Justice & Law Quote by John Bates Clark

Clark is doing something sly here: dressing a warning to the legal system in the cool costume of economic rationality. A court can propose “adjustment,” but whether workers accept it, he argues, won’t hinge on its fairness or legitimacy. It hinges on incentives. If the expected payoff from staying out is higher, they’ll refuse the deal, even if the refusal drags “whatever of violence that involves” in its wake. The sentence reads like a tidy model with an ugly variable smuggled in.

The specific intent is to demystify labor conflict. Strikes aren’t moral tantrums, in this framing; they’re bargaining strategies. Courts, for all their robes and ritual, are just another actor trying to impose a settlement on an ongoing negotiation. Clark’s subtext is tougher: legitimacy doesn’t govern behavior as reliably as leverage does. You can hear the implicit critique of reformers who think a neutral ruling can end a dispute simply by being pronounced.

Context matters. Clark wrote in an era of high-stakes, often bloody U.S. labor battles (Homestead, Pullman), when injunctions and “labor peace” schemes promised order but frequently functioned as discipline. His phrasing—“men can gain more”—treats workers as calculating agents, but the line about violence also nudges the reader toward a familiar elite anxiety: that economic self-interest, uncontained, turns combustible. It’s a technocratic diagnosis with a moral tremor underneath: ignore the distribution of power and the payoff structure, and your courtroom compromise becomes just another piece of paper on the picket line.