The Parliamentary judgment of the merits or demerits of an administration very generally depends on matters which the Parliament, being close at hand, distinctly sees, and which the distant nation does not see.
This quote highlights the disparity between Parliament's immediate judgments and the distant nation's perspective.
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More from Walter Bagehot
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.
Nothing promotes intellect like intellectual discussion, and nothing promotes intellectual discussion so much as government by discussion.
But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.
The nation then selected the English policy, but the Crown chose the English Ministers.
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