Walter Bagehot

If they could ever have been trusted to resist the people, they would then have resisted it.

But in truth it is idle to expect a second chamber--a chamber of notables--ever to resist a popular chamber, a nation's chamber, when that chamber is vehement and the nation vehement too.

Every class chamber, every minority chamber, so to speak, feels weak and helpless when the nation is excited.

In a time of revolution there are but two powers, the sword and the people.

The executive commands the sword; the great lesson which the First Napoleon taught the Parisian populace--the contribution he made to the theory of revolutions at the 18th Brumaire--is now well known.

Such a body has no force to put down the nation, and if the nation will have it do something it must do it.

The very nature, too, as has been seen, of the Lords in the English Constitution, shows that it cannot stop revolution.

The executive, the appointee of the popular chamber and the nation, can make new peers, and so create a majority in the peers; it can say to the Lords, "Use the powers of your House as we like, or you shall not use them at all.

We will find others to use them; your virtue shall go out of you if it is not used as we like, and stopped when we please." An assembly under such a threat cannot arrest, and could not be intended to arrest, a determined and insisting…

In fact the House of Lords, as a House, is not a bulwark that will keep out revolution, but an index that revolution is unlikely.

Resting as it does upon old deference, and inveterate homage, it shows that the spasm of new forces, the outbreak of new agencies, which we call revolution, is for the time simply impossible.

So long as many old leaves linger on the November trees, you know that there has been little frost and no wind; just so while the House of Lords retains much power, you may know that there is no desperate discontent in the country, no wild…

The first person who threw a hard stone--an effectually hitting stone--against the theory was one very little likely to be favourable to democratic influence, or to be blind to the use of aristocracy; it was the present Lord Grey.

He was the first great Colonial Minister of England who ever set himself to introduce representative institutions into ALL her capable colonies, and the difficulty stared him in the face that in those colonies there were hardly enough good…

The democracy was strengthened rather than weakened by the isolation of its best opponents in a weak position.

As soon as experience had shown this, or seemed to show it, the theory that two chambers were essential to a good and free Government vanished away.

With a perfect Lower House it is certain that an Upper House would be scarcely of any value.

If we had an ideal House of Commons perfectly representing the nation, always moderate, never passionate, abounding in men of leisure, never omitting the slow and steady forms necessary for good consideration, it is certain that we should…

And whatever is unnecessary in Government is pernicious.

Human life makes so much complexity necessary that an artificial addition is sure to do harm: you cannot tell where the needless bit of machinery will catch and clog the hundred needful wheels; but the chances are conclusive that it will…

But though beside an ideal House of Commons the Lords would be unnecessary, and therefore pernicious, beside the actual House a revising and leisured legislature is extremely useful, if not quite necessary.

The nation never attends to any but the principal matters of policy and State.

Upon these it forms that rude, rough, ruling judgment which we call public opinion; but upon other things it does not think at all, and it would be useless for it to think.

It has not the materials for forming a judgment: the detail of bills, the instrumental part of policy, the latent part of legislation, are wholly out of its way.

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