Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
In dress and bearing, in at-homeness in the world, in ability to take care of themselves under strange conditions or in an emergency, and in domestic hygiene they are inferior, and yet they are so competent to push the national military, industrial, and commercial ball along as men, that one wonders whether Bagehot's gibe at certain well-to-do classes of the Saxons, that "they spend half their time washing their whole persons," may not have a grain of truth in it.
And they failed in this because they did not have government by discussion. No one will dispute the importance of Mr. Bagehot's, contribution to this subject. But it may be doubted whether he has pointed out the full reason for the difficulty of breaking the "cake of custom" or manifested the real root of progress.
Those who were least willing to assent to Bagehot's practical maxims in judging current affairs, yet were well aware how much they profited by his Socratic objections, and knew, too, what real acquaintance with men and business, what honest sympathy and friendliness, and what serious judgment and interest all lay under his playful and racy humour.
It is an historical survey of the political institutions of all nations, 'from China to Peru, executed with care and great reading; but there are no traces of original thought, and it leaves you exactly where you were before in relation to the democratic element in society. Bagehot's books have ten times as much thought in them.
Lloyd George's way of reading the political heavens, a sentence in Bagehot's essay on Charles Dickens comes into my mind: "There is nothing less like the great lawyer, acquainted with broad principles and applying them with distinct deduction, than the attorney's clerk who catches at small points like a dog biting at flies."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking