Walter Bagehot: “Even in the best case, where a set of earnest men choose a member to expound their earnestness, they will look after him…”

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

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

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

Just so the lines of our Constitution were framed in old eras of sparse population, few wants, and simple habits; and we adhere in seeming to their shape, though civilisation has come with its dangers, complications, and enjoyments.