English economist and political analyst (1826-1877)
What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind. And the greatest of these results is this wonderful spectacle of society, which is ever new, and yet ever the same; in which accidents pass and essence remains; in which one generation dies and another succeeds, as if they were birds in a cage, or animals in a menagerie; of which it seems almost more than a metaphor to treat the parts as limbs of a perpetual living thing, so silently do they seem to change, so wonderfully and so perfectly does the conspicuous life of the new year take the place of the conspicuous life of last year.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The worst families are those in which the members never really speak their minds to one another; they maintain an atmosphere of unreality, and every one always lives in an atmosphere of suppressed ill-feeling. It is the same with nations.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The soul "itself by itself," could tell all it wanted if it would be true to its sublimer isolation.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The leading statesmen in a free country have great momentary power. They settle the conversation of mankind. It is they who, by a great speech or two, determine what shall be said and what shall be written for long after.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The deep sea of mysticism lies opposed to some natures; in some moods it is a sublime wonder; in others an "impious ocean,"—they will never put forth on it at any time.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Respect is traditional; it is given not to what is proved to be good, but to what is known to be old.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Probably if we had historic records of the ante-historic ages—if some superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages before they could set them down for themselves—we should know that this first step in civilization was the hardest step. But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next step.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
It is a grave objection to our existing Parliamentary constitution that it gives much power to regions of past greatness, and refuses equal power to regions of present greatness.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
In the East, in a word, we are attempting to put new wine into old bottles-to pour what we can of a civilization whose spirit is progress into the form of a civilization whose spirit is fixity, and whether we shall succeed or not is perhaps the most interesting question in an age abounding almost beyond example in questions of political interest.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
If the first work of the poor voters is to try to create a "poor man's paradise," as poor men are apt to fancy that Paradise, and as they are apt to think they can create it, the great political trial now beginning will simply fail. The wide gift of the elective franchise will be a great calamity to the whole nation, and to those who gain it as great a calamity as to any.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
First, it is laid down as a principle of the English polity, that in it the legislative, the executive, and the judicial powers are quite divided—that each is entrusted to a separate person or set of persons—that no one of these can at all interfere with the work of the other. There has been much eloquence expended in explaining how the rough genius of the English people, even in the middle ages, when it was especially rude, carried into life and practice that elaborate division of functions which philosophers had suggested on paper, but which they had hardly hoped to see except on paper.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
And so the permanent public servant will be teased by the wits, oppressed by the bores, and massacred by the innovators of Parliament.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
We are not now concerned with perfection or excellence; we seek only for simple fitness and bare competency.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The soul ties its shoe; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
The sort of taxation tried in America, that of taxing everything, and seeing what every thing would yield, could not have been tried under a Government delicately and quickly sensitive to public opinion.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The danger of the House of Commons is, perhaps, that it will be reformed too rashly; the danger of the House of Lords certainly is, that it may never be reformed.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The Congress declares war, but they would find it very difficult, according to the recent construction of their laws, to compel the President to make a peace.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
It would seem as if, when the mind was once set apart by the natural consequences of the disease, and secluded from the usual occupations of, and customary contact with, other minds, it searched about through all the universe for causes of trouble and anguish. A certain pain probably exists; and even in insanity, man is so far a rational being that he seeks and craves at least the outside and semblance of a reason for a suffering, which is really and truly without reason. Something must be found to justify its anguish to itself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
If, therefore, a nation is able to gain the benefit of custom without the evil—if after ages of waiting it can have order and choice together—at once the fatal clog is removed, and the ordinary springs of progress, as in a modern community we conceive them, begin their elastic action.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
But in all cases it must be remembered that a political combination of the lower classes, as such and for their own objects, is an evil of the first magnitude; that a permanent combination of them would make them (now that so many of them have the suffrage) supreme in the country; and that their supremacy, in the state they now are, means the supremacy of ignorance over instruction and of numbers over knowledge.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution