Walter Bagehot

The higher world, as it looks from without, is a stage on which the actors walk their parts much better than the spectators can.

Every rustic feels that his house is not like my lord's house; his life like my lord's life; his wife like my lady.

The climax of the play is the Queen: nobody supposes that their house is like the court; their life like her life; her orders like their orders.

There is in England a certain charmed spectacle which imposes on the many, and guides their fancies as it will.

Philosophers may deride this superstition, but its results are inestimable.

By the spectacle of this august society, countless ignorant men and women are induced to obey the few nominal electors--the Ll0 borough renters, and the L50 county renters--who have nothing imposing about them, nothing which would attract…

What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer.

The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

There are whole classes who have not a conception of what the higher orders call comfort; who have not the prerequisites of moral existence; who cannot lead the life that becomes a man.

But the most miserable of these classes do not impute their misery to politics.

If a political agitator were to lecture to the peasants of Dorsetshire, and try to excite political dissatisfaction, it is much more likely that he would be pelted than that he would succeed.

A deferential community, even though its lowest classes are not intelligent, is far more suited to a Cabinet government than any kind of democratic country, because it is more suited to political excellence.

A country of respectful poor, though far less happy than where there are no poor to be respectful, is nevertheless far more fitted for the best government.

You can use the best classes of the respectful country; you can only use the worst where every man thinks he is as good as every other.

Certain classes in certain nations retain by common acceptance a marked political preference, because they have always possessed it, and because they inherit a sort of pomp which seems to make them worthy of it.

But in a new colony, in a community where merit MAY be equal, and where there CANNOT be traditional marks of merit and fitness, it is obvious that a political deference can be yielded to higher culture only upon proof, first of its…

As yet the few rule by their hold, not over the reason of the multitude, but over their imaginations, and their habits; over their fancies as to distant things they do not know at all, over their customs as to near things which they know…

A cone balanced on its point is in unstable equilibrium, for if you push it ever so little it will depart farther and farther from its position and fall to the earth.

So in communities where the masses are ignorant but respectful, if you once permit the ignorant class to begin to rule you may bid farewell to deference for ever.

Their demagogues will inculcate, their newspapers will recount, that the rule of the existing dynasty (the people) is better than the rule of the fallen dynasty (the aristocracy).

A people very rarely hears two sides of a subject in which it is much interested; the popular organs take up the side which is acceptable, and none but the popular organs in fact reach the people.

No one will tell it that the educated minority whom it dethroned governed better or more wisely than it governs.

A democracy will never, save after an awful catastrophe, return what has once been conceded to it, for to do so would be to admit an inferiority in itself, of which, except by some almost unbearable misfortune, it could never be convinced.

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