Walter Bagehot

The House of Lords, as a body, is accessible to no social bribe.

Many members of the House of Commons, who are to be influenced by no other manner of corruption, are much influenced by this its most insidious sort.

But the Lords are those who give social bribes, and not those who take them.

They have no constituency to fear or wheedle; they have the best means of forming a disinterested and cool judgment of any class in the country.

The aristocracy live in the fear of the middle classes--of the grocer and the merchant.

They dare not frame a society of enjoyment as the French aristocracy once formed it.

Politics are the only occupation a peer has worth the name.

The House of Lords, besides independence to revise judicially and position to revise effectually, has leisure to revise intellectually.

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.

Those merits of the Lords have faults close beside them which go far to make them useless.

With its wealth, its place, and its leisure, the House of Lords would, on the very surface of the matter, rule us far more than it does if it had not secret defects which hamper and weaken it.

The House of Commons is a scene of life if ever there was a scene of life.

Every member in the throng, every atom in the medley, has his own objects (good or bad), his own purposes (great or petty); his own notions, such as they are, of what is; his own notions, such as they are, of what ought to be.

There is a motley confluence of vigorous elements, but the result is one and good.

The Lower Chamber is a chamber of eager politicians; the Upper (to say the least) of not eager ones.

The world knows what you seem; it does not know what you are.

An assembly--a revising assembly especially--which does not assemble, which looks as if it does not care how it revises, is defective in a main political ingredient.

The next defect is even more serious: it affects not simply the apparent work of the House of Lords but the real work.

Errors are of various kinds; but the constitution of the House of Lords only guards against a single error--that of too quick change.

They revise legislation, as far as they do revise it, exclusively according to the supposed interests, the predominant feelings, the inherited opinions, of that class.

There was a spirit in it alien to their spirit, and which when they could they have tried to cast out.

It is not easy to concentrate its essence in a phrase; it lives in our life, animates our actions, suggests our thoughts.

We all know what it means, though it would take an essay to limit it and define it.

To this the Lords object; wherever it is concerned, they are not impartial revisers, but biassed revisers.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.