Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Babington

“Government by the wisest and best” sounds like political common sense until Babington pokes the obvious hole: the selection mechanism. The line works because it turns a flattering abstraction into an institutional problem. Everyone wants competence; nobody agrees on the judge who certifies it. That’s not cynicism for its own sake. It’s a warning about how quickly “merit” becomes a mask for power.

Babington’s question is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s pragmatic: a society can’t run on self-congratulating slogans. Underneath, it’s an attack on the quiet arrogance baked into elite governance. The phrase “wisest and best” is a moral credential, not just an IQ score, and moral credentials are famously easy to counterfeit. Whoever gets to define wisdom also gets to define which voices count, which traits become “virtues,” and which groups are conveniently labeled unfit. The quote anticipates a core democratic suspicion: that an unelected aristocracy will always find a theory that proves it deserves to rule.

Context matters: early-to-mid 19th-century Britain was wrestling with reform, representation, and the legitimacy of old hierarchies in a rapidly modernizing society. Babington is speaking into a culture where appeals to “the best men” were often code for “our sort of men.” His intent isn’t to romanticize mass opinion; it’s to force the conversation off lofty ideals and onto accountable procedures. If you can’t answer “who decides,” your political philosophy is just etiquette.