Justice & Law Quote by George Chapman

Self-rule is Chapman’s aristocracy of the psyche: the idea that the highest authority isn’t a crown or a court, but an internal discipline so complete it makes external rules feel redundant. “Who to himself is law” doesn’t flatter mere stubbornness; it praises a person whose appetites, ambitions, and fears have been governed into coherence. The line turns legality inward, suggesting that the real alternative to chaos isn’t harsher enforcement but a character sturdy enough to police itself.

The subtext is quietly political. Writing in an England anxious about order, succession, and the fragile legitimacy of power, Chapman offers a daring consolation: kingship can be ethical rather than hereditary. Yet he also hedges. By defining the “king indeed” as someone who “offends no law,” he reassures the state that inward freedom won’t translate into public disorder. The ideal subject becomes so self-possessed that he becomes the regime’s dream citizen: autonomous, yes, but predictably lawful.

What makes it work is the braid of paradox and aspiration. Chapman lifts the reader into sovereignty, then pins that sovereignty to restraint. The rhetoric is compact and ceremonial, echoing proverbial wisdom while smuggling in a humanist ethic: virtue as self-mastery. In an era when “law” often meant the will of powerful men, Chapman’s line proposes a radical metric for legitimacy: not the power to command others, but the power to command oneself.