Love Quote by George Borrow

Borrow’s line is patriotism sold as social technology: a moral disinfectant that keeps the public from going bad. The hierarchy matters. By placing “the love of country” just beneath “the love of God,” he borrows religion’s authority to launder nationalism into a near-sacred duty. It’s not merely that faith and flag make people better; it’s that they make people governable. Crime, in this framing, isn’t only desperation or inequality or impulse. It’s a lapse in belonging.

That’s the subtextual wager: attachment beats enforcement. If you can persuade citizens to feel watched by God and claimed by nation, you need fewer police, fewer prisons, fewer messy explanations. Borrow, a 19th-century writer steeped in a Britain anxious about disorder, poverty, and the “dangerous classes,” offers an appealingly simple remedy: bind the individual to something larger, and self-restraint will follow. The line reads like a Victorian civic sermon compressed into one sentence.

It also contains a quiet threat. “Love of country” isn’t neutral affection; it implies a standard of loyalty. The “preventive of crime” can easily become a test of who counts as legitimate: the unpatriotic drift toward suspicion, the outsider toward blame. In an era when empire and national identity were being aggressively narrated, patriotism doubled as an alibi for power. Borrow’s sentence works because it turns a political desire (cohesion, obedience, stability) into a moral instinct. You don’t argue with it; you’re meant to feel it.