These are great merits: and, considering how difficult it is to get a good second chamber, and how much with our present first chamber we need a second, we may well be thankful for them.
Walter Bagehot: “These are great merits: and, considering how difficult it is to get a good second chamber, and how much with our present…”
Editor's note · Context
Bagehot expresses gratitude for the merits of the Lords, especially given the challenges of establishing a good second chamber.
Share
More from Walter Bagehot
The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.
The Parliament, the laws, the press were human institutions; but the Monarchy was a Divine institution.
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.
If the above reasoning be sound, compulsory constituencies are necessary, voluntary constituencies destructive; the optional transferability of votes is not a salutary aid, but a ruinous innovation.





