The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.
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 Americans of 1787 thought they were copying the English Constitution, but they were contriving a contrast to it.
Just as the American is the type of composite Governments, in which the supreme power is divided between many bodies and functionaries, so the English is the type of SIMPLE Constitutions, in which the ultimate power upon all questions is…
It can ensure that its decrees shall be executed, for it, and it alone, appoints the executive; it can inflict the most severe of all penalties on neglect, for it can remove the executive.
It can choose, to effect its wishes, those who wish the same; and so its will is sure to be done.
A stipulated majority of both Houses of the American Congress can overrule by stated enactment their executive; but the popular branch of our legislature can make and unmake ours.
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…
The Americans now extol their institutions, and so defraud themselves of their due praise.
How any free government is to exist in societies where so many bad elements are so much perturbed, I cannot imagine.
How important singleness and unity are in political action no one, I imagine, can doubt.
We may distinguish and define its parts; but policy is a unit and a whole.
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.
The excellence of the British Constitution is that it has achieved this unity; that in it the sovereign power is single, possible, and good.
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.
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.
Wherever in our colonies Parliamentary government is unsuccessful, or is alleged to be unsuccessful, this is the vice which first impairs it.
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.
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.
It is, in substance, subjecting the whole nation to the rule of a section of the nation, selected because of its speciality.
Parliamentary government is, in its essence, a sectarian government, and is possible only when sects are cohesive.
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.
You are gratifying caprice at the cost of the nation.
You are indulging party spirit at the cost of the nation.
You are helping yourself at the cost of the nation.
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
