Walter Bagehot

And when the taxes do not yield as they were expected to yield, who is responsible?

Whom, then, can you punish--whom can you abolish--when your taxes run short?

There is nobody save the legislature, a vast miscellaneous body difficult to punish, and the very persons to inflict the punishment.

In England, on a vital occasion, the Cabinet can compel legislation by the threat of resignation, and the threat of dissolution; but neither of these can be used in a Presidential State.

There the legislature cannot be dissolved by the executive Government; and it does not heed a resignation, for it has not to find the successor.

Cabinet government educates the nation; the Presidential does not educate it, and may corrupt it.

The great scene of debate, the great engine of popular instruction and political controversy, is the legislative assembly.

A speech there by an eminent statesman, a party movement by a great political combination, are the best means yet known for arousing, enlivening, and teaching a people.

The Cabinet system ensures such debates, for it makes them the means by which statesmen advertise themselves for future and confirm themselves in present Governments.

Everything which is worth saying, everything which ought to be said, most certainly WILL be said.

Conscientious men think they ought to persuade others; selfish men think they would like to obtrude themselves.

The nation is forced to hear two sides--all the sides, perhaps, of that which most concerns it.

Human nature despises long arguments which come to nothing--heavy speeches which precede no motion--abstract disquisitions which leave visible things where they were.

It has a hundred ramifications; it runs through society; it gives hope to many, and it takes away hope from many.

And debates which have this catastrophe at the end of them--or may so have it--are sure to be listened to, and sure to sink deep into the national mind.

The nation feels that its judgment is important, and it strives to judge.

It succeeds in deciding because the debates and the discussions give it the facts and the arguments.

But under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

There are doubtless debates in the legislature, but they are prologues without a play.

The prize of power is not in the gift of the legislature, and no one cares for the legislature.

The executive, the great centre of power and place, sticks irremovable; you cannot change it in any event.

The teaching apparatus which has educated our public mind, which prepares our resolutions, which shapes our opinions, does not exist.

It cannot change the administration; the executive was elected for such and such years, and for such and such years it must last.

People wonder that so literary a people as the Americans--a people who read more than any people who ever lived, who read so many newspapers--should have such bad newspapers.

The papers are not so good as the English, because they have not the same motive to be good as the English papers.