"The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?"
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A neat Victorian pin through the balloon of benevolent statecraft: Macaulay takes a pious slogan - governments should "train the people" - and asks the one question paternalists hate, because it drags the whole enterprise from morality to probability. Not "is it well-intentioned?" but "what makes you think it will work?" The line lands by pretending to grant the maxim its good manners ("sounds well") before pivoting into a skeptical, almost lawyerly cross-examination. The charm is in the understatement; the indictment is in the premise.
The subtext is a rejection of the era's confidence in administrative uplift. Early-to-mid 19th-century Britain is debating education, the Poor Laws, factory regulation, the expanding franchise - all the machinery of a modernizing state learning how to manage mass society. Macaulay, a Whig with faith in progress but suspicion of coercive tutelage, frames "government" not as a neutral instructor but as a fallible actor with its own incentives, prejudices, and class assumptions. Training sounds like schooling; it also sounds like obedience.
The rhetorical trick is the reversal of burden. Reformers often assume the people are the variable to be corrected; Macaulay makes government the suspect instrument. He also slips in a liberal anthropology: ordinary people, left room to adapt, can "fall into the right way" through practice, commerce, civil society, and trial-and-error. It's not anti-government so much as anti-certainty: a warning that centralized moral education is as likely to manufacture compliant citizens as capable ones, and that the most dangerous policies are the ones that arrive wrapped in good intentions and impeccable diction.
The subtext is a rejection of the era's confidence in administrative uplift. Early-to-mid 19th-century Britain is debating education, the Poor Laws, factory regulation, the expanding franchise - all the machinery of a modernizing state learning how to manage mass society. Macaulay, a Whig with faith in progress but suspicion of coercive tutelage, frames "government" not as a neutral instructor but as a fallible actor with its own incentives, prejudices, and class assumptions. Training sounds like schooling; it also sounds like obedience.
The rhetorical trick is the reversal of burden. Reformers often assume the people are the variable to be corrected; Macaulay makes government the suspect instrument. He also slips in a liberal anthropology: ordinary people, left room to adapt, can "fall into the right way" through practice, commerce, civil society, and trial-and-error. It's not anti-government so much as anti-certainty: a warning that centralized moral education is as likely to manufacture compliant citizens as capable ones, and that the most dangerous policies are the ones that arrive wrapped in good intentions and impeccable diction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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