Justice & Law Quote by Denis Kearney

There’s a velvet glove over a clenched fist in Kearney’s phrasing: “trusting you will do me the justice” is less a plea for fairness than a demand for control. The sentence performs politeness while signaling a boundary. Kearney isn’t simply disagreeing; he’s staging the disagreement as a matter of moral bookkeeping, where the editor (or publisher) owes him “justice” by either altering the text or publicly recording his dissent.

The intent is procedural, but the subtext is reputational triage. By insisting on modification or a note in a “new edition,” Kearney treats print as a political battleground: permanence is the threat, revision is the defense, and an editorial footnote becomes a kind of legal disclaimer. He’s angling to shape how he will be read after the immediate quarrel fades, anticipating that the next audience will encounter the dispute without him in the room.

Context matters because Kearney’s career depended on message discipline. As a late-19th-century politician and labor agitator, he thrived on confrontation and public narrative, but he also understood the risk of being pinned down by hostile summaries or inconvenient quotations. This line reads like a tactical memo from someone who knows that credibility is manufactured in the margins: if he can’t rewrite the record, he can at least force the record to show that he objected. The “etc” at the end is telling, too - a brusque shorthand that assumes authority, as if the rest is administrative detail.