Justice & Law Quote by Maria Edgeworth

A novelist’s complaint, but it lands like a constitutional warning: when “the law... seems to make the right,” power gets to launder itself into virtue. Edgeworth is pushing back against a worldview where legality is treated as a moral alibi, where whatever is enforced becomes, by repetition and intimidation, whatever is “right.” The bite is in “in our case” - a pointed aside that turns the sentence into social reportage. She’s not theorizing from an armchair; she’s diagnosing a local arrangement that everyone’s learned to stop questioning.

The inversion she proposes - “the right should make the law” - sounds obvious until you hear the implied accusation: the system is built backward on purpose. Edgeworth wrote in an era when law was often the language of property, empire, and Protestant ascendancy; in Ireland especially, statutes could codify domination while claiming neutrality. Her phrasing catches the quiet scandal of that dynamic: once you let law define right, you don’t need arguments, only courts.

As a novelist, Edgeworth also understands the psychological trick at work. People mistake order for justice because order feels calming; it promises predictability, safety, “how things are done.” She insists on a more uncomfortable sequence: moral judgment first, then legislation. It’s an appeal to conscience over compliance, and it hints at a society where “respectability” is just obedience in a nicer coat.