Walter Bagehot: “All clever people are eager to be under Government, and are hardly to be satisfied elsewhere.”

The United States could not have become monarchical, even if the Constitutional Convention had decreed it, even if the component States had ratified it.

But, above all things, they were frightened of 'the world;' the spectacle of nature filled them with awe and dread.

They say, We reject your Bill for this once or these twice, or even these thrice: but if you keep on sending it up, at last we won't reject it.

If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.