Walter Bagehot

By definition, a nation calling itself free should have no jealousy of the executive, for freedom means that the nation, the political part of the nation, wields the executive.

We have, accordingly, inherited the traditions of conflict, and preserve them in the fulness of victory.

We look on State action, not as our own action, but as alien action; as an imposed tyranny from without, not as the consummated result of our own organised wishes.

The natural impulse of the English people is to resist authority.

The old notion that the Government is an extrinsic agency still rules our imaginations, though it is no longer true, and though in calm and intellectual moments we well know it is not.

By the very nature of our government our executive cannot be liked and trusted as the Swiss or the American is liked and trusted.

If active real bodies had not sent the representatives, they would have been powerless.

This is very much the reason why our old rights of suffrage were so various; the Government let whatever people happened to be the strongest in each town choose the members.

Probably, if there is any body more than another which an educated Englishman nowadays regards with little favour, it is the Corporation of London.

He connects it with hereditary abuses perfectly preserved, with large revenues imperfectly accounted for, with a system which stops the principal city government at an old archway, with the perpetuation of a hundred detestable parishes…

For the want of all which makes Paris nice and splendid we justly reproach the Corporation of London; for the existence of much of what makes London mean and squalid we justly reproach it too.

Yet the Corporation of London was for centuries a bulwark of English liberty.

The conscious support of the near and organised capital gave the Long Parliament a vigour and vitality which they could have found nowhere else.

Now we are quite grown up, and can put away childish things.

I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.

It is natural that those who by special and admirable culture have come to look at all things upon the artistic side, should start back from these queer peculiarities.

But it is natural also that persons used to analyse political institutions should look at these anomalies with a little tenderness and a little interest.

Political philosophy is still more imperfect; it has been framed from observations taken upon regular specimens of politics and States; as to these its teaching is most valuable.

The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.

I cannot, therefore, join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may quickly overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to find.

Subject to this saving remark, however, I not only admit, but maintain, that our Constitution is full of curious oddities, which are impeding and mischievous, and ought to be struck out.

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner.

At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

Just so the lines of our Constitution were framed in old eras of sparse population, few wants, and simple habits; and we adhere in seeming to their shape, though civilisation has come with its dangers, complications, and enjoyments.

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