Justice & Law Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A bumper of good liquor is Sheridan's wickedly efficient shortcut through the moral machinery of society: forget courts, clergy, and the dignified grind of due process - pour a round and watch conflict evaporate. The line works because it flatters a certain worldly intelligence. It assumes the audience already knows that "justice" often means procedure, delay, performance. By contrast, drink is immediate: it lubricates conversation, blurs pride, and offers a ready-made ritual of reconciliation. Sheridan isn't praising drunkenness so much as exposing how thin the veneer of principle can be when a simpler pleasure offers everyone an exit ramp.

The comic bite comes from the lineup: justice, judge, vicar. That's the full respectable tripod - law, authority, religion - and Sheridan knocks it over with a tavern utensil. "Bumper" is doing a lot of work: not a sip, not a medicinal tot, but a hearty, convivial dose, the kind tied to toasts and social bonding. It's a transactional peace, purchased not by truth but by shared mood.

Context matters: Sheridan wrote for a late-18th-century Britain where public life ran on club culture, patronage, and a performative morality that often coexisted happily with vice. His stage comedies thrive on the gap between what society preaches and what it practices. The subtext is bleak under the sparkle: institutions claim to resolve disputes on principle, but people often prefer relief over rectitude - and they're willing to let a pleasant fog stand in for fairness.