Walter Bagehot: “Just when it is desirable that ignorant men, new to politics, should have good issues, and only good issues, put before…”

Political philosophy is still more imperfect; it has been framed from observations taken upon regular specimens of politics and States; as to these its teaching is most valuable.

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.