Justice & Law Quote by Henry Green

Green nails a peculiarly British strain of class consciousness: not the swaggering snobbery of the born-to-it, but the jittery, self-policing anxiety of someone educated into the ruling class’s manners without fully trusting its moral legitimacy. “Hated every other face” is an outrageous escalation that works because it’s socially illegible hate: not personal, not principled, almost allergic. The punchline is the reason for it - “for fear the owner was a lord” - which turns a schoolboy’s social life into a minefield of titles. Faces become property; identity is reduced to ownership and rank. That little word “owner” makes the whole system feel feudal, as if aristocracy is something you possess like land.

Then Green shifts to university, where the emotional posture flips from hostility to performance: “court the rich.” The verb is perfect. It suggests seduction, strategy, self-abasement - and also a kind of transactional romance with power. The subtext is that education doesn’t dissolve hierarchy; it trains you to navigate it, even to depend on it, while still leaving room for a nagging ethical recoil: “doubting whether there should be great inequalities between incomes.” Green frames the doubt as tentative, almost embarrassed, because the institutions he’s describing reward ambivalence. You can question inequality in theory while practicing deference in daily life.

Written by a novelist who moved through elite spaces, the line reads like a confession without absolution: the making of a modern subject who is politically awake just enough to feel guilty, and socially ambitious enough to keep playing.