Writing in 1833, Macaulay claimed that a modern Tory resembled what a Whig was in the past, during the reign of Queen Anne. “Society, we believe, is constantly advancing in knowledge. The tail is now where the head was some generations ago. But the head and the tail still keep their distance.” Therefore, despite the fact that a modern Tory resembled a Whig of the previous century, the Whigs themselves had also progressed during this time, and remained ahead of the Tories. All this, according to Macaulay, was part of the general progress England had been undergoing throughout its history, a progress which he believed would continue in the future. “It is delightful to think, that, in due time, the last of those who straggle in the rear of the great march will occupy the place now occupied by the advanced guard.” With these observations he could very well have been describing his own place in history; indeed, he was consciously doing so, and in the process describing the ongoing development of history in general, and political philosophy in particular. Macaulay clearly understood that he and his whole generation of Whig liberals would one day be superseded by a more advanced, enlightened, and liberal society, which might very well view them as immature and illiberal. Considering how recent scholarship has judged Macaulay, from the perspective of contemporary political correctness, he was no doubt quite prescient.

The point of this study, however, is not to vindicate Macaulay. There were aspects of his outlook, particularly in his consideration of colonialism, which were unenlightened and illiberal even by the standards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is significant is that Macaulay was, as his popularity demonstrated, a prominent representative of mainstream British liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, in describing how even the conservatives of his time were as liberal as the radicals of a century earlier, he recognized a central mechanism through which progress developed over time, and specifically in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, from the Enlightenment to liberalism. To note just one particularly significant example – the espousal of free market political economy by Adam Smith and others in the late eighteenth century opposed government intervention, but in that respect viewed intervention in the old sense of mercantilism. In this sense it was what today we would term a “leftist” political cause.