Justice & Law Quote by George Savile

Savile’s line drips with the politician’s oldest fear: wanting to be loved is the first step toward becoming untrustworthy. In an age when “interest” and patronage quietly organized public life, seeking popularity meant courting the crowd with performance - trading judgment for applause. Calling it a “crime” is deliberately severe. He’s not describing bad taste; he’s describing a moral breach, the moment public service gets subordinated to self-advertisement.

The sentence turns on a hard distinction between pursued and accidental power. Popularity “sought” implies calculation: flattery, pandering, the polishing of a public self. That’s why it’s criminal “from the moment” it’s sought - intent corrupts before any policy does. Savile is sketching a theory of political legitimacy: esteem is trustworthy only when it arrives as an unintended consequence of doing the work. “Whether they will or no” lands like a verdict. The ideal statesman doesn’t chase affection; he endures it, sometimes against his own preference, because his actions compel respect.

Context matters. Savile sits in an eighteenth-century Britain suspicious of demagogues and newly attentive to public opinion - the early modern pressure cooker of print culture, coffeehouse politics, and increasingly visible electoral contest. His warning reads like an aristocratic immune response to mass sentiment, but it also anticipates a modern problem: once popularity becomes a goal, it starts rewriting behavior, rewarding showmanship over substance. The quote works because it doesn’t deny that popularity can signal merit; it insists that the signal becomes noise the instant you try to manufacture it.