Politics & Power Quote by George MacDonald

Politics, MacDonald suggests, is a sorting machine that rewards appetite, not virtue. His sting isn’t that voters are foolish or that institutions are doomed; it’s that the job itself selects for people who want power, and that desire is already a moral tell. In one move he flips the usual civics fantasy - that elections elevate the worthy - into a darker anthropology: the “best men” aren’t missing from office because they were overlooked, but because they have the good sense (and humility) to avoid the temptation of ruling others.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Not in the nature of politics” makes the problem feel structural, almost biological, as if ambition and self-importance are baked into the role. “Govern their fellowmen” is equally pointed: it frames political authority less as service than as a kind of presumptive superiority, the impulse to manage equals. MacDonald is less interested in policy than in character formation; the subtext is Christian-adjacent suspicion of pride and moral vanity, a theme that runs through much Victorian moral writing even when it isn’t preached from a pulpit.

Context matters: MacDonald lived through Britain’s expanding franchise and the professionalization of public life, when politics was becoming a career and mass persuasion a craft. His line reads like a warning about that transition. The more governance turns into a ladder, the more it attracts climbers. And the more it attracts climbers, the more “the best” learn to stay off it.