Walter Bagehot: “When other sources of leisure become possible, the one use of slavery is past.”

That a House of Commons may work well it must perform, as we saw, five functions well: it must elect a Ministry well, legislate well, teach the nation well, express the nation's will well, bring matters to the nation's attention well.

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.

The work would be done so well that we should not want any one to look over or revise it.

He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.