Justice & Law Quote by George Farquhar

Poverty, Farquhar implies, isn’t merely hardship; it’s a social offense, prosecuted in the court of public taste. The line flips the moral order with a dramatist’s efficiency: “crime” and “scandal” usually belong to vice, but here they’re pinned on “rags,” the visible evidence of deprivation. That’s the engine of the wit. He’s not claiming the poor are shameful by nature; he’s exposing a culture that treats poverty as if it were a character flaw, then uses that stigma to justify exclusion.

As a Restoration-era playwright working in a world obsessed with surface, reputation, and the rituals of “gentility,” Farquhar understood how clothing functioned as social ID. “Rags” aren’t just fabric; they are an accusation you can’t talk your way out of. In comedy, scandal is fuel: it turns private behavior into public spectacle. Farquhar’s move is to show that the most reliable scandal isn’t sexual misbehavior or political intrigue, but the simple failure to look prosperous. The poor can be perfectly innocent and still be “caught.”

The subtext is bleakly modern: societies love to moralize what they refuse to fix. By framing poverty as “shameful,” the quote captures how economic inequality gets laundered into etiquette. It’s not the system that should blush; it’s the person who can’t perform respectability. Farquhar is writing from inside that hypocrisy, letting the line land like a laugh that curdles a second later.