"Laws are generally found to be nets of such a texture, as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized are alone entangled in it"
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A law that behaves like a net is already confessing its bias: it is designed less to stop motion than to sort bodies by size. Shenstone’s image is tactile and quietly brutal. “Texture” does the real work here, implying that injustice isn’t merely in enforcement but woven into the material itself. The poor “creep through” because they’re too small to be worth catching; their infractions are petty, their lives already policed by necessity. The “great” break through because wealth, status, and connections turn rules into a negotiable surface. It’s the “middle-sized” who get “alone entangled,” trapped by the system’s sweet spot: visible enough to prosecute, powerless enough to punish, invested enough in respectability to be damaged by scandal.
Shenstone was writing in an 18th-century Britain where law was both expansive and uneven, a society of patronage and property, with punishment often spectacularly harsh but applied selectively. As a poet rather than a statesman, he sidesteps policy and lands a moral diagnosis in one clean metaphor. The cynicism is measured: not a call to abolish law, but an accusation that law often functions as social technology, maintaining hierarchy under the guise of neutrality.
The line still stings because it refuses comforting explanations. It doesn’t blame individual bad actors; it suggests the net is doing exactly what it was made to do. That’s why it reads less like an aphorism and more like a warning label.
Shenstone was writing in an 18th-century Britain where law was both expansive and uneven, a society of patronage and property, with punishment often spectacularly harsh but applied selectively. As a poet rather than a statesman, he sidesteps policy and lands a moral diagnosis in one clean metaphor. The cynicism is measured: not a call to abolish law, but an accusation that law often functions as social technology, maintaining hierarchy under the guise of neutrality.
The line still stings because it refuses comforting explanations. It doesn’t blame individual bad actors; it suggests the net is doing exactly what it was made to do. That’s why it reads less like an aphorism and more like a warning label.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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