What is the truth behind this speech by (Lord Macaulay)?

score:39

Accepted answer

It looks fairly likely this story was invented around the turn of the 21'st Century.

The hits against it are:

  • No reference to it has ever been found any older than 1998 (reportedly from a American neo-gnostic publication).
  • Lord Macauly is known to have been in the middle of a stint in India (halfway around the world) in 1835 when this was supposedly delivered to Parliment.
  • It does not appear in the Hansard for that date, as everything else said in Parliment then does.
  • He did produce a minute for his employers while he was in India around that date, but it did not contain this text.
  • The language is too modern for the 1830's.
  • The cynicism displayed is completely out of character for Macaulay, who believed strongly in British Empire's "high moral purpose".

Note that none of this is my own research, but rather a compilation of others' I found at the following places:

Upvote:7

Another point against the authenticity of the quote: The date of the speech is given as 2 February 1835. However, there was in fact no Parliament on that date; it had been dissolved on 29 December 1834, triggering the 1835 General Election, and was not summoned again until 19 February 1835. Here is the relevant page of Hansard.

Upvote:19

I think @T.E.D.'s answer makes a very convincing case for the speech being a modern forgery, like the Protocols or the Dulles Plan.

It's also, imho, a very inept forgery. As T.E.D. has pointed out the language is too modern. As one who has read some works by Macaulay, I must also add that the style does not seem to be his and is very much inferior.

To illustrate this point, I've made some Google Ngram searches for words in the text:

education system, high moral values

enter image description here

cultural heritage

As you can see, all these expressions were absolutely not in vogue in Macaulay's time and only begin to be used extensively much much later. So I think it's not likely the person who wrote this text ever troubled himself to read a page of Macaulay. Which presumably rules out Macaulay himself...

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