Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Aldrich’s line is a neat little indictment dressed as epigram: civilization isn’t a triumph over brutality so much as its costume. The lamb’s skin image does the heavy lifting. It invokes innocence, softness, moral purity - then flips it into camouflage. Barbarism doesn’t merely survive under civilized norms; it learns their manners, borrows their vocabulary, and uses their institutions as cover. The masquerade is the point: violence becomes legible, even respectable, when it can pass as order.

The subtext is less “people are secretly monsters” than “polite society is structurally capable of sanctioned cruelty.” Aldrich was writing in the late 19th century, when American and European modernity liked to congratulate itself: industry, science, imperial “progress,” a swelling middle class with rules for everything from table settings to public virtue. Against that self-flattery, the quote needles the period’s moral bookkeeping. Lynching, colonial conquest, labor exploitation, and racial hierarchy didn’t announce themselves as barbarism; they arrived with paperwork, sermons, and patriotic songs. That’s the lamb’s skin.

What makes the line work is its refusal of comfort. It doesn’t allow “civilization” to be a stable opposite of “barbarism.” Instead it suggests a continuum where refinement can be an instrument, not an antidote. Aldrich, a poet and editor steeped in genteel culture, also knew how easily “taste” becomes a shield for power. The sentence is short, sharp, and cynical because it’s meant to puncture the era’s favorite illusion: that progress automatically equals moral advance.