Justice & Law Quote by David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence’s line takes a swing at history’s favorite alibi: the idea that time itself can launder moral failure. By yoking “ethics and equity and the principles of justice” into a triple insistence, he builds a moral chorus that refuses to be reduced to a trend. The calendar becomes the villainous prop of modern life: a tidy grid that encourages people to think in eras, to excuse cruelty as “how things were then,” to treat conscience like last season’s fashion. Lawrence won’t allow it. His phrasing is plain, even sermon-like, because the target is slippery: rationalization dressed up as sophistication.

The subtext is a rebuke of progress narratives that confuse novelty with improvement. Lawrence wrote in a period when industrial modernity promised uplift while grinding people down, and when Europe’s self-congratulating civilization was steering toward mechanized slaughter. In that climate, “the calendar” isn’t just time passing; it’s the bureaucratic mindset that turns human lives into schedules, quotas, and historical inevitabilities. Justice, he implies, is not a moving goalpost set by whoever wins the moment.

What makes the sentence work is its refusal to bargain. There’s no “mostly,” no “in general,” no room for moral inflation. Lawrence isn’t arguing that society can’t change; he’s arguing that moral clarity is the prerequisite for change worth having. If you need the date to tell you whether something is wrong, you’ve already outsourced your conscience.