Walter Bagehot

The addition of a contrasting mass would have excited the old leaven, but the delicate infusion of ingredients similar in genus, though different in species, has modified the new compound without irritating the old original.

It is not from men of large wealth that a very great impetus to organic change should be expected.

Whether the English Peerage be or be not predominantly now Tory, it is certainly not Tory after the fashion of the Toryism of 1832.

The profuse Tory creations of half a century had made the House of Lords bigotedly Tory before the first Reform Act, but it is wonderfully mitigated now.

Consequently, each continuously-governing party has had the means of modifying the Upper House to suit its views.

Owing to very curious circumstances English parties have not alternated in power, as a good deal of speculation predicts they would, and a good deal of current language assumes they have.

A good, capable, hereditary monarch would exercise it better than a Premier, but a Premier could manage it well enough; and a monarch capable of doing better will be born only once in a century, whereas monarchs likely to do worse will be…

Such Parliaments require the imminent check of possible dissolution; but that check is (as has been shown) better in the Premier than in the sovereign; and by the late practice of our constitution, its use is yearly ebbing from the…

It is easy to imagine a House of Commons which is discontented with all statesmen, which is contented with none, which is made up of little parties, which votes in small knots, which will adhere steadily to no leader, which gives every…

The Parliamentary judgment of the merits or demerits of an administration very generally depends on matters which the Parliament, being close at hand, distinctly sees, and which the distant nation does not see.

The one great vice of Parliamentary government in an adult political nation, is the caprice of Parliament in the choice of a Ministry.

A steady opposition to a formed public opinion is hardly possible in our House of Commons, so incessant is the national attention to politics, and so keen the fear in the mind of each member that he may lose his valued seat.

Indeed, the dangers arising from a party spirit in Parliament exceeding that of the nation, and of a selfishness in Parliament contradicting the true interest of the nation, are not great dangers in a country where the mind of the nation…

So that the last precedent for a royal onslaught on a Ministry ended thus:--in opposing the right principles, in aiding the wrong principles, in hurting the party it was meant to help.

The commencing dissatisfaction did but relate to the personal demerits of the Whig leaders, and other temporary adjuncts of free principles, and not to those principles intrinsically.

The popular distaste to the Whigs was as yet but incipient, inefficient; and the intervention of the Crown was advantageous to them, because it looked inconsistent with the liberties of the people.

He forced on a premature Tory Government, which was as unsuccessful as all wise people perceived that it must be.

But the king's POLICY was wrong; he impeded the reaction instead of aiding it.

That power, indisputably, in theory, belongs to her; but it has passed so far away from the minds of men that it would terrify them, if she used it, like a volcanic eruption from Primrose Hill.

Nothing, perhaps, would more surprise the English people than if the Queen by a coup d'etat and on a sudden destroyed a Ministry firm in the allegiance and secure of a majority in Parliament.

Principle shows that the power of dismissing a Government with which Parliament is satisfied, and of dissolving that Parliament upon an appeal to the people, is not a power which a common hereditary monarch will in the long run be able…

The preponderant probability is that on a great occasion the Premier and Parliament will really be wiser than the king.

The more we study the nature of Cabinet government, the more we shall shrink from exposing at a vital instant its delicate machinery to a blow from a casual, incompetent, and perhaps semi-insane outsider.

The check which our Constitution finds for the special vices of our Parliament was misused to curb its wisdom.

Even if Lord North had wished to make peace, and had persuaded Parliament accordingly, all his work would have been useless; a superior power could and would have appealed from a wise and pacific Parliament to a sullen and warlike nation.