Justice & Law Quote by Auberon Herbert

Herbert’s line is a trapdoor: step away from human rights and you don’t land in some tough-minded realism, you drop straight into worship. Not metaphorical “power politics,” but an almost medieval idolatry - “that old-world god, Force” - the kind of authority you’re supposed to have outgrown. The brilliance is how he frames coercion as regression. Force isn’t presented as a tool you reluctantly pick up; it’s a deity that demands posture, ritual, humiliation. “Abjectly kneeling” makes the bargain bodily: deny rights and you end up smaller, not stronger.

The specific intent is warning, but also accusation. Herbert is aiming at respectable reformers and paternalists who claim they can suspend rights for order, improvement, or national greatness. He denies them the comfort of clean motives: “however little you may wish to do so” suggests the slide into coercion is structural. Once you reject rights as constraints on what may be done to people, legitimacy has to come from somewhere else. Force is the remaining currency, and it quickly becomes the whole economy.

Context matters: Herbert, a Victorian-era classical liberal and early libertarian, wrote in a Britain confident in empire, moral “uplift,” and bureaucratic solutions. His critique lands on the era’s self-image - progress draped over compulsion. The subtext is that rights are not sentimental ornaments; they are the only alternative to rule by might. Take them away and you don’t get pragmatism. You get a shrine.