Politics & Power Quote by Thomas B. Macaulay

Macaulay takes a politician's favorite velvet rope and yanks it off the stanchions. The line he skewers - "no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom" - sounds prudently parental, like a safety warning disguised as wisdom. His intent is to expose it as a circular, self-serving delay tactic: the powerful get to define "fit", then keep moving the goalposts until freedom arrives never.

The swim metaphor is doing more than simplifying. It humiliates the maxim by recoding it as cowardice dressed up as common sense. Everyone recognizes the absurdity of learning to swim without water; Macaulay is betting the reader will feel the same snap of recognition about political rights. Fitness for liberty isn't a prerequisite, it's a product. You acquire competence by practicing choice, argument, and responsibility in public, not by being quarantined from them.

As a Whig historian writing in an age of British reform fights and imperial paternalism, Macaulay is also swiping at the moral alibi of empire: the claim that subject peoples must be "prepared" for self-rule by the very regime that benefits from their unpreparedness. The subtext is accusation. When leaders insist on readiness, they often mean controllability. "Not yet" becomes a permanent tense.

What makes the passage work is its blend of reason and ridicule. Macaulay doesn't merely counter-argue; he makes the opposing view socially embarrassing to hold. He turns delay into farce, and in doing so reframes freedom not as a reward for good behavior but as the training ground where a society learns to govern itself.