On the record
The dignified torpor of English society is inevitable if we give precedence, not to the cleverest classes, but to the oldest classes, and we have seen how useful that is.
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Walter Bagehot
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gutenberg.orgWalter Bagehot: “The dignified torpor of English society is inevitable if we give precedence, not to the cleverest classes, but to the…”
Editor's note · Context
Bagehot reflects on the consequences of prioritizing older social classes over the more capable ones in English society.
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More from Walter Bagehot
At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.
These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.
The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.
But it is natural also that persons used to analyse political institutions should look at these anomalies with a little tenderness and a little interest.
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