Justice & Law Quote by James F. Cooper

Cooper’s line lands like a gentleman’s warning shot: democracies don’t usually collapse through coups, they erode through crowd habits. The phrase “besetting vice” is doing heavy work. He’s not accusing democracy of occasional mistakes; he’s diagnosing a recurring addiction, a moral weakness baked into the system’s daily life. When “public opinion” becomes a stand-in for “law,” the majority stops persuading and starts presuming. The subtext is less about elections than about impatience: why wait for due process, institutions, and rights when a loud consensus can deliver the same thrill faster?

Cooper’s cynicism is sharpened by his choice of villain. It isn’t a king, an aristocracy, or a corrupt cabinet. It’s “masses of men,” ordinary people discovering they can be oppressive at scale while still calling themselves free. That’s the rhetorical trap he sets: tyranny is typically imagined as something done to the public, not by it. He flips the script and implicates the reader in the mechanism of coercion.

Context matters. Cooper wrote in an America accelerating into Jacksonian democracy, with expanding suffrage, partisan newspapers, and a growing confidence that “the people” were both the source and the proof of legitimacy. His fear isn’t anti-democratic so much as anti-mob: a warning that without law as a brake - courts, protections for minorities, enforceable procedures - popular sentiment becomes an unaccountable sovereign. The line still stings because it frames the most flattering story democracies tell about themselves (majority rule) as their easiest route to cruelty.