Life & Wisdom Quote by Alexander Pope

Justice here isn’t blind; it’s just peckish. Pope compresses an entire political economy of cruelty into a couplet that moves like a guillotine: quick, clean, and nauseatingly efficient. The line’s snap comes from its grotesque imbalance of stakes. On one side, “wretches” and the noose; on the other, jurymen angling for lunch. That contrast isn’t merely moral outrage - it’s a diagnosis of how institutions metabolize human lives into routine, how punishment becomes paperwork when the body doing the condemning is thinking about dinner.

Pope’s intent is satiric, but not playful. He’s writing in an England where courts were tangled with patronage, class power, and a penal code so brutal it earned the later nickname “the Bloody Code.” In that world, the law could be less a search for truth than a performance of order, with the poor as convenient props. “Hungry judges” works as literal detail and metaphor: hunger is appetite, self-interest, the basic animal drive that makes lofty civic language collapse into procurement. The sentence gets “signed” soon not because guilt is clear, but because the machine is lubricated by comfort.

The subtext stings because Pope doesn’t need to accuse anyone of villainy. He suggests something worse: ordinary indifference. The jurymen don’t have to hate the condemned; they just have to want their meal on time. That’s Pope’s dark trick - he shows how easily civilization’s rituals, robe and bench included, can be powered by petty convenience.