Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Babington

Macauley’s cool little demolition job lands because it refuses to flatter anyone’s preferred pipeline to authority. Popular election, lottery, inheritance: he lines them up with the same dry cadence, then tags two of them as “accident” outright. The rhetorical trick is the faux even-handedness. He’s not mounting a revolutionary attack on monarchy alone; he’s puncturing the democratic consolation myth, too: that the crowd’s choice is evidence of superior judgment in the chosen. By the time he gets to “wiser than any of his neighbours,” the standard for legitimacy has been shrunk to something almost embarrassingly modest - not virtue, not vision, just basic comparative wisdom. And even that, he implies, is rarely secured.

The subtext is institutional, not personal. “As far as we can perceive” affects a tone of empirical humility, but it’s a pointed kind: a way of saying that if wisdom reliably followed these appointment methods, we’d have noticed. This is the nineteenth-century liberal mind at work, suspicious of sanctified power and equally suspicious of mass romance. Macaulay lived in a Britain negotiating parliamentary reform, expanding the franchise, and re-arguing what “representation” should buy you. His warning is that procedure alone doesn’t alchemize competence.

Intent-wise, it’s less nihilism than a demand for grown-up politics: treat magistrates as ordinary humans elevated by mechanisms that select for luck, lineage, or popularity - none of which correlates neatly with prudence. The line leaves you with an uncomfortable implication: if you want wise governance, you’ll need constraints, accountability, and institutions that assume mediocrity rather than pretending selection cures it.