Walter Bagehot

But looking not to the present hour, and this single country, but to the world at large and coming times, no question can be more practical.

The test of each century, more than of the century before, is the test of results.

New countries are arising all over the world where there are no fixed sources of reverence; which have to make them; which have to create institutions which must generate loyalty by conspicuous utility.

This matter-of-factness is the growth even in Europe of the two greatest and newest intellectual agencies of our time.

We see so much of the material fruits of commerce that we forget its mental fruits.

It begets a mind desirous of things, careless of ideas, not acquainted with the niceties of words.

There has in truth been a great change during the last five hundred years in the predominant occupations of the ruling part of mankind; formerly they passed their time either in exciting action or inanimate repose.

Modern life is scanty in excitements, but incessant in quiet action.

The old excitement of thought has half died out, or rather it is diffused in quiet pleasure over a life instead of being concentrated in intense and eager spasms.

The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries--the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning--without ever being bound to look at anything.

I am not saying that the new thought is better than the old; it is no business of mine to say anything about that; I only wish to bring home to the mind, as nothing but instances can bring it home, how matter-of-fact, how petty, as it…

We used before the civil war to say that the Americans worshipped the almighty dollar; we now know that they can scatter money almost recklessly when they will.

But what we meant was half right--they worship visible value: obvious, undeniable, intrusive result.

Physical difficulty is the enemy of early communities, and an incessant conflict with it for generations leaves a mark of reality on the mind--a painful mark almost to us, used to impalpable fears and the half-fanciful dangers of an old…

When, therefore, the new communities of the colonised world have to choose a government, they must choose one in which ALL the institutions are of an obvious evident utility.

We catch the Americans smiling at our Queen with her secret mystery, and our Prince of Wales with his happy inaction.

It is impossible, in fact, to convince their prosaic minds that constitutional royalty is a rational government, that it is suited to a new age and an unbroken country, that those who start afresh can start with it.

The realisme impitoyable which good critics find in a most characteristic part of the literature of the nineteenth century, is to be found also in its politics.

If hereditary royalty had been essential to Parliamentary government, we might well have despaired of that government.

A Cabinet government is the government of a committee selected by the legislature, and there are therefore a double set of conditions to it: first, those which are essential to all elective governments as such; and second, those which are…

The first prerequisite of elective government is the MUTUAL CONFIDENCE of the electors.

We are so accustomed to submit to be ruled by elected Ministers, that we are apt to fancy all mankind would readily be so too.

Knowledge and civilisation have at least made this progress, that we instinctively, without argument, almost without consciousness, allow a certain number of specified persons to choose our rulers for us.

The peculiar marks of semi-barbarous people are diffused distrust and indiscriminate suspicion.

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