Daily Inspiration Quote by Auberon Herbert

Herbert’s line doesn’t just argue against violence; it tries to corner the reader into admitting a category error that politics routinely depends on. “As a mental abstract” is doing heavy lifting: he’s asking you to step back from the messy, justificatory stories states tell about themselves and look at force in its pure form. Strip away uniforms, ballots, and legal language, and physical coercion is simply compulsion. In that cleaned-up frame, morality can’t share the same space, because morality requires choice. Virtue at gunpoint isn’t virtue; it’s compliance.

The second move is sharper and more consequential: force doesn’t merely conflict with morality, it “drives out of existence the moral forces.” Herbert is diagnosing a displacement effect. When coercion becomes the default tool, the social muscles that make moral life possible atrophy: persuasion, restraint, voluntary cooperation, mutual aid, the slow work of building trust. People stop practicing those skills because they don’t have to. Why negotiate when you can command? Why cultivate conscience when penalties can do the job?

Context matters. Writing in late Victorian Britain, Herbert sits in the crosshairs of expanding state power: empire, policing, taxation, and a rising confidence in administrative “solutions” to social problems. His libertarian suspicion is that every moral project outsourced to force becomes less moral and more managerial. The subtext is a warning about temptation: even good ends, once pursued through coercion, re-train a society to believe that rightness is something you can enforce rather than something you must choose.