Word: bagehots
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BRITISH royalty reigns but does not govern. According to a famed British constitutional scholar, Walter Bagehot, Queen Elizabeth II "could disband the army; she could dismiss all the officers . . .she could sell off all our ships-of-war and all our naval stores; she could make a peace by the sacrifice of Cornwall and begin a war for the conquest of Brittany. She could make every citizen in the United Kingdom, male or female, a peer; she could make every parish in the United Kingdom a 'University'; she could dismiss most of the civil servants, and she could...
Queen Victoria, in whose reign Bagehot was writing, exclaimed: "Oh, the wicked man, to write such a story!" Elizabeth might feel the same way, for, as every loyal subject knows, the British Constitution cannot be understood by people who think it says exactly what it means. The monarch's will is presumed to march with the will of her ministers. Elizabeth's actual rights as a Queen are only three: the right to be consulted by the Prime Minister, to encourage certain courses of action, and to warn against others...
...could conceive him [Winston Churchill] in a great upheaval, he would be seen emerging in the role of what Bagehot calls 'a Benthamite despot,' dismissing all feudal ideas and legitimist pretensions, sweeping aside all aristocracies, proclaiming the democratic doctrine of the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number' and seating himself astride the storm as the people's Caesar-at once dictator and democrat...
...been my pleasure of late to have had need to read "The English Constitution" by Walter Bagehot. These famous essays, it may be noted, first appeared in 1867; and most of the contrasts which the author made were to things American. In the essay entitled "Its Supposed Checks and Balances" I find the following words: "The Americans now extol their institutions, and so defraud themselves of their due praise. But if they had not a genius for politics; if they had not a moderation in action singularly curious where superficial speech is so violent; if they had not a regard...
...Bagehot was a shrewd and earnest commentator, not given to irony...