Justice & Law Quote by Wilkie Collins

A Victorian scalpel disguised as a shrug: Collins reduces “the law” to a rented mind, a service industry that sells intelligence by the hour. The brilliance is in the grammatical sleight of hand. He doesn’t say lawyers will argue anything; he says the law itself will. The institution becomes a ventriloquist, speaking not for truth or justice but for whoever feeds the meter. That personification lands like an accusation without the decorum of moralizing, which is exactly the kind of cold-blooded clarity Collins prized.

The line’s cynicism isn’t abstract; it’s procedural. “Any thing, with any body” is a rhythmic double-stamp, the language of a machine that doesn’t discriminate between causes or characters. Add the commercial detail - “pay the law for the use of its brains and its time” - and you get a portrait of argument as commodity: intellect monetized, time billed, conscience optional. It’s not that the legal system is stupid or cruel; it’s that it can be brilliant on behalf of anyone. That’s the unsettling part.

In Collins’s world of sensation fiction - secrets, fraud, inheritance schemes, reputations hanging by paperwork - law is less a moral compass than a plot engine. His readers lived in a Britain expanding its bureaucracy and professional classes, where access to justice often correlated with access to money. The subtext is modern: if argument is a purchasable skill, then “truth” becomes the best-funded narrative, and legitimacy can look suspiciously like good representation.