Ethics & Morality Quote by Lewis J. Bates

Bates sketches a small indictment of social life: we pride ourselves on being rational judges, yet our verdicts are often weather - blunt, seasonal, and indifferent to human complexity. “Cruel as winter, and cold as the snow” isn’t just decorative simile; it’s a way of making judgment feel like something that happens to you, not something someone thoughtfully chooses. Winter doesn’t negotiate. It arrives, it bites, it leaves marks. So does public opinion when it’s in a mood.

The poem’s pivot, “But by-and-by,” carries the real argument. Bates concedes that snap judgment is the default setting, then introduces time as the only fair court. With distance, the “deed and the plan” can be refiled not under outcome but under intention: “the motive that lieth below.” That phrasing matters. Motive is subterranean, obscured by the visible spectacle of action. Bates implies that the crowd typically assesses the surface - the mess, the optics, the scandal - because it’s easy, emotionally satisfying, and socially contagious. Reading motive requires patience and empathy, virtues that don’t trend.

Contextually, this fits a moral-poetic tradition that pushes back against the era’s appetite for reputational punishment: the quick branding of a person by a single act, a single failure, a single misunderstood choice. Bates isn’t naïve about mercy; he’s strategic. He suggests the only antidote to cold judgment is time’s slow thaw, when motives - messy, mixed, human - finally become legible.