Politics & Power Quote by Thomas W. Higginson

A “paternal” government sounds cuddly until Higginson translates it bluntly: meddling. The move is deliberate. He takes a word associated with care and recasts it as domination dressed up as concern, a rhetorical unmasking aimed at readers who might tolerate soft coercion because it arrives with a moral smile.

His most effective tactic is the piling-on of everyday verbs - read, say, eat, drink, wear. That catalogue drags politics out of the courthouse and into the kitchen and closet, where control feels intimate and humiliating. It’s not just censorship or regulation; it’s a state that tries to manage taste, speech, appetite, and self-presentation - the raw materials of identity. By listing the mundane, he’s arguing that liberty isn’t primarily lost in grand coups, but in incremental permissions granted over the small stuff until the public forgets it ever owned itself.

“People not broken in from the birth” is the tell: liberty here is a trained instinct, not an abstract principle. The phrase borrows from animal training, implying that obedience can be manufactured culturally, even domesticated into normalcy. Higginson, a clergyman with reformist commitments, is also signaling a Protestant-inflected suspicion of centralized authority: moral life should be governed by conscience and community, not bureaucratic parenting.

The subtext is less anti-government than anti-infantilization. A state that treats adults as children doesn’t merely restrict them; it remakes them into the kind of citizens who stop resenting restraint. Higginson is warning that the real victory of paternalism is psychological.