Justice & Law Quote by William Godwin

Godwin makes justice sound less like a courtroom procedure and more like a moral climate: something you breathe, something that should saturate you. The phrasing is strategically expansive. “The cause of justice” isn’t a policy plank; it’s a movement, a calling, almost a substitute for religion. By immediately yoking it to “humanity,” he refuses the narrower Enlightenment temptation to treat justice as abstract balance sheets of rights and duties. Justice, for Godwin, has to cash out as lived human flourishing, or it’s counterfeit.

The subtext is an argument against factional righteousness. “Its advocates should overflow with universal good will” is a warning shot at reformers who fight oppression by becoming smaller people: vindictive, tribal, addicted to enemies. Godwin is writing in the age of revolutions, when the rhetoric of liberation could curdle into purges, denunciations, and moral panic. He’s trying to immunize the idea of justice against the revolutionary sin of hating in the name of virtue.

Notice how he smuggles in a utilitarian finish - “general happiness of mankind” - but frames it in the language of affection: “We should love this cause.” That move matters. He’s not just instructing; he’s recruiting the reader’s emotional life. Justice becomes desirable, not merely obligatory. In a culture where political commitment easily performs as cruelty, Godwin insists that the truest sign you’re fighting for humanity is that you still sound like you mean it.