Walter Bagehot: “In this present age and country it would be very dangerous to give the slightest addition to a force already perilously…”

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

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.

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.