Walter Bagehot: “Now that free government is in Europe so rare and in America so distant, the opinion, even the incomplete, erroneous…”

Political philosophy is still more imperfect; it has been framed from observations taken upon regular specimens of politics and States; as to these its teaching is most valuable.

I cannot, therefore, join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may quickly overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to find.

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.