Walter Bagehot

And a monarch in the recesses of a palace, listening to a charmed flattery unbiassed by the miscellaneous world, who has always been hedged in by rank, is likely to be but a poor judge of public opinion.

He may have an inborn tact for finding it out; but his life will never teach it him, and will probably enfeeble it in him.

But there is a still worse case, a case which the life of George III.--which is a sort of museum of the defects of a constitutional king--suggests at once.

The Parliament may be wiser than the people, and yet the king may be of the same mind with the people.

If Lord North had been able to throw the undivided energy and the undistracted authority of the executive Government into the excellent work of making a peace and carrying a peace, years of bloodshed might have been spared, and an entail…

But there was a power behind the Prime Minister; George III. was madly eager to continue the war, and the nation--not seeing how hopeless the strife was, not comprehending the lasting antipathy which their obstinacy was creating--ignorant…

Even if Lord North had wished to make peace, and had persuaded Parliament accordingly, all his work would have been useless; a superior power could and would have appealed from a wise and pacific Parliament to a sullen and warlike nation.

The check which our Constitution finds for the special vices of our Parliament was misused to curb its wisdom.

The more we study the nature of Cabinet government, the more we shall shrink from exposing at a vital instant its delicate machinery to a blow from a casual, incompetent, and perhaps semi-insane outsider.

The preponderant probability is that on a great occasion the Premier and Parliament will really be wiser than the king.

Principle shows that the power of dismissing a Government with which Parliament is satisfied, and of dissolving that Parliament upon an appeal to the people, is not a power which a common hereditary monarch will in the long run be able…

Nothing, perhaps, would more surprise the English people than if the Queen by a coup d'etat and on a sudden destroyed a Ministry firm in the allegiance and secure of a majority in Parliament.

That power, indisputably, in theory, belongs to her; but it has passed so far away from the minds of men that it would terrify them, if she used it, like a volcanic eruption from Primrose Hill.

But the king's POLICY was wrong; he impeded the reaction instead of aiding it.

He forced on a premature Tory Government, which was as unsuccessful as all wise people perceived that it must be.

The popular distaste to the Whigs was as yet but incipient, inefficient; and the intervention of the Crown was advantageous to them, because it looked inconsistent with the liberties of the people.

The commencing dissatisfaction did but relate to the personal demerits of the Whig leaders, and other temporary adjuncts of free principles, and not to those principles intrinsically.

So that the last precedent for a royal onslaught on a Ministry ended thus:--in opposing the right principles, in aiding the wrong principles, in hurting the party it was meant to help.

Indeed, the dangers arising from a party spirit in Parliament exceeding that of the nation, and of a selfishness in Parliament contradicting the true interest of the nation, are not great dangers in a country where the mind of the nation…

A steady opposition to a formed public opinion is hardly possible in our House of Commons, so incessant is the national attention to politics, and so keen the fear in the mind of each member that he may lose his valued seat.

The one great vice of Parliamentary government in an adult political nation, is the caprice of Parliament in the choice of a Ministry.

The Parliamentary judgment of the merits or demerits of an administration very generally depends on matters which the Parliament, being close at hand, distinctly sees, and which the distant nation does not see.

It is easy to imagine a House of Commons which is discontented with all statesmen, which is contented with none, which is made up of little parties, which votes in small knots, which will adhere steadily to no leader, which gives every…

Such Parliaments require the imminent check of possible dissolution; but that check is (as has been shown) better in the Premier than in the sovereign; and by the late practice of our constitution, its use is yearly ebbing from the…

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