When the leading sect (so to speak) in Parliament is doing what the nation do not like, an instant appeal ought to be registered and Parliament ought to be dissolved.
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).
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The actual contact with affairs is indeed likely to purify him from many prejudices, to tame him of many fanaticisms, to beat out of him many errors.
The Prime Minister obviously being the nominee of a party majority is likely to share its feeling, and is sure to be obliged to say that he shares it.
But, on the contrary, the party zeal and the self-seeking of Parliament are best checked by an authority which has no connection with Parliament or dependence upon it--supposing that such authority is morally and intellectually equal to…
The caprice of Parliament is better checked when the faculty of dissolution is entrusted to its appointee, than when it is set apart in an outlying and an alien authority.
He is the person most interested in maintaining his administration, and therefore the most likely person to use efficiently and dexterously the power by which it is to be maintained.
I will see whether the nation approves what you are doing or not; I will appeal from Parliament No. 1 to Parliament No. 2.
You are helping yourself at the cost of the nation.
You are indulging party spirit at the cost of the nation.
You are gratifying caprice at the cost of the nation.
A Parliament, like every other sort of sovereign, has peculiar feelings, peculiar prejudices, peculiar interests; and it may pursue these in opposition to the desires, and even in opposition to the well-being of the nation.
Parliamentary government is, in its essence, a sectarian government, and is possible only when sects are cohesive.
It is, in substance, subjecting the whole nation to the rule of a section of the nation, selected because of its speciality.
The only mode by which a cohesive majority and a lasting administration can be upheld in a Parliamentary government, is party organisation; but that organisation itself tends to aggravate party violence and party animosity.
The assembly cannot be induced to maintain any administration; it shifts its selection now from one Minister to another Minister, and in consequence there is no government at all.
Wherever in our colonies Parliamentary government is unsuccessful, or is alleged to be unsuccessful, this is the vice which first impairs it.
It lets forth a dangerous accumulation of inhibited power, which might sweep this Constitution before it, as like accumulations have often swept away like Constitutions.
It enables the popular will--the will of which the executive is the exponent, the will of which it is the appointee--to carry out within the Constitution desires and conceptions which one branch of the Constitution dislikes and resists.
The excellence of the British Constitution is that it has achieved this unity; that in it the sovereign power is single, possible, and good.
The interlaced character of human affairs requires a single determining energy; a distinct force for each artificial compartment will make but a motley patchwork, if it live long enough to make anything.
We may distinguish and define its parts; but policy is a unit and a whole.
How important singleness and unity are in political action no one, I imagine, can doubt.
How any free government is to exist in societies where so many bad elements are so much perturbed, I cannot imagine.
The Americans now extol their institutions, and so defraud themselves of their due praise.
The English Constitution, in a word, is framed on the principle of choosing a single sovereign authority, and making it good; the American, upon the principle of having many sovereign authorities, and hoping that their multitude may atone…
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