Walter Bagehot

The liberty existed before, and the right to be taxed was an efflorescence and instance of it, not a sub-stratum or a cause.

The steps were many, but the energy was one--the growth of the English middle-class, using that word in its most inclusive sense, and its animation under the influence of Protestantism.

No one, I think, can doubt that Lord Macaulay is right in saying that political causes would not alone have then provoked such a resistance to the sovereign unless propelled by religious theory.

Gradually, however, a strong Evangelic spirit (as we should now speak) and a still stronger anti-Papal spirit entered into the middle sort of Englishmen, and added to that force, fibre, and substance which they have never wanted, an ideal…

Of course, in seeming, Cromwell's work died with him; his dynasty was rejected, his republic cast aside; but the spirit which culminated in him never sank again, never ceased to be a potent, though often a latent and volcanic force in the…

Charles II. said that he would never go again on his travels for anything or anybody; and he well knew that though the men whom he met at Worcester might be dead, still the spirit which warmed them was alive and young in others.

But give this fiery element a body of decent-looking earth; give it an excuse for breaking out on an occasion, when the decent, the cultivated, and aristocratic classes could join with it, and they would conquer by means of it, and it…

James II., by incredible and pertinacious folly, irritated not only the classes which had fought AGAINST his father, but also those who had fought FOR his father.

He offended the Anglican classes as well as the Puritan classes; all the Whig nobles, and half the Tory nobles, as well as the dissenting bourgeois.

The rule of Parliament was established by the concurrence of the usual supporters of royalty with the usual opponents of it.

Our revolution has been called the minimum of a revolution, because in law, at least, it only changed the dynasty, but exactly on that account it was the greatest shock to the common multitude, who see the dynasty but see nothing else.

The support of the main aristocracy held together the bulk of the deferential classes, but it held them together imperfectly, uneasily, and unwillingly.

If an able Stuart had with credible sincerity professed Protestantism probably he might have overturned the House of Hanover.

So strong was inbred reverence for hereditary right, that until the accession of George III. the English Government was always subject to the unceasing attrition of a competitive sovereign.

Many of the English people--the higher and more educated portion--had come to comprehend the nature of constitutional government, but the mass did not comprehend it.

They looked to the sovereign as the Government, and to the sovereign only.

At first Parliament did not know how to exercise it; the organisation of parties and the appointment of Cabinets by parties grew up in the manner Macaulay has described so well.

Up to the latest period the sovereign was supposed, to a most mischievous extent, to interfere in the choice of the persons to be Ministers.

The Tory Ministry was carrying on a successful war--a war of existence--against Napoleon; but in the people's minds, the necessity at such an occasion for an unchanged Government did not outweigh the fancy that George IV. was a Whig.

As we all know, he kept the Ministry whom he found in office; but that it should have been thought he could then change them, is a significant example how exceedingly modern our notions of the despotic action of Parliament in fact are.

Here, too, the appendages of a monarchy have been converted into the essence of a republic; only here, because of a more numerous heterogeneous political population, it is needful to keep the ancient show while we secretly interpolate the…

This long and curious history has left its trace on almost every part of our present political condition; its effects lie at the root of many of our most important controversies; and because these effects are not rightly perceived, many of…

One of the most curious peculiarities of the English people is its dislike of the executive government.

The Americans conceive of the executive as one of their appointed agents; when it intervenes in common life, it does so, they consider, in virtue of the mandate of the sovereign people, and there is no invasion or dereliction of freedom in…

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