“There is no such thing as a small injustice”

“There is no such thing as a small injustice” names the Unnamed protagonist’s central argument against treating individual abuses as isolated or trivial. In his imagined appeal to the United States Senate Special Investigating Committee, the maxim links everyday legal harassment to grave harm and insists that a threat to the most vulnerable endangers everyone. Its force comes from that widening movement—from a minor infraction to a systemic accusation—but the novel presents the campaign as the protagonist’s fantasy, not as a verified public inquiry.

Formulation and First Use

The expression emerges while the Unnamed protagonist drafts a letter from his cell. He tries to frame his appeal as a public duty, revises himself as he writes, and settles on the claim that the country is living under a police state in which police surveillance follows people wherever they go. The maxim later gives this broad charge its compact moral rule: no abuse should be dismissed merely because it begins small.

His draft connects that claim to the accumulation of laws, including archaic rules that ordinary people may not know exist. He argues that citizens cannot walk the streets for five minutes without breaking some law and that such rules give police tools to harass them at will. In the same passage, he warns that an officer’s personal animosity can turn an everyday act—parking a few inches from the curb or dropping a cigarette butt—into an occasion for punishment. The expression thus joins legal technicalities to discretionary enforcement: the danger, in his account, lies not only in spectacular violence but also in the ordinary power to choose whom to target.

From Minor Rules to State Power

The maxim’s companion formulation, “What threatens the least of us threatens all of us,” makes its logic explicit. The protagonist’s imagined speech rejects a hierarchy in which harm to one person can be discounted as an exceptional case. He urges the committee to expose injustice wherever it appears, in large cities or small hamlets, and argues that neglect allows corruption to spread. The rhetoric moves from the individual victim to the condition of the public as a whole, presenting attention and exposure as safeguards against that spread.

This reasoning also explains why the protagonist singles out traffic tickets and gratuities as more than petty matters. He imagines minor abuses accumulating until they belong to the same continuum as catastrophic misconduct. The claim is not that every small violation produces the same consequence; rather, allowing routine abuses to pass without challenge, he argues, makes larger abuses easier to excuse. The maxim converts scale into a question of principle: an injustice does not become harmless simply because its first instance appears small.

The Case at the Center of the Appeal

In the imagined Senate address, the protagonist supports his argument with the account of Mrs. Haagstromm, a young mother whose alleged assault by two police officers is presented as the most devastating example of unchecked authority. He says that she was found after the attack and treated at General Hospital, and that her injuries led to the amputation of her right foot. He also describes her prolonged psychological collapse and commitment to the State Mental Hospital. These details give the maxim a human consequence within the speech: what begins as the officers’ abuse of authority becomes a lasting destruction of a woman’s former life and a separation from her young daughter.

The protagonist says the officers were identified after Mrs. Haagstromm reacted to their photographs, but that the case could not proceed because there was no admissible evidence. He presents the officers as continuing to serve in the community and frames that impunity as part of the same problem as minor police abuses. The account is therefore an argument about both harm and proof: in his telling, the absence of evidence acceptable to the legal system leaves the victim’s recognition unable to produce accountability. The narrative’s framing matters, however. The speech belongs to the protagonist’s imagined campaign, so its claims are evidence of the scale and shape of his indictment, not independent confirmation of the events as he recounts them.

Rhetorical Force and Narrative Limits

The maxim’s public, collective language contrasts with the protagonist’s isolation and distrust. During his preliminary hearing, he pleads not guilty but experiences the formal proceedings as incomprehensible; he believes his appointed lawyer has abandoned him, and the judge denies the motion to dismiss. Later, when the court reminds him that he chose to represent himself and offers counsel again, he refuses. These scenes ground his hostility toward legal procedure in a felt lack of understanding and agency, while stopping short of establishing that his broader accusations are true.

The book also lets the argument’s rhetoric collide with courtroom testimony. During the cross-examination concerning Mrs. Haagstromm, a witness denies having discussed perfume or her name with Harry; when asked how she could identify him as one of the officers who attacked her, the witness protests that she is lying and says he never saw her. Those exchanges place the problem of testimony and identification beside the maxim’s demand that abuses not be ignored. They do not resolve the conflict between accusation, denial, and admissible proof; instead, they show how the protagonist’s imagined public vindication and his actual courtroom experience remain entangled.

As a result, the expression works both as an ethical principle and as a window into the protagonist’s way of organizing experience. It insists that small abuses matter because unchecked power can grow through their repetition. At the same time, its appearance in a fantasy of public exposure—set against proceedings in which the protagonist feels unheard—makes the reader attend to who can speak, whose account receives institutional recognition, and what the narrative itself does or does not establish.