Justice & Law Quote by Thomas Hardy

Hardy’s line lands like a cold front: not an outburst of bitterness, but a deliberately unsentimental diagnosis. Calling cruelty “the law” borrows the prestige of science and jurisprudence, as if suffering isn’t a moral accident but a governing principle. That phrasing matters. A “law” doesn’t bargain, doesn’t listen to prayer, doesn’t care about good intentions. It just operates.

The subtext is classic Hardy: the Victorian faith that progress, education, and decency will steadily civilize human life is treated as a comforting myth. By yoking “nature” to “society,” he collapses the boundary people use to excuse themselves. We like to imagine cruelty as either animal necessity (out there in the woods) or human corruption (in here, among institutions). Hardy insists it’s the same current running through both: predation, competition, humiliation, indifference. The line’s bleakest twist is the final clause: “and we can’t get out of it if we would.” Even reformist willpower, even moral clarity, hits structural limits. Wanting better isn’t the same as being able to build it.

Contextually, Hardy is writing in the long shadow of Darwin, when natural selection made “red in tooth and claw” feel less like poetry and more like an operating manual. His novels keep staging that collision between private longing and impersonal forces: class, sex, money, reputation, chance. The intent isn’t to celebrate cruelty but to strip away the sentimental alibis, forcing the reader to confront how often “civilization” simply rebrands harm as custom, necessity, or fate.