Walter Bagehot: “Half the boroughs in England are represented by considerable landowners, and when rent is in question, as in the cattle…”

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.

I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.

Subject to this saving remark, however, I not only admit, but maintain, that our Constitution is full of curious oddities, which are impeding and mischievous, and ought to be struck out.

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