Politics & Power Quote by Richard Cobden

Cobden lands the punch by pretending to grant his opponent a lofty title, then stripping it for parts. “This great oracle” is not admiration; it’s a sneer. He frames the East India Company’s apologist as a mystic dispensing wisdom, then uses the man’s own admission to indict the entire system: if the Court of Directors’ only real lever is patronage, then what you have isn’t governance, it’s a jobs machine with an empire attached.

The line works because it collapses a comforting fiction. The Company liked to present itself as a sober administrator of faraway territories, a quasi-state staffed by responsible men. Cobden’s subtext is that the administrative language is camouflage for a crude incentive structure: appointments, favors, and private advancement. By defining “power” as “patronage,” he drags imperial rule down from strategy and civilization-talk to the grubby mechanics of who gets paid, who gets promoted, who owes whom. It’s an early, devastating version of “follow the money.”

Context matters: mid-19th-century Britain was wrestling with the legitimacy of corporate sovereignty in India, especially after scandals and, soon enough, the cataclysm of 1857. Cobden, a businessman-politician with a free-trade reformer’s distrust of monopoly, targets the Company as a relic of protected privilege. His argument isn’t abstract morality; it’s institutional design. A body that governs primarily through patronage will optimize for loyalty, not competence or accountability. Calling that “government” is the scam, and he wants the reader to feel the scam snap into focus.