Walter Bagehot

The House of Commons, since it caught its tone from such a statesman, has taught the nation worse, and elevated it less, than usual.

The teaching there given must be popular, and to be popular it must be concrete, embodied, short.

The problem is to know the highest truth which the people will bear, and to inculcate and preach that.

In comparison with the debates of any other assembly, it is true the debates by the English Parliament are most instructive.

The debates in the American Congress have little teaching efficacy; it is the characteristic vice of Presidential government to deprive them of that efficacy; in that government a debate in the legislature has little effect, for it cannot…

Accordingly the House of Commons, representing only mind coupled with property, is not equal in mind to a legislature chosen for mind only, and whether accompanied by wealth or not.

I maintain that Parliament ought to embody the public opinion of the English nation; and, certainly, that opinion is much more fixed by its property than by its mind.

Only, after every great abatement and deduction, I think the country would bear a little more mind; and that there is a profusion of opulent dulness in Parliament which might a little--though only a little--be pruned away.

The only function of Parliament which remains to be considered is the informing function, as I just now called it; the function which belongs to it, or to members of it, to bring before the nation the ideas, grievances, and wishes of…

The teaching function brings true ideas before the nation, and is the function of its highest minds.

Such sectarian conceptions are not those by which a determining nation should regulate its action, nor are orators, mainly animated by such conceptions, safe guides in policy.

The great maxim of modern thought is not only the toleration of everything, but the examination of everything.

It is by examining very bare, very dull, very unpromising things, that modern science has come to be what it is.

They may contain elements of truth which, though small, are the very elements which we now require, because we already know all the rest.

They wished that the shipping trade, the wool trade, the linen trade, should each have their spokesman; that the unsectional Parliament should know what each section in the nation thought before it gave the national decision.

This is the true reason for admitting the working classes to a share in the representation, at least as far as the composition of Parliament is to be improved by that admission.

They believe that they have interests which are misconceived or neglected; that they know something which others do not know; that the thoughts of Parliament are not as their thoughts.

They ought to be allowed to try to convince Parliament; their notions ought to be stated as those of other classes are stated; their advocates should be heard as other people's advocates are heard.

Just so, as long as a great class, congregated in political localities, and known to have political thoughts and wishes, is without notorious and palpable advocates in Parliament, we may prove on paper that our representation is adequate…

It is in vain to demonstrate that the working classes have no grievances; that the middle classes have done all that is possible for them, and so on with a crowd of arguments which I need not repeat, for the newspapers keep them in type…

The only answer to the cry against constituencies WITHOUT inhabitants was to transfer their power to constituencies WITH inhabitants.

Just so, the way to stop the complaint that artisans have no members is to give them members--to create a body of representatives, chosen by artisans, believing, as Mr.

A perfectly inexperienced man, so far as Indian affairs go, rules all our Indian Empire.

If twenty offices are vacant at once, there are almost never twenty tried, competent, clever men ready to take them.

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