Walter Bagehot: “My opinion is, that the great object of all is that you should assume the station, and exercise the influence, which I…”

He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.

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.

There is no ELASTIC element, everything is rigid, specified, dated.

And again, in political matters, how quickly a leading statesman can change the tone of the community!