whose
breast that faith has been darkened is naturally the subject of
dangerous and uncanny suggestions. Those who use unlawful methods, if
moved by no higher motive than the selfishness that prompted them, may
well stop and inquire what is to be the end of this.

An unlawful expedient can not become a permanent condition of
government. If the educated and influential classes in a community
either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that
seem to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the
lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient
cause for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes? A
community where law is the rule of conduct and where courts, not mobs,
execute its penalties is the only attractive field for business
investments and honest labor.