Politics & Power Quote by Matthew Green

A single crooked line, and you can feel the Augustan-era smile behind it: polite language doing dirty work. Green’s phrasing mimics the cadence of public virtue - “politics like ours profess” - only to puncture it with the blunt law that actually governs things: “the greater prey upon the less.” The verb “profess” is the tell. It implies a creed performed for an audience, not a principle lived in private. What follows is less a complaint than an anatomy lesson.

Green is writing in a Britain newly confident in its commercial modernity, where party rhetoric, patronage networks, and expanding imperial power all coexisted with sermons about liberty and improvement. The line turns that contradiction into predator-prey ecology. “Greater” and “less” are deliberately vague, letting the reader slot in aristocrats and laborers, creditors and debtors, metropole and colony. The abstraction is strategic: it makes exploitation feel systemic rather than the fault of a few bad actors. No villain needed when the structure feeds on itself.

The craft is in the compression. “They politics” carries a faint archaic stiffness, like a parliamentary document, which makes “prey” land harder. Green isn’t offering a revolutionary program; he’s offering clarity, the kind that embarrasses power by naming its appetite. The subtext is that moral language in politics often functions as camouflage, and that the real constitution is written in hunger: who gets protected, who gets consumed, and how elegantly the menu is described.