Justice & Law Quote by Charles Babbage

Babbage is doing something sly here: praising meritocracy while quietly indicting the social machinery that usually crushes it. He frames English law as a rare zone where “ability, coupled with exertion” can win “even though unaided by patronage” - and the giveaway is that last clause. In early-19th-century Britain, patronage wasn’t an unfortunate side-note; it was the operating system. So when Babbage singles out law as an exception, he’s really sketching the rule: most professions, including the ones tied to government, science, and polite society, were still throttled by gatekeepers, connections, and class.

The intent reads as comparative cultural criticism. Babbage, a mathematician and reform-minded tinkerer with systems, is interested in incentives: where does talent go when reward is predictably allocated? He treats “profession” like a market, with “attraction” pulling human capital toward the one place the payoff is legible. It’s not romantic admiration for lawyers; it’s a diagnosis of why ambitious people rationally choose that path. Law becomes a pressure valve for ability in a country that otherwise leaks talent into frustration.

There’s also an implied warning to elites. If the only ladder not bolted to the old-boy network is the legal one, then law will monopolize ambition - and the nation’s scientific and industrial capacity will suffer. Coming from Babbage, a figure invested in turning ingenuity into public benefit, the line doubles as a quiet argument for broader reform: make more fields reward competence, or watch competence migrate to wherever it can eat.