They would, perhaps, be divided between the genuine representatives of the artisans--not possibly of the best of the artisans, who are a select and intellectual class, but of the common order of workpeople--and the merely pretended members for that class whom I may call the members for the public-houses.
Bagehot differentiates between genuine and pretended representatives of the working class.
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More from Walter Bagehot
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.
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.
Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner.
The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.
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