Walter Bagehot

And I hope that in fact this is true, for according to me, it proves that the hereditary barbaric impulse is decaying and dying out.

And I believe that this is in great part due, in England at least, to our government by discussion, which has fostered a general intellectual tone, a diffused disposition to weigh evidence, a conviction that much may be said on every side…

This is the real reason why our energies seem so much less than those of our fathers.

When we have a definite end in view, which we know we want, and which we think we know how to obtain, we can act well enough.

The campaigns of our soldiers are as energetic as any campaigns ever were; the speculations of our merchants have greater promptitude, greater audacity, greater vigour than any such speculations ever had before.

In old times a few ideas got possession of men and communities, but this is happily now possible no longer.

We see how incomplete these old ideas were; how almost by chance one seized on one nation, and another on another; how often one set of men have persecuted another set for opinions on subjects of which neither, we now perceive, knew…

It might be well if a greater number of effectual demonstrations existed among mankind; but while no such demonstrations exist, and while the evidence which completely convinces one man seems to another trifling and insufficient, let us…

Let us not be bigots with a doubt, and persecutors without a creed.

But it is a great benefit, and it is to the incessant prevalence of detective discussion that our doubts are due; and much of that discussion is due to the long existence of a government requiring constant debates, written and oral.

This is one of the unrecognised benefits of free government, one of the modes in which it counteracts the excessive inherited impulses of humanity.

The thing is done and cannot be undone, and the most natural wish of the Opposition leaders is to prove that if they had been in office, and it therefore had been theirs to do it, they could have done it much better.

The whole pitch of party malice is then expended, because there is nothing to check the party in opposition.

Either the Cabinet legislates and acts, or else it can dissolve.

It is a creature, but it has the power of destroying its creators.

It is an executive which can annihilate the legislature, as well as an executive which is the nominee of the legislature.

It was made, but it can unmake; it was derivative in its origin, but it is destructive in its action.

The independence of the legislative and executive powers is the specific quality of Presidential government, just as their fusion and combination is the precise principle of Cabinet government.

The essence of a civilised age is, that administration requires the continued aid of legislation.

Education, prison discipline, art, science, civil contingencies of a hundred kinds, require more money one year and less another.

The expense of defence--the naval and military estimates--vary still more as the danger of attack seems more or less imminent, as the means of retarding such danger become more or less costly.

If the persons who have to do the work are not the same as those who have to make the laws, there will be a controversy between the two sets of persons.

In America so much has this difficulty been felt that a semi-connection has grown up between the legislature and the executive.

We have by present practice an Indian Chancellor of the Exchequer talking English finance at Calcutta, and an English one talking Indian finance in England.

But the figures are never the same, and the views of policy are rarely the same.