弔民伐罪
diào mín fá zuì
"condole with the people and punish the guilty"
Here we have a line that's passed into regular usage as one of the many four-character set phrases known as 成語 chengyu. My pop-up online dictionary (all hail Perapera, even if it's no longer being updated) translates it as "to console the people and punish the tyrant." I don't know how 罪 ended up meaning "tyrant" here, but it's a pretty good phrase.
"Condole" is an English word you don't hear much. Sure, there's "condolences," but I don't think I've ever heard "condole" on its own. It means to lament or express sorrow in sympathy with someone, which to me comes across differently than "console" in the translation above. (Weirdly enough, the translation of 弔 alone in that same dictionary is "to condole with.")
弔 also represents a string of 100 copper coins, the kind with a hole in the middle. I usually avoid leaning too heavily on the pictographic aspect of Chinese characters, but here you can kinda see it—either the curved stroke as a string winding around and through the vertical stroke of a coin seen edgewise, or the vertical stroke is the string passing through a series of coins, also seen edgewise.
Who's condoling with the people and punishing the guilty? We're about to find out.
微臣
史大偉
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