Walter Bagehot

Perfection in legislation is not to be looked for, and is not, indeed, much wanted in a rude, painful, confined life.

That men should enjoy the fruits of their labour, that the law of property should be known, that the law of marriage should be known, that the whole course of life should be kept in a calculable track is the summum bonum of early ages, the…

In that age men do not want to have their laws adapted, but to have their laws steady.

The passions are so powerful, force so eager, the social bond so weak, that the august spectacle of an all but unalterable law is necessary to preserve society.

In the early stages of human society all change is thought an evil.

The conditions of life are so simple and so unvarying that any decent sort of rules suffice so long as men know what they are.

Custom is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is impeded, is the primitive check on base power.

The perception of political expediency has then hardly begun; the sense of abstract justice is weak and vague; and a rigid adherence to the fixed mould of transmitted usage is essential to an unmarred, unspoiled, unbroken life.

There is a diffused desire in civilised communities for an ADJUSTING legislation; for a legislation which should adapt the inherited laws to the new wants of a world which now changes every day.

It has ceased to be necessary to maintain bad laws because it is necessary to have some laws.

Civilisation is robust enough to bear the incision of legal improvements.

It must be possible to have not only a legislature, but to have a competent legislature--a legislature willing to elect and willing to maintain an efficient executive.

We are not now concerned with perfection or excellence; we seek only for simple fitness and bare competency.

First, you must get a good legislature; and next, you must keep it good.

To keep a legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial business.

If you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they will quarrel with each other about that nothing.

All we can say is, that a Parliament with little business, which is to be as efficient as a Parliament with much business, must be in all other respects much better.

An indifferent Parliament may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave affairs; but a Parliament which has no such affairs must be intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.

But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature, is evidently secondary to the difficulty of first getting it.

The first is a nation in which the mass of the people are intelligent, and in which they are comfortable.

Where there is no honest poverty, where education is diffused, and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair legislature.

Education is diffused much, and is fast spreading, Ignorant emigrants from the Old World often prize the intellectual advantages of which they are themselves destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where rudimentary…

No one can doubt that the New England States, if they were a separate community, would have an education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such as the numerical majority of no people, equally numerous, has ever possessed.

In a State of this sort, where all the community is fit to choose a sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost easy, to create that legislature.

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