If we could get hold of a complemental critic, a critic who saw what the age did not see, and who saw rightly what the age mistook, we should have a critic of inestimable value.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
gutenberg.org
Can it be said that its unfriendliness to the legislation of the age is founded on a perception of what the age does not see, and a rectified perception of what the age does see?
On free trade, for example, no one can doubt that the Lords--in opinion, in what they wished to do, and would have done, if they had acted on their own minds--were utterly wrong.
Now no one can doubt that England is a great deal better off because of free trade; that it has more money, and that its money is diffused more as we should wish it diffused.
In the one case in which we can unanswerably test the modern spirit, it was right, and the dubious Upper House--the House which would have rejected it, if possible--was wrong.
The House of Lords, being an hereditary chamber, cannot be of more than common ability.
But its average born law-makers cannot be extraordinary.
Being a set of eldest sons picked out by chance and history, it cannot be very wise.
The task of revising, of adequately revising the legislation of this age, is not only that which an aristocracy has no facility in doing, but one which it has a difficulty in doing.
And there is no educated human being less likely to know business, worse placed for knowing business than a young lord.
Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply.
Few things are more amusing than the ideas of a well-intentioned young man, who is born out of the business world, but who wishes to take to business, about business.
But hardly any young man destitute of experience is able to separate end and means.
Being the only class at ease for money and cultivated in mind they were without competition; and though they might not be, as a rule, and extraordinary ability excepted, excellent in State business, they were the best that could be had.
But now a class is coming up trained to thought, full of money, and yet trained to business.
This is the class of highly-cultivated men of business who, after a few years, are able to leave business and begin ambition.
It is like Columbus and the egg once again; a few original men will show it can be done, and then a crowd of common men will follow.
Just so there are business families to whom all that concerns money, all that concerns administration, is as familiar as the air they breathe.
All Americans, it has been said, know business; it is in the air of their country.
It is as great a difficulty to learn business in a palace as it is to learn agriculture in a park.
The old-world diplomacy of Europe was largely carried on in drawing-rooms, and, to a great extent, of necessity still is so.
It is always the highest class which travels most, knows most of foreign nations, has the least of the territorial sectarianism which calls itself patriotism, and is often thought to be so.
But, notwithstanding, the new race is not as serviceable for diplomacy as the old race.
An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.
The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.
Politicians like Walter Bagehot
