Walter Bagehot

I only profess to explain what seem to me the political prerequisites of progress, and especially of early progress, I do this the rather because the subject is insufficiently examined, so that even if my views are found to be faulty, the…

There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitution--a Constitution that is in actual work and power.

He must paint it as it stood at some one time, or else he will be putting side by side in his representations things which never were contemporaneous in reality.

If I had given a sketch of the Palmerston time as a sketch of the present time, it would have been in many points untrue; and if I had tried to change the sketch of seven years since into a sketch of the present time, I should probably…

The best plan in such a case is, I think, to keep the original sketch in all essentials as it was at first written, and to describe shortly such changes either in the Constitution itself, or in the Constitutions compared with it, as seem…

The people enfranchised under it do not yet know their own power; a single election, so far from teaching us how they will use that power, has not been even enough to explain to them that they have such power.

A new Constitution does not produce its full effect as long as all its subjects were reared under an old Constitution, as long as its statesmen were trained by that old Constitution.

It is not really tested till it comes to be worked by statesmen and among a people neither of whom are guided by a different experience.

The change since 1865 is a change not in one point but in a thousand points; it is a change not of particular details but of pervading spirit.

A new world has arisen which is not as the old world; and we naturally ascribe the change to the Reform Act.

If there had been no Reform Act at all there would, nevertheless, have been a great change in English politics.

There has been a change of the sort which, above all, generates other changes--a change of generation.

Generally one generation in politics succeeds another almost silently; at every moment men of all ages between thirty and seventy have considerable influence; each year removes many old men, makes all others older, brings in many new.

Though in some ways always young, he had not a particle of sympathy with the younger generation; he brought forward no young men; he obstructed all that young men wished.

In consequence, at his death a new generation all at once started into life; the pre-'32 all at once died out.

Such an enormous change in the age of the workers necessarily caused a great change in the kind of work attempted and the way in which it was done.

Even if there had been no Reform Act, this single cause would have effected grave alterations.

A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them; the seeds were waiting in the ground, and they began to grow as soon as the withdrawal of the old…

These new questions of themselves would have made a new atmosphere, new parties, new debates.

I have said that Cabinet government is possible in England because England was a deferential country.

Nothing could be more unlike those Parliaments than the average mass of the constituency from which they were chosen.

They were not influenced by ideas, but by facts; not by things impalpable, but by things palpable.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, they were influenced by rank and wealth.

No doubt the better sort of them believed that those who were superior to them in these indisputable respects were superior also in the more intangible qualities of sense and knowledge.

The issue put before these electors was, Which of two rich people will you choose?