He would not let us do right in time, so now our attempts at right are out of time and fruitless.

Constitutional royalty under an active and half-insane king is one of the worst of Governments.

There is in it a secret power which is always eager, which is generally obstinate, which is often wrong, which rules Ministers more than they know themselves, which overpowers them much more than the public believe, which is irresponsible…

The benefits of a good monarch are almost invaluable, but the evils of a bad monarch are almost irreparable.

In my last essay I showed that it was possible for a constitutional monarch to be, when occasion served, of first-rate use both at the outset and during the continuance of an administration; but that in matter of fact it was not likely…

The requisite ideas, habits, and faculties, far surpass the usual competence of an average man, educated in the common manner of sovereigns.

The office of an order of nobility is to impose on the common people--not necessarily to impose on them what is untrue, yet less what is hurtful; but still to impose on their quiescent imaginations what would not otherwise be there.

The fancy of the mass of men is incredibly weak; it can see nothing without a visible symbol, and there is much that it can scarcely make out with a symbol.

Even after he is insolvent, when every one knows that his ruin is but a question of time, he will get five times as much respect from the common peasantry as the newly-made rich man who sits beside him.

The common peasantry will listen to his nonsense more submissively than to the new man's sense.

His very existence is so far useful that it awakens the sensation of obedience to a sort of mind in the coarse, dull, contracted multitude, who could neither appreciate nor perceive any other.

The order of nobility is of great use, too, not only in what it creates, but in what it prevents.

It prevents the rule of wealth--the religion of gold.

He is always trying to make money; he reckons everything in coin; he bows down before a great heap and sneers as he passes a little heap.

So long as we play the game of industry vigorously and eagerly (and I hope we shall long play it, for we must be very different from what we are if we do anything better), we shall of necessity respect and admire those who play…

Whether this feeling be right or wrong, it is useless to discuss; to a certain degree, it is involuntary; it is not for mortals to settle whether we will have it or not; nature settles for us that, within moderate limits, we must have it.

But the admiration of wealth in many countries goes far beyond this; it ceases to regard in any degree the skill of acquisition; it respects wealth in the hands of the inheritor just as much as in the hands of the maker; it is a simple…

But it may be said that this is no gain; that worship for worship, the worship of money is as good as the worship of rank.

Even granting that it were so, it is a great gain to society to have two idols: in the competition of idolatries the true worship gets a chance.

But it is not true that the reverence for rank--at least, for hereditary rank--is as base as the reverence for money.

It is the STYLE of society; it is in the daily-spoken intercourse of human beings what the art of literary expression is in their occasional written intercourse.

In reverencing wealth we reverence not a man, but an appendix to a man; in reverencing inherited nobility, we reverence the probable possession of a great faculty--the faculty of bringing out what is in one.

The unconscious grace of life MAY be in the middle classes: finely-mannered persons are born everywhere; but it OUGHT to be in the aristocracy: and a man must be born with a hitch in his nerves if he has not some of it.

There is a third idolatry from which that of rank preserves us, and perhaps it is the worst of any--that of office.

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