English economist and political analyst (1826-1877)
A great deal of excellent research has been spent on the difference between "humor" and "wit," into which metaphysical problem " our limits," of course, forbid us to enter. There is, however, between them, the distinction of dry sticks and green sticks; there is in humor a living energy, a diffused potency, a noble sap; it grows upon the character of the humorist.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
The trained official hates the rude, untrained public. He thinks that they are stupid, ignorant, reckless—that they cannot tell their own interest—that they should have the leave of the office before they do anything. Protection is the natural inborn creed of every official body; free trade is an extrinsic idea alien to its notions, and hardly to be assimilated with life; and it is easy to see how an accomplished critic, used to a free and active life, could thus describe the official.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Our Government cannot buy for minor clerks the best ability of the nation in the cheap currency of pure honour, and no Government is rich enough to buy very much of it in money.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The defects of bureaucracy are, indeed, well known. It is a form of Government which has been tried often enough in the world, and it is easy to show what, human nature being what it in the long run is, the defects of a bureaucracy must in the long run be.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
An indifferent Parliament may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave affairs; but a Parliament which has no such affairs must be intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
I conceive, therefore, that the great power of the House of Lords should be exercised very timidly and very cautiously. For the sake of keeping the headship of the plutocracy, and through that of the nation, they should not offend the plutocracy; the points upon which they have to yield are mostly very minor ones, and they should yield many great points rather than risk the bottom of their power. They should give large donations out of income, if by so doing they keep, as they would keep, their capital intact. The Duke of Wellington guided the House of Lords in this manner for years, and nothing could prosper better for them or for the country, and the Lords have only to go back to the good path in which he directed them.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Now that the suffrage is universal, the average intellect and the average culture of the constituent bodies are excessively low; and even such mind and culture as there is has long been enslaved to authority.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The most strange fact, though the most certain in nature, is the unequal development of the human race. If we look back to the early ages of mankind, such as we seem in the faint distance to see them—if we call up the image of those dismal tribes in lake villages, or on wretched beaches—scarcely equal to the commonest material needs, cutting down trees slowly and painfully with stone tools, hardly resisting the attacks of huge, fierce animals—without culture, without leisure, without poetry, almost without thought—destitute of morality, with only a sort of magic for religion; and if we compare that imagined life with the actual life of Europe now, we are overwhelmed at the wide contrast—we can scarcely conceive ourselves to be of the same race as those in the far distance.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Commerce is like war; its result is patent. Do you make money or do you not make it? There is as little appeal from figures as from battle.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The supreme court of the English people ought to be a great conspicuous tribunal, ought to rule all other courts, ought to have no competitor, ought to bring our law into unity, ought not to be hidden beneath the robes of a legislative assembly.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
The English people must miss a thousand minutiae that continental bureaucracies know even too well; but if they see a cardinal truth which those bureaucracies miss, that cardinal truth may greatly help the world.
WALTER BAGEHOT
The English Constitution
Commerce brings this mingling of ideas, this breaking down of old creeds, and brings it inevitably.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Of course there was always some reason (if we only could find it) which gave the prominence in each age to some particular winning literature. There always is some reason why the fashion of female dress is what it is. But just as in the case of dress we know that now-a-days the determining cause is very much of an accident, so in the case of literary fashion, the origin is a good deal of an accident. What the milliners of Paris, or the demi-monde of Paris, enjoin our English ladies, is (I suppose) a good deal chance; but as soon as it is decreed, those whom it suits and those whom it does not all wear it. The imitative propensity at once insures uniformity; and 'that horrid thing we wore last year' (as the phrase may go) is soon nowhere to be seen. Just so a literary fashion spreads, though I am far from saying with equal primitive unreasonableness—a literary taste always begins on some decent reason, but once started, it is propagated as a fashion in dress is propagated; even those who do not like it read it because it is there, and because nothing else is easily to be found.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
A single run of luck has made the fortune of many a charm and many idols.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
In ancient customary societies the influence of manner, which is a primary influence, has been settled into rules, so that it may aid established usages and not thwart them—that it may, above all, augment the HABIT of going by custom, and not break and weaken it. Every aid, as we have seen, was wanted to impose the yoke of custom upon such societies; and impressing the power of manner to serve them was one of the greatest aids.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Most men mostly imitate what they see, and catch the tone of what they hear, and so a settled type—a persistent character—is formed.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
Discussion, too, has incentives to progress peculiar to itself. It gives a premium to intelligence. To set out the arguments required to determine political action with such force and effect that they really should determine it, is a high and great exertion of intellect. Of course, all such arguments are produced under conditions; the argument abstractedly best is not necessarily the winning argument. Political discussion must move those who have to act; it must be framed in the ideas, and be consonant with the precedent, of its time, just as it must speak its language. But within these marked conditions good discussion is better than bad; no people can bear a government of discussion for a day, which does not, within the boundaries of its prejudices and its ideas, prefer good reasoning to bad reasoning, sound argument to unsound. A prize for argumentative mind is given in free states, to which no other states have anything to compare.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Physics and Politics
In early youth it is, perhaps, not true that the passions, taken generally, are particularly violent, or that the imagination is in any remarkable degree powerful; but it is certain that the fancy (which though it be, in the last resort, but a weak stroke of that same faculty, which, when it strikes hard, we call imagination, may yet for this purpose be looked on as distinct) is particularly wakeful, and that the gentler species of passions are more absurd than they are afterwards.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Look at a railway stall; you see books of every color—blue, yellow, crimson, "ringstreaked, speckled, and spotted," on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent—but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies