Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)—Whig historian, essayist, and parliamentarian—used this line in the context of nineteenth-century debates about political reform and self-government, especially arguments deployed against extending liberties to groups deemed “unprepared” (whether newly enfranchised classes at home or subject peoples abroad). Macaulay repeatedly attacked the paternalist claim that freedom must be postponed until a population proves its “fitness,” insisting that civic capacity is developed through practice rather than prior certification. The image of the would-be swimmer captures his broader Whig faith in gradual improvement through institutions and participation, and his suspicion of excuses that indefinitely delay reform.

The quotation ridicules a common anti-democratic argument: that liberty is dangerous in the hands of those who have not yet learned to use it responsibly. Macaulay’s counterpoint is that competence in freedom is not a prerequisite but a product of freedom—much as swimming is learned only by entering the water. The “self-evident proposition” is exposed as a rhetorical shield for maintaining power, because it sets an impossible condition: people cannot demonstrate the habits of free citizens without opportunities to act as such. The passage thus defends political rights as educative, and treats participation as the training ground for civic virtue.