Justice & Law Quote by James F. Cooper

Cooper’s line doesn’t fear the mob because it’s loud; it fears the mob because it’s convinced it’s righteous. “Besetting vice” is moral language, the kind you use for a habit you keep excusing until it becomes character. He’s warning that democracies carry a built-in temptation: to treat whatever the crowd believes today as if it were binding, self-justifying law. That substitution is the trick. Law is supposed to be procedure, restraint, precedent, a system that forces even popular impulses to pass through friction. Public opinion is immediate, emotional, and allergic to delay. When the latter starts acting like the former, democracy begins to behave like a shortcut to power rather than a discipline of power.

The sharpest move is the reversal in “masses of men exhibit their tyranny.” Tyranny is usually pinned on kings and elites; Cooper flips it onto majorities. It’s not anti-democratic so much as anti-complacent: popular rule doesn’t automatically produce justice, only authorization. The subtext is a defense of minority rights and institutional insulation, a case for courts, constitutions, and unpopular safeguards that prevent politics from becoming a permanent referendum on who gets to belong.

Context matters. Cooper is writing in an early American republic that was expanding the franchise, celebrating “the people,” and also practicing exclusion, moral panics, and party vendettas. A novelist, he understands how a crowd becomes a character: not just numerous, but narratively certain. His warning lands because it targets democracy’s most seductive myth-that popularity can stand in for legitimacy, and that numbers alone absolve cruelty.