Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson’s “good man” isn’t a flag-waver; he’s a moral auditor. The line tightens virtue into a test: it’s easy to “value” your own countrymen because affection can be inherited like an accent. The harder task is to “think as highly” of strangers who will never pay you back in praise, kinship, or social advantage. Richardson builds a hierarchy of loyalties and then quietly demotes the most fashionable one. Nation is allowed as sentiment, but it can’t be the measure of worth.

The phrasing is doing sly work. “Though” grants patriotism just enough legitimacy to keep the reader from bristling, then pivots to the real demand: esteem must follow “worthy men,” not passports. “Under the sun” stretches the horizon on purpose, making parochial pride look small and a little embarrassing. This is cosmopolitanism framed not as sophistication but as decency.

Context matters. Richardson is an early English novelist, writing in an era when Britain’s imperial reach and commercial networks were expanding, and “national character” was becoming a popular way to sort humans into flattering and unflattering stereotypes. His fiction is famously preoccupied with moral perception: who deserves sympathy, who deserves credit, who gets misread. This sentence reads like a pocket version of that project. It trains the reader’s gaze away from tribal shortcuts and toward a universal yardstick, while still acknowledging the sticky pull of home. The subtext is both ethical and social: if your admiration can’t cross borders, it isn’t virtue; it’s just loyalty dressed up as principle.