Walter Bagehot: “They like to hear arguments suited to this intellectual haze.”

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 the above reasoning be sound, compulsory constituencies are necessary, voluntary constituencies destructive; the optional transferability of votes is not a salutary aid, but a ruinous innovation.

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.

No doubt this momentary gain is bought at a ruinous after-cost.