Nature & Animals Quote by Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s line lands like a joke, then keeps biting. The image is cartoon-simple: a fish is already doomed, and the only question is which cat gets the first bite. By casting “two lawyers” as predators and the “countryman” as prey, Franklin isn’t merely dunking on the legal profession; he’s sketching an entire power imbalance in one rural vignette. The countryman is outnumbered, out-versed, and out-armed by procedure. Even neutrality is impossible, because the system he’s entered is built in a language he doesn’t speak fluently.

The intent is practical cynicism. Franklin lived in a world where courts were central to property, debt, and status, and where professional expertise could be used as leverage against the less educated. Lawyers, in the colonial imagination, often symbolized a growing class of intermediaries: people who don’t grow food or make goods but can still extract value by controlling rules. Franklin, a champion of civic virtue and plain dealing, presses that suspicion into a proverb you could repeat at a tavern.

The subtext is sharper than “lawyers are bad.” It’s a warning about institutions that claim to arbitrate fairness while quietly rewarding those who can pay for representation and strategy. “Between two” matters: even if one lawyer is “yours,” the structure still turns the countryman into an object to be managed, negotiated over, billed. Franklin’s genius is to make the critique feel inevitable, almost natural, which is exactly the unsettling point.