Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary

“Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary” is a maxim whose repeated appearances expose the gap between the promise of justice and the arbitrary power that governs the novel’s encounters with law. First invoked as the narrator faces confinement, then repeated by an Inspector ending an interview, and finally echoed by the grotesque procedures of the Old Court House, the phrase shifts from a wry personal rule to a refrain for institutional absurdity.

The Maxim in Use

The narrator cites the maxim while tapping his arm and announcing that duty calls. The saying arrives as a judge’s formula, but its immediate setting is practical: the narrator is moving on to an automat where he meets Bill Gains and Old Bart. Its clipped permission to substitute arbitrariness for failed justice gives the narrator’s departure a dry, self-protective edge.

The same formula returns during an interview with the Inspector. After describing the prospect of further “equalizations” and a suitable decompression chamber, the Inspector opens his fly to look for crabs and applies ointment from a clay pot. When the Reporter appears ready to leave, the Inspector invokes the maxim and says he regrets that he cannot observe customary obscenities. The exchange makes the line part of an encounter in which official procedure, bodily exposure, and comic indecency collapse together.

The Old Court House

The maxim’s institutional resonance is made concrete by the County Clerk’s office in the Old Court House, a huge red-brick building where civil cases can drag on until the parties die or abandon their claims. Records concerning everything are filed in the wrong places; the Clerk and his assistants may search for years, and he is still looking for material concerning a damage suit settled out of court in 1910. The building itself is partly ruined, with dangerous sections and frequent cave-ins. In 1912, 207 assistants were trapped in a collapse of the North-by-North-East wing.

The courthouse does not merely administer delay; its procedures can determine a case before it is heard. Lawyers try to have suits transferred there because once the transfer is made, the plaintiff has effectively lost. The few cases that reach trial are brought by eccentrics and paranoids seeking a public hearing, which they rarely receive because only an extreme famine of news attracts a reporter. Against this machinery, the maxim’s alternative—arbitrary judgment—sounds less like a deviation from a functioning system than a bleak description of what the system already produces.

Lee at the Frontier

Lee’s urgent effort to file an affidavit claiming that he has bubonic plague brings the same arbitrary logic into the customs process. He needs the affidavit to avoid eviction from the house he has occupied rent-free for ten years, and carries a suitcase packed with affidavits, petitions, injunctions, and certificates. The urban customs inspector waves him through with a joke about an atom bomb in the case; at Pigeon Hole, Lee swallows tranquilizers before the inspectors spend three hours examining his documents and consulting dusty regulations.

The scrutiny shifts from paperwork to his body. The inspectors order him to undress, probe him for contraband and evidence of sodomy, and dunk his hair so the water can be analyzed for drugs. They ultimately impound his suitcase, leaving him to stagger out with a fifty-pound bale of documents. The episode gives the maxim a material counterpart: rules multiply, but their application subjects Lee to invasive inspection and strips him of the very papers on which his urgent appeal depends.

Refrain and Irony

Across these appearances, the line changes speakers and setting without acquiring a stable authority. It passes from a judge’s supposed wisdom to the narrator’s sardonic announcement and the Inspector’s grotesque farewell, while the Old Court House supplies an extended image of legal process defeating the claims it should resolve. The phrase’s balanced alternatives promise a choice between justice and arbitrariness; the surrounding scenes suggest that when institutions cannot deliver justice, arbitrariness is not an escape from their rule but one of its operating forms.