Justice & Law Quote by Christian Nestell Bovee

Bovee’s line is a Victorian confidence trick dressed up as a “law.” By calling progressive development the “grandest” law, he borrows the prestige of science and inevitability - the era’s favorite rhetorical shortcut - and uses it to sanctify optimism. “Under it” reads like a benevolent regime: history isn’t chaotic, it’s governed. That framing does quiet ideological work. If improvement is natural, then existing institutions can be treated less as contested arrangements and more as vehicles of destiny.

The sentence glides from the individual to the collective: men grow wiser with age; societies get “better” over time. It’s a soothing parallelism that converts a familiar personal narrative (aging equals wisdom) into a social prophecy (time equals moral advancement). The subtext is reassurance for an audience living through industrial upheaval, mass immigration, labor conflict, and widening inequality. Progress becomes a kind of emotional infrastructure: you may not like the present, but the future is already on your side.

Yet the claim is also strategically vague. “Wiser” and “better” aren’t defined, which lets readers plug in their own preferred version of progress - technological, moral, political, spiritual - without confronting the costs: colonial violence, exploitative factories, or the way “societal betterment” has often been used to justify disciplining the poor and the “uncivilized.” Bovee’s intent isn’t to argue from evidence; it’s to provide a worldview with built-in momentum, the kind that keeps faith intact when reality gets messy.