The foreign policy of England has for many years been, according to the judgment now in vogue, inconsequent, fruitless, casual; aiming at no distinct pre-imagined end, based on no steadily pre-conceived principle.
Bagehot critiques England's foreign policy as lacking direction and coherence, reflecting a broader discontent with its approach.
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Perhaps such powers as these are what a wise man would most seek to exercise and least fear to possess.
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.
That a House of Commons may work well it must perform, as we saw, five functions well: it must elect a Ministry well, legislate well, teach the nation well, express the nation's will well, bring matters to the nation's attention well.
Savages waste away before modern civilisation; they seem to have held their ground before the ancient.
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