Walter Bagehot: “In fact, these opinions were not formed by reason, but by mimicry.”

At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

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.

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