Justice & Law Quote by Thomas Babington

Macauley is allergic to the lazy shortcut: convicting someone for what they might do. The line is built like a legal brief but aimed at a moral panic. Its force comes from the way it refuses to let “doctrine” stand in for evidence, or group behavior substitute for individual guilt. He’s not defending an idea so much as defending a principle of modern governance: you punish acts, not forecasts.

The phrasing “we infer” quietly puts the accuser on trial. It frames suspicion as an act of imagination - a projection masquerading as prudence. Then he tightens the vise: the inference comes either from “the nature” of a doctrine (thought crime) or from “the conduct of other persons” (guilt by association). Those are the classic engines of persecution, whether dressed up as national security, moral hygiene, or religious orthodoxy.

Calling it “in every case, foolish and wicked” is doing double work. “Wicked” is the obvious moral verdict; “foolish” is the strategic jab. Persecution isn’t just cruel, it’s counterproductive: it turns belief into martyrdom, drives communities underground, and replaces social trust with surveillance. That’s why the sentence lands as more than Victorian liberal piety. It anticipates how states manufacture enemies by collapsing identity into threat.

Context matters: Macauley wrote in an era of British reform and empire, when governments routinely rationalized repression as preventive. The quote reads like a warning label for any society tempted to treat ideology as intent and affiliation as evidence.