Happily, the process of election is so indirect and hidden, and the introduction of that process was so gradual and latent, that we scarcely perceive the immense political trust we repose in each other.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
gutenberg.org
To fancy that Northumberland in the thirteenth century would have consented to ally itself with Somersetshire for the choice of a chief magistrate is absurd; it would scarcely have allied itself to choose a hangman.
And if such co-operation is not to be expected in trivial matters, it is not to be thought of in the most vital matter of government--the choice of the executive ruler.
In ages when distant territories are blanks in the mind, when neighbourhood is a sentiment, when locality is a passion, concerted co-operation between remote regions is impossible even on trivial matters.
The inhabitants of the north speak a dialect different from the dialect of the south: they have other laws, another aristocracy, another life.
Here is a definite beginning of new maxims, new thoughts, new ways: the immemorial boundary mark begins in feeling a strange world.
People, in all but the most favoured times and places, are rooted to the places where they were born, think the thoughts of those places, can endure no other thoughts.
The peculiar marks of semi-barbarous people are diffused distrust and indiscriminate suspicion.
Knowledge and civilisation have at least made this progress, that we instinctively, without argument, almost without consciousness, allow a certain number of specified persons to choose our rulers for us.
We are so accustomed to submit to be ruled by elected Ministers, that we are apt to fancy all mankind would readily be so too.
The first prerequisite of elective government is the MUTUAL CONFIDENCE of the electors.
A Cabinet government is the government of a committee selected by the legislature, and there are therefore a double set of conditions to it: first, those which are essential to all elective governments as such; and second, those which are…
If hereditary royalty had been essential to Parliamentary government, we might well have despaired of that government.
The realisme impitoyable which good critics find in a most characteristic part of the literature of the nineteenth century, is to be found also in its politics.
It is impossible, in fact, to convince their prosaic minds that constitutional royalty is a rational government, that it is suited to a new age and an unbroken country, that those who start afresh can start with it.
We catch the Americans smiling at our Queen with her secret mystery, and our Prince of Wales with his happy inaction.
When, therefore, the new communities of the colonised world have to choose a government, they must choose one in which ALL the institutions are of an obvious evident utility.
Physical difficulty is the enemy of early communities, and an incessant conflict with it for generations leaves a mark of reality on the mind--a painful mark almost to us, used to impalpable fears and the half-fanciful dangers of an old…
But what we meant was half right--they worship visible value: obvious, undeniable, intrusive result.
We used before the civil war to say that the Americans worshipped the almighty dollar; we now know that they can scatter money almost recklessly when they will.
I am not saying that the new thought is better than the old; it is no business of mine to say anything about that; I only wish to bring home to the mind, as nothing but instances can bring it home, how matter-of-fact, how petty, as it…
The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries--the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning--without ever being bound to look at anything.
The old excitement of thought has half died out, or rather it is diffused in quiet pleasure over a life instead of being concentrated in intense and eager spasms.
Modern life is scanty in excitements, but incessant in quiet action.
There has in truth been a great change during the last five hundred years in the predominant occupations of the ruling part of mankind; formerly they passed their time either in exciting action or inanimate repose.
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