Walter Bagehot: “The conditions of life are so simple and so unvarying that any decent sort of rules suffice so long as men know what…”

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

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.

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

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.