Justice & Law Quote by George Bancroft

Bancroft’s line is a scalpel aimed at a familiar political reflex: treating anxiety as evidence. By drawing a hard boundary between “fears” and “rights,” he refuses the perennial argument that the comfort of the powerful can legitimately shrink the liberties of the vulnerable. The phrasing does quiet work. “One class of men” isn’t accidental; it signals hierarchy, not just difference. Bancroft is reminding readers that public policy often masquerades as neutral while quietly protecting a social tier’s sense of order.

The most pointed move is his choice of “measure.” Fear is framed as the wrong yardstick altogether - not a bad measurement, but an illegitimate one. That’s an intellectual rebuke to the way majorities (or elites) convert private dread into public principle: immigrants as threats, dissent as danger, freed people as instability, labor as menace. It’s also a moral rebuke, because “rights” implies something prior to government permission. If rights are inherent, then they don’t expand or contract based on the nervous system of whoever already holds power.

Context matters: Bancroft wrote in a 19th-century America riven by slavery, nativism, and periodic panics about democracy itself. As a historian of the nation’s origin story, he’s policing the terms of the American experiment. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: if you justify restriction by invoking fear, admit what you’re really defending - not safety, but status. The sentence end-stops any “but we’re just being prudent” rhetoric by exposing its social beneficiary.