Walter Bagehot: “In America so much has this difficulty been felt that a semi-connection has grown up between the legislature and the…”

The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.

These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.

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.

The casual line was traced according to the strength of deceased combatants; succeeding generations fought elsewhere; and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit.