Justice & Law Quote by Walt Whitman

Whitman isn’t offering despair so much as stripping away the comfortable fiction that history naturally bends toward fairness. “Judging from the main portions of the history of the world” is a deliberately cool, almost reportorial setup: he’s invoking the record - war, conquest, slavery, exploitation - and refusing to cherry-pick the uplifting footnotes. The phrase “so far” does quiet but crucial work. It admits the past is unfinished business, not a closed case, and it keeps the door open to change without pretending change is guaranteed.

The sting is in “always in jeopardy.” Whitman treats justice not as an achievement you secure once and store in a glass case, but as a living condition that can be reversed, bargained away, or exhausted into apathy. “Jeopardy” carries courtroom weight - a legal term with moral pressure behind it - suggesting that justice is perpetually on trial, and the jury is history itself. There’s no cosmic referee here, no invisible hand that automatically corrects abuses. That’s a pointed stance for a poet so often associated with democratic confidence.

Context matters: Whitman lived through a violently stress-tested America - the expansionist 19th century, the Civil War, emancipation followed by backlash. His democratic vision was muscular, but not naive. The subtext is a warning to citizens who want to treat justice as a national trait rather than a daily practice. If justice is “always” threatened, then the only durable defense is vigilance: institutions, movements, and individuals willing to keep re-arguing the case, because history won’t do it for you.