Justice & Law Quote by Dwight Morrow

Morrow’s sentence performs a neat rhetorical judo move: it admits government is coercive, then insists coercion can be legitimate only when it blocks other people’s coercion. That framing matters. A businessman in the early 20th century - an era of labor upheaval, Progressive regulation, Red Scare anxieties, and rising administrative power - is drawing a bright line around the state. Government isn’t a moral tutor, an economic planner, or a dispenser of virtue; it’s a referee whose whistle should blow only when someone’s rights are being stepped on.

The specific intent is defensive: to sanctify individual rights as “inalienable” and pre-political, and to make state action answerable to that premise. Notice the careful hedge, “in so far as they are coercive.” It’s a concession to reality (states always compel) and a trapdoor for legitimacy: the more coercive the policy, the higher the burden of justification. That is a classic liberal move, pitched in calm, lawyerly cadence rather than populist fire.

The subtext is about fear of interference, not just violence. “Those who would interfere” can mean mobs, majorities, unions, zealots, or bureaucrats - anyone whose collective will might crowd out private choice. By pairing “pursuit of happiness” with “worship God,” Morrow widens the coalition: economic freedom and religious liberty as parallel claims, both protected by a minimalist state.

It works because it recasts restraint as activism. Doing less becomes a principled act, not a failure of imagination - and that’s a powerful argument in a moment when “more government” was increasingly sold as modernity itself.