Justice & Law Quote by Thomas Jordan Jarvis

A politician’s sweetest trick is to make policy sound like a hymn. Jarvis frames a law-and-order program not as coercion but as caretaking: if it’s been "honestly and faithfully tried" elsewhere, then any failure in Pitt County won’t be the law’s fault - it’ll be the community’s moral lapse. That conditional promise ("if we faithfully administer the law") is doing heavy lifting. It shifts responsibility away from legislators and onto local administrators and citizens, setting up a ready-made excuse for uneven outcomes while still selling certainty.

The language is almost liturgical: "honestly", "faithfully", "gladness and joy". Those aren’t neutral governance terms; they’re church terms. Jarvis is recruiting religious virtue to launder the hard edges of enforcement. Whatever the law actually regulates - taxes, schooling, policing, public health, temperance - he casts it as a domestic salvation project: not merely order in the streets, but "gladness and joy into the homes". That move narrows the audience to the respectable household and implies that opposition is opposition to family wellbeing.

Context matters. Jarvis governed in the post-Reconstruction South, where "faithful administration" often functioned as code for restoring local control and disciplining who counted as part of the political community. The quote sells legitimacy through comparison ("other communities") and through character ("honestly"). It’s a classic reassurance strategy in moments of social friction: trust the system, trust the people running it, and trust that the law is already proven. The subtext: compliance is virtue, dissent is disorder, and any suffering that follows can be blamed on insufficient "faith."