Walter Bagehot

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

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.

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

Courts and aristocracies have the great quality which rules the multitude, though philosophers can see nothing in it--visibility.

Their imagination is bowed down; they feel they are not equal to the life which is revealed to them.

A certain state passes before them; a certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed, and they are coerced by it.

They defer to what we may call the THEATRICAL SHOW of society.

In fact, the mass of the English people yield a deference rather to something else that to their rulers.

The middle classes--the ordinary majority of educated men--are in the present day the despotic power in England.

England is the type of deferential countries, and the manner in which it is so, and has become so, is extremely curious.

It has the best people to elect a legislature, and therefore it may fairly be expected to choose a good legislature--a legislature competent to select a good administration.

It acknowledges as its secondary electors--as the choosers of its government--an educated minority, at once competent and unresisted; it has a kind of loyalty to some superior persons who are fit to choose a good government, and whom no…

It abdicates in favour of its elite, and consents to obey whoever that elite may confide in.

The numerical majority--whether by custom or by choice, is immaterial--is ready, is eager to delegate its power of choosing its ruler to a certain select minority.

It has been thought strange, but there ARE nations in which the numerous unwiser part wishes to be ruled by the less numerous wiser part.

But suppose the mass of the people are not able to elect--and this is the case with the numerical majority of all but the rarest nations--how is a Cabinet government to be then possible?

It satisfies the essential condition; there is a people able to elect, a Parliament able to choose.

At any rate, an isocratic polity--a polity where every one votes, and where every one votes alike--is, in a community of sound education and diffused intelligence, a conceivable case of Cabinet government.

And if we can get them ruled by a decent capable thought, we may be well enough contented with our work.

Great communities have scarcely ever--never save for transient moments--been ruled by their highest thought.

In theory it is desirable that this highest class of wealth and leisure should have an influence far out of proportion to its mere number: a perfect constitution would find for it a delicate expedient to make its fine thought tell upon the…

After generations of education, too, there arise varieties of culture--there will be an upper thousand, or ten thousand, of highly cultivated people in the midst of a great nation of moderately educated people.

The capitalist becomes a unit with much, and his labourers a crowd with little.

If manufactures on a considerable scale are established--and most young communities strive even by protection to establish them--the tendency to inequality is intensified.