Walter Bagehot

The House of Lords on most days looks so unlike what it ought to be, that most people will not believe it is what it ought to be.

The abolition of proxies would have made the House of Lords a real House; the addition of life peers would have made it a good House.

It always perhaps happens in a great nation, that certain bodies of sensible men posted prominently in its Constitution, acquire functions, and usefully exercise functions, which at the outset, no one expected from them, and which do not…

This is a function which no theorist would assign to a second chamber in a new Constitution, and which is matter of accident in ours.

Gradually, indeed, the unfitness of the second chamber for judicial functions has made itself felt.

No one, indeed, would venture REALLY to place the judicial function in the chance majorities of a fluctuating assembly: it is so by a sleepy theory; it is not so in living fact.

As a legal question, too, it is a matter of grave doubt whether there ought to be two supreme courts in this country--the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and (what is in fact though not in name) the Judicial Committee of the House…

Up to a very recent time, one committee might decide that a man was sane as to money, and the other committee might decide that he was insane as to land.

This absurdity has been cured; but the error from which it arose has not been cured--the error of having two supreme courts, to both of which as time goes on, the same question is sure often enough to be submitted, and each of which is…

The supreme court of the English people ought to be a great conspicuous tribunal, ought to rule all other courts, ought to have no competitor, ought to bring our law into unity, ought not to be hidden beneath the robes of a legislative…

The first is the faculty of criticising the executive.

Every man of great ability puts his own mark on his own criticism; it will be full of thought and feeling, but then it is of idiosyncratic thought and feeling.

We want many critics of ability and knowledge in the Upper House--not equal to Lord Grey, for they would be hard to find--but like Lord Grey.

They should resemble him in impartiality; they should resemble him in clearness; they should most of all resemble him in taking a supplemental view of a subject.

But there is also a bystander's view which is likely to omit some one or more of these old and certain elements, but also to contain some new or distant matter, which the absorbed and occupied actor could not see.

Taking the House of Commons, not after possible but most unlikely improvements, but in matter of fact and as it stands, it is overwhelmed with work.

It is all but necessary that certain members of the Cabinet should be exempt from its toil, and untouched by its excitement.

But it is also necessary that they should have the power of explaining their views to the nation; of being heard as other people are heard.

But so much is evident: the House of Lords, for its own members, attains this object; it gives them a voice, it gives them what no competing plan does give them--POSITION.

Life peers would enable us to use this faculty of our Constitution more freely and more variously.

It would give us a larger command of able leisure; it would improve the Lords as a political pulpit, for it would enlarge the list of its select preachers.

He only goes where he believes they will go after him.

But he has to take the lead; he must choose his direction, and begin the journey.

A good horse likes to feel the rider's bit; and a great deliberative assembly likes to feel that it is under worthy guidance.

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