Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.

Lord Henry Brougham was a leading Whig reformer and a driving force behind early nineteenth‑century British popular-education initiatives, including the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the founding of University College London. The sentiment in this quotation is closely associated with his public advocacy for educating the working and middle classes as a safeguard for constitutional government: schooling would cultivate civic competence and independence, making citizens more receptive to rational leadership while resistant to coercion and tyranny. The line is widely circulated as Brougham’s, but it is often repeated without a verifiable, single occasion attached to it in modern quotation sources.

The aphorism contrasts legitimate leadership with domination. An educated populace, Brougham suggests, is “easy to lead” and “easy to govern” because education cultivates judgment, civic understanding, and willingness to cooperate with rational authority. Yet that same education makes people “difficult to drive” and “impossible to enslave”: they recognize manipulation, resist arbitrary power, and demand accountability. The quote thus frames education as a political safeguard—an engine of consent rather than coercion—and implies that stable, free government depends less on force than on an informed public capable of self-direction.