Justice & Law Quote by John Trumbull

Trumbull skewers the pious sermon that every generation owes its descendants a blank check of sacrifice. The lines sound like a courtroom cross-examination: you “get them, bear them, breed, and nurse” - the brute inventory of labor that turns the sentimental category of “posterity” into diapers, hunger, and exhaustion. By the time he asks, “What has posterity done for us,” the question is meant to sting, because it violates a civic taboo: you are not supposed to demand reciprocity from the future. Trumbull does anyway, and the audacity is the point.

The subtext is anti-martyrdom. He’s mocking elites who drape present pain in the language of moral destiny, especially when that pain looks suspiciously like political risk borne by ordinary bodies. “Trust our necks to gripe of noose” turns abstract duty into the image of hanging - not metaphorical discomfort, but lethal consequence. The future’s “rights” become a rhetorical weapon used to conscript the living.

Context matters: Trumbull wrote in the churn of the American revolutionary era, when talk of liberty and obligation competed with real fears about reprisal, instability, and who exactly would pay for lofty principles. As an artist-satirist (best known for M'Fingal), he understands how slogans work: “posterity” is a sacred word that launders coercion. The wit isn’t just decorative; it’s a diagnostic tool, exposing how political movements manufacture virtue by outsourcing reward to people not yet born. Trumbull’s cynicism lands because it refuses the easy halo, insisting the present has its own claims - and its own neck.