They wrote the law for us, not for themselves

“They wrote the law for us, not for themselves” condenses a suspicion that rules presented as universal are made and applied unequally. The phrase comes from a village meeting in Lipce, where an official school order is read aloud and a peasant reflects on the law’s powerlessness against authority. Its force reaches beyond that immediate dispute: elsewhere, villagers complain that appeals to the courts have brought them no remedy, and act together when they believe their rights are being ignored.

Meaning and Form

The sentence turns on a sharp contrast between “us” and “themselves.” Its speaker does not simply say that the law has failed; he suggests that the failure is built into who makes and benefits from it. The plain, collective phrasing gives a political grievance the shape of a folk saying: compact enough to be remembered, but pointed enough to challenge the legitimacy of official rules.

The remark is not presented as a formal argument or a legal judgment. It emerges in conversation, in response to another peasant’s claim that the law means nothing to a powerful man. The reply shifts attention from an individual’s ability to disregard rules to the system that sets those rules and decides whose interests they serve.

The School Meeting in Lipce

At the meeting, the Voyt rings the bell and announces that the notary will read the order concerning the proposed school. The notary reads slowly and clearly, but after listening in silence for some time, villagers call out that they do not understand and demand that it be read in their own language. The scene makes exclusion tangible: an official document is being presented to the people it concerns, yet its language and procedure leave them unable to follow or contest it on equal terms.

After the meeting, two peasants describe the law as powerless before a man who does not fear it. Another answers, “Aye, they wrote the law for us, after all, not for themselves.” A peasant from Przyłęk then says he had wanted to stand with them, but the notary’s gaze left him tongue-tied, while the official wrote down whatever he pleased. The exchange connects legal inequality not only to rules on paper, but also to who can speak, whose account is recorded, and who feels safe enough to object.

Courts and the Claim to Justice

A separate timber-theft case supplies a concrete counterpart to the saying’s distrust of formal justice. A bailiff brings a complaint against peasants from Rokiciny accused of taking timber from the judge’s woods. The reported penalty is a fine or a fortnight in prison; the judgment is rejected, and the peasants give notice of appeal. The episode shows formal procedure in motion, but it does not establish that the phrase was spoken about this case. Rather, the appeal and the identity of the complainant help frame the wider question the saying raises: whether access to legal process guarantees an impartial outcome.

The dispute over the forest in Lipce sharpens that question into collective action. At a crowded gathering, the villagers wait for Boryna, whom they regard as the person entitled to lead them. When he addresses them, he lists grievances against the manor, including its refusal to employ them and its felling of the forest; he says they have taken complaints to court without effect. The people answer with calls to go to the forest. There, Boryna tells the woodcutters from Modlica and Rzepki to take their belongings and leave, declaring that the villagers forbid the felling. When the manor’s men attack, the peasants close ranks and fight them off. Their action does not prove that the saying directly caused the confrontation, but it dramatizes the alternative the grievance imagines: when legal appeals appear futile, the community asserts its claim through shared resistance.

A Saying About Unequal Power

The phrase’s “us” names more than the speaker alone. In the school meeting, it gathers villagers who struggle to understand an official order and whose objections can be overridden in the record. In the forest dispute, it resonates with peasants who believe that the manor can press ahead despite their complaints and customary claims. In both settings, the question is not merely whether rules exist, but whether those subject to them have a meaningful voice in how they are interpreted and enforced.

The saying therefore holds together two scales of conflict: the small, exposing moment when one villager cannot get a word recorded on his own terms, and the larger confrontation in which a whole community attempts to stop the felling. Its accusation is memorable precisely because it is spare. It names the asymmetry between those who must live under the law and those who can shape, evade, or enforce it.