Walter Bagehot

But this is nothing to what the Queen can by law do without consulting Parliament.

We should have the reasons for the treaty plainly stated, and also the reasons against it.

We should have a manlier and plainer way of dealing with foreign policy, if Ministers were obliged to explain clearly their foreign contracts before they were valid, just as they have to explain their domestic proposals before they can…

And if it be meant, as it often is meant, that the whole truth as to treaties cannot be spoken out, I answer, that neither can the whole truth as to laws.

A Parliamentary Minister is a man trained by elaborate practice not to blurt out crude things, and an English Parliament is an assembly which particularly dislikes anything gauche or anything imprudent.

I am, too, disposed to deny entirely that there can be any treaty for which adequate reasons cannot be given to the English people, which the English people ought to make.

A great deal of the reticence of diplomacy had, I think history shows, much better be spoken out.

The worst families are those in which the members never really speak their minds to one another; they maintain an atmosphere of unreality, and every one always lives in an atmosphere of suppressed ill-feeling.

In a word, the Queen could by prerogative upset all the action of civil government within the Government, could disgrace the nation by a bad war or peace, and could, by disbanding our forces, whether land or sea, leave us defenceless…

The law of treason neither could nor ought to be enforced against an act which was an error of judgment, not of intention--which was in good faith intended not to impair the well-being of the State, but to promote and augment it.

Because there are two checks--one ancient and coarse, the other modern and delicate.

Any Minister who advised the Queen so to use her prerogative as to endanger the safety of the realm, might be impeached for high treason, and would be so.

Most of the Ministries for thirty years have never possessed the confidence of the Lords, and in such cases a vote of censure by the Lords could therefore have but little weight; it would be simply the particular expression of a general…

It would be like a vote of censure on a Liberal Government by the Carlton, or on a Tory Government by the Reform Club.

The mode of governing the country, according to the existing laws, is mostly worn into a rut, and most administrations move in it because it is easier to move there than anywhere else.

Treaties are quite as important as most laws, and to require the elaborate assent of representative assemblies to every word of the law, and not to consult them even as to the essence of the treaty, is prima facie ludicrous.

Now, beforehand, no one would have ventured to suggest that a committee of Parliament on foreign relations should be able to commit the country to the greatest international obligations without consulting either Parliament or the country.

They would then receive that which is best for all arrangements of business, an understanding and sympathising criticism, but still a criticism.

And in no case has an adverse vote by the Lords the same decisive effect as a vote of the Commons; the Lower House is the ruling and the choosing House, and if a Government really possesses that, it thoroughly possesses nine-tenths of what…

The support of the Lords is an aid and a luxury; that of the Commons is a strict and indispensable necessary.

And this seems to be the best position in which negotiators can be placed, namely, that they should be sure to have to account to considerate and fair persons, but not to have to account to inconsiderate and unfair ones.

In whatever way a man has done anything once, he has a tendency to do it again: if he has done it several times he has a great tendency so to do it, and what is more, he has a great tendency to make others do it also.

He transmits his formed customs to his children by example and by teaching.

But what is peculiar in early societies is that over most of these customs there grows sooner or later a semi-supernatural sanction.

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