They WILL have people with a great piece of land in a particular spot, and of course these people generally cannot speak, and often cannot think.
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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It is almost another side of the same matter to say that the structure of Parliament gives too little weight to the growing districts of the country and too much to the stationary, In old times the south of England was not only the…
The immense preponderance which our Parliament gave before 1832, and though pruned and mitigated, still gives to England south of the Trent, then corresponded to a real preponderance in wealth and mind.
The nature of modern trade is to give to those who have much and take from those who have little.
Every railway takes trade from the little town to the big town because it enables the customer to buy in the big town.
Year by year the North (as we may roughly call the new industrial world) gets more important, and the South (as we may call the pleasant remnant of old time) gets less important.
It is a grave objection to our existing Parliamentary constitution that it gives much power to regions of past greatness, and refuses equal power to regions of present greatness.
I think (though it is not a popular notion) that by far the greater part of the cry for Parliamentary reform is due to this inequality.
They cannot endure--they ought not to endure--that a rich, able manufacturer should be a less man than a small stupid squire.
So long as there is an uneasy class, a class which has not its just power, it will rashly clutch and blindly believe the notion that all men should have the same power.
The working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion, and therefore, the fact of their want of influence in Parliament does not impair the coincidence of Parliament with public opinion.
But I do not believe that these families have the least corporate character, or any common opinions, different from others of the landed gentry.
The English aristocracy have never been a caste apart, and are not a caste apart now.
As long as we keep up a double set of institutions--one dignified and intended to impress the many, the other efficient and intended to govern the many--we should take care that the two match nicely, and hide where the one begins and where…
This is in part effected by conceding some subordinate power to the august part of our polity, but it is equally aided by keeping an aristocratic element in the useful part of our polity.
The reality of the deferential feeling in the community is tested by the actual election of the class deferred to, where there is a large free choice betwixt it and others.
On foreign matters, where we cannot legislate, whatever the English nation thinks, or thinks it thinks, as to the critical events of the world, whether in Denmark, in Italy, or America, and no matter whether it thinks wisely or unwisely…
The lyrical function of Parliament, if I may use such a phrase, is well done; it pours out in characteristic words the characteristic heart of the nation.
Now that free government is in Europe so rare and in America so distant, the opinion, even the incomplete, erroneous, rapid opinion of the free English people is invaluable.
It may be very wrong, but it is sure to be unique; and if it is right it is sure to contain matter of great magnitude, for it is only a first-class matter in distant things which a free people ever sees or learns.
The English people must miss a thousand minutiae that continental bureaucracies know even too well; but if they see a cardinal truth which those bureaucracies miss, that cardinal truth may greatly help the world.
But if in these ways, and subject to these exceptions, Parliament by its policy and its speech well embodies and expresses public opinion, I own I think it must be conceded that it is not equally successful in elevating public opinion.
The greatest teacher of all in Parliament, the head-master of the nation, the great elevator of the country--so far as Parliament elevates it--must be the Prime Minister: he has an influence, an authority, a facility in giving a great tone…
No Prime Minister, so popular and so influential, has ever left in the public memory so little noble teaching.
The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.
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