It begets a mind desirous of things, careless of ideas, not acquainted with the niceties of words.
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).
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We see so much of the material fruits of commerce that we forget its mental fruits.
This matter-of-factness is the growth even in Europe of the two greatest and newest intellectual agencies of our time.
New countries are arising all over the world where there are no fixed sources of reverence; which have to make them; which have to create institutions which must generate loyalty by conspicuous utility.
The test of each century, more than of the century before, is the test of results.
But looking not to the present hour, and this single country, but to the world at large and coming times, no question can be more practical.
In these very essays it has been shown that the mass of our people would obey no one else, that the reverence she excites is the potential energy--as science now speaks--out of which all minor forces are made, and from which lesser…
Queen Anne's case and William IV.'s case prove that neither object is certainly attained by entrusting this critical and extreme force to the chance idiosyncrasies and habitual mediocrity of an hereditary sovereign.
The existence of a fancied check on the Premier is in truth an evil, because it prevents the enforcement of a real check.
He might use it by unaccountable impulse when not required, and refuse to use it out of sullen madness when required.
A half-insane king, like George III., would be worse.
An ordinary hereditary sovereign--a William IV., or a George IV.--is unfit to exercise the peer-creating power when most wanted.
In fact, you may place power in weak hands at a revolution, but you cannot keep it in weak hands.
No one who reads it carefully will doubt that the discretionary power of making peers would have been far better in Lord Grey's hands than in the king's.
A more striking example of well-meaning imbecility is scarcely to be found in history.
It is a strange instance of high-placed weakness and conscientious vacillation.
He was a very conscientious king, but at the same time an exceedingly weak king.
But of large thought and comprehensive statesmanship she was as destitute as Mrs.
He may prevent years of tumult, save bloodshed and civil war, lay up a store of grateful fame to himself, prevent the accumulated intestine hatred of each party to its opposite.
The value of a discreet, calm, wise monarch, if such should happen to be reigning at the acute crisis of a nation's destiny, is priceless.
This is the conclusive, the swaying power of the moment, and of course, therefore, it had better be in the hands of a power both capable and impartial, than of a Premier who must in some degree be a partisan.
It is a power only to be used on great occasions, when the object is immense, and the party strife unmitigated.
The catastrophic creation of peers for the purpose of swamping the Upper House is utterly different.
Hardly any contrived constitution possesses a machinery for modifying its secondary house so delicate, so flexible, and so constant.
He, as the head of the predominant party, is the proper person to modify gradually the permanent chamber which, perhaps, was at starting hostile to him; and, at any rate, can be best harmonised with the public opinion he represents by the…
Politicians like Walter Bagehot
