Walter Bagehot: “No polity can get out of a nation more than there is in the nation.”

But it is natural also that persons used to analyse political institutions should look at these anomalies with a little tenderness and a little interest.

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

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.

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