Justice & Law Quote by George Farquhar

Farquhar lands the line like a slap: not at the poor, but at a society that treats poverty as moral evidence. The phrasing is built for the stage - a neat, balanced couplet of absolutes ("no scandal", "nor any crime") that mimics the rhetoric of law and gossip, then weaponizes it against the audience. By pairing "rags" with "scandal", he yokes material condition to social spectacle. Poverty isn't merely endured; it's performed in public, read by strangers, narrated into shame.

The subtext is nastier than simple sympathy. Farquhar suggests that in a status-obsessed culture, the worst offense is being visibly out of place. "Crime" here isn't about harm done, it's about norms violated. Rags function as incriminating evidence: they expose you as someone without protection, without lineage, without the right costume for respectability. That inversion - poverty as the most shameful wrongdoing - points straight at the real tribunal: polite society, which pretends to judge virtue while actually policing class.

Context matters: Farquhar writes in the late Restoration/early 18th-century theater world, where comedies of manners dissected fashion, reputation, and the transactional marriage market. His audience would have understood scandal as currency and appearance as social survival. The line exploits that familiarity to reveal a grim punchline: the only unforgivable sin is failing to afford the disguise.