English economist and political analyst (1826-1877)
If we leave literary theory, and look to our actual old law, it is wonderful how much the sovereign can do. A few years ago the Queen very wisely attempted to make life peers, and the House of Lords very unwisely, and contrary to its own best interests, refused to admit her claim. They said her power had decayed into non-existence; she once had it, they allowed, but it had ceased by long disuse. If any one will run over the pages of Comyn's Digest or any other such book, title "Prerogative," he will find the Queen has a hundred such powers which waver between reality and desuetude, and which would cause a protracted and very interesting legal argument if she tried to exercise them. Some good lawyer ought to write a careful book to say which of these powers are really usable, and which are obsolete. There is no authentic explicit information as to what the Queen can do, any more than of what she does.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Lastly, there is the function of legislation, of which of course it would be preposterous to deny the great importance, and which I only deny to be AS important as the executive management of the whole State, or the political education given by Parliament to the whole nation. There are, I allow, seasons when legislation is more important than either of these. The nation may be misfitted with its laws, and need to change them: some particular corn law may hurt all industry, and it may be worth a thousand administrative blunders to get rid of it. But generally the laws of a nation suit its life; special adaptations of them are but subordinate; the administration and conduct of that life is the matter which presses most. Nevertheless, the statute-book of every great nation yearly contains many important new laws, and the English statute-book does so above any. An immense mass, indeed, of the legislation is not, in the proper language of jurisprudence, legislation at all. A law is a general command applicable to many cases. The "special acts" which crowd the statute-book and weary Parliamentary committees are applicable to one case only. They do not lay down rules according to which railways shall be made, they enact that such a railway shall be made from this place to that place, and they have no bearing upon any other transaction. But after every deduction and abatement, the annual legislation of Parliament is a result of singular importance; were it not so, it could not be, as it often is considered, the sole result of its annual assembling.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
On the whole, I think it indisputable that the selecting task of Parliament is performed as well as public opinion wishes it to be performed; and if we want to improve that standard, we must first improve the English nation, which imposes that standard. Of the substantial part of its legislative task, the same, too, may, I think, be said. The manner of our legislation is indeed detestable, and the machinery for settling that manner odious. A committee of the whole House, dealing, or attempting to deal with the elaborate clauses of a long bill, is a wretched specimen of severe but misplaced labour. It is sure to wedge some clause into the Act, such as that which the judge said "seemed to have fallen by itself, PERHAPS, from heaven, into the mind of the legislature," so little had it to do with anything on either side or around it. At such times government by a public meeting displays its inherent defects, and is little restrained by its necessary checks. But the essence of our legislature may be separated from its accidents. Subject to two considerable defects I think Parliament passes laws as the nation wishes to have them passed.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
When once polities were began, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against the principle of 'natural selection' in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history. The strongest killed out the weakest, as they could. And I need not pause to prove that any form of politics more efficient than none; that an aggregate of families owning even a slippery allegiance to a single head, would be sure to have the better of a set of families acknowledging no obedience to anyone, but scattering loose about the world and fighting where they stood. Homer's Cyclops would be powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness it became valuable in poetry.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
When other sources of leisure become possible, the one use of slavery is past. But all its evils remain, and even grow worse.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
A prolonged meditation on unseen realities is sufficiently difficult, and seems scarcely the occupation for which common human nature was intended.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
A man of business hates elaborate trifling. "If you do not believe your own senses," he will say, "there is no use in my talking to you." As to the multiplicity of arguments and the complexity of questions, he feels them little. He has a plain, simple, as he would say, practical way of looking at the matter; and you will never make him comprehend any other.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
The positive tastes and tendencies of the English mind confine its training to ascertained learning and definite science.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
In reverencing wealth we reverence not a man, but an appendix to a man.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The worst judge, they say, is a deaf judge; the most dull Government is a free Government on matters its ruling classes will not hear.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The ages of isolation had their use, for they trained men for ages when they were not to be isolated.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork—part resemblance, part contrast.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
No one should be surprised at the prominence given to war. We are dealing with early ages; nation-MAKING is the occupation of man in these ages, and it is war that makes nations. Nation-CHANGING comes afterwards, and is mostly effected by peaceful revolution, though even then war, too, plays its part. The idea of an indestructible nation is a modern idea; in early ages all nations were destructible, and the further we go back, the more incessant was the work of destruction. The internal decoration of nations is a sort of secondary process, which succeeds when the main forces that create nations have principally done their work. We have here been concerned with the political scaffolding; it will be the task of other papers to trace the process of political finishing and building. The nicer play of finer forces may then require more pleasing thoughts than the fierce fights of early ages can ever suggest. It belongs to the idea of progress that beginnings can never seem attractive to those who live far on; the price of improvement is, that the unimproved will always look degraded.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
What separates the author from his readers, will make it proportionably difficult for him to explain himself to them. Secluded habits do not tend to eloquence; and the indifferent apathy which is so common in studious persons is exceedingly unfavourable to the liveliness of narration and illustration which is needed for excellence in even the simpler sorts of writing.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
As a man's family go on muttering in his maturity incorrect phrases derived from a just observation of his early youth, so, in the full activity of an historical constitution, its subjects repeat phrases true in the time of their fathers, and inculcated by those fathers, but now true no longer. Or, if I may say so, an ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Gamblers to this day are, with respect to the chance part of their game, in much the same plight as savages with respect to the main events of their whole lives. And we well know how superstitious they all are. To this day very sensible whist-players have a certain belief—not, of course, a fixed conviction, but still a certain impression—that there is 'luck under a black deuce,' and will half mutter some not very gentle maledictions if they turn up as a trump the four of clubs, because it brings ill-luck, and is 'the devil's bed-post.' Of course grown-up gamblers have too much general knowledge, too much organized common sense to prolong or cherish such ideas; they are ashamed of entertaining them, though, nevertheless, they cannot entirely drive them out of their minds. But child gamblers—a number of little boys set to play loo-are just in the position of savages, for their fancy is still impressible, and they have not as yet been thoroughly subjected to the confuting experience of the real world and child gamblers have idolatries—at least I know that years ago a set of boy loo-players, of whom I was one, had considerable faith in a certain 'pretty fish' which was larger and more nicely made than the other fish we had. We gave the best evidence of our belief in its power to 'bring luck;' we fought for it (if our elders were out of the way); we offered to buy it with many other fish from the envied holder, and I am sure I have often cried bitterly if the chance of the game took it away from me. Persons who stand up for the dignity of philosophy, if any such there still are, will say that I ought not to mention this, because it seems trivial; but the more modest spirit of modern thought plainly teaches, if it teaches anything, the cardinal value of occasional little facts. I do not hesitate to say that many learned and elaborate explanations of the totem—the 'clan' deity—the beast or bird which in some supernatural way, attends to the clan and watches over it—do not seem to me to be nearly akin to the reality as it works and lives among—the lower races as the 'pretty fish' of my early boyhood. And very naturally so, for a grave philosopher is separated from primitive thought by the whole length of human culture; but an impressible child is as near to, and its thoughts are as much like, that thought as anything can now be.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The lion may eat straw like the ox, and the child put his head on the cockatrice' den; but will even then the light antelope be equal to the heavy plough? Will the gentle gazelle, even in those days, pull the slow wagon of ordinary occupation?
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
There is, as yet, no Act of Parliament compelling a bona fide traveler to read. If you wish him to read, you must make reading pleasant. You must give him short views, and clear sentences.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Sydney Smith is often compared to Swift; but this only shows with how little thought our common criticism is written. The two men have really nothing in common, except that they were both high in the Church, and both wrote amusing letters about Ireland.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies