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Updated: May 17, 2025
It happens, too, though in a deeper and more subtle way, to the man who marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul weather. Mr. Bagehot used to say that a bachelor was "an amateur in life," and wit and wisdom are married in the jest. A man who lives only for himself has not begun to live has yet to learn his use, and his real pleasure too, in the world.
For a time he seemed, under the influence of Bagehot, to have believed in the feasibility of introducing something like the parliamentary system into the government of the United States. To the last he regarded the President as a sort of Prime Minister, at the head of his party in the Legislature and able to count absolutely upon its loyalty.
As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often forgotten passage: "The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil.
Every man in parliament is a premier in posse. While asking my readers to recall what I have already said as to the effect of responsible government on the public men and people of Canada, I shall also here refer them to some authorities worthy of all respect. Mr. Bagehot says with his usual clearness:
Bagehot was a writer who had a good deal of influence in his day; and in Physics and Politics , where he discusses Progress, there is no suggestion of fatalism. Progress was discussed by Fiske in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy , vol. ii. 192 sqq. Thus in the seventies and eighties of the last century the idea of Progress was becoming a general article of faith.
The Reform Bill, which transferred the political centre of gravity from the middle class to the artisan class had not yet arrived; and the propositions laid down by Bagehot have necessarily been in some degree modified in the works of more recent authorities, such as Professor Dicey and Mr. Sidney Low.
They are in love with the exercise of their faculties upon a great scale; they are organizing and overseeing a great part of the life of the world. No wonder they are captivated. Business is more interesting than pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and when once the mind has caught its zest, there's no disengaging it. The world has reason to be grateful for the fact.
I'd had a bent for it ever since the Bagehot 'Lombard Street' days. I'd nourished my bent. I'd been encouraged to nourish my bent. The work was just a passion with me. Sturgiss went. I went practically into his place. I'd a position in banking that no woman had ever held, nor no banker ever imagined a woman ever holding, before. It was Sturgiss, a partner, I'd released for war service.
Neither do you read it to kill time, but to lengthen time, rather, adding to its natural usury by living the more abundantly while it lasts, joining another's life and thought to your own. There are a few children in every generation, as Mr. Bagehot reminds us, who think the natural thing to do with any book is to read it.
But it is safe to say that on the whole the feeling of contempt for women, and the love to exercise arbitrary power over them, is the survival of a crude impulse which the world is outgrowing, and which is in general least obvious in the manliest men. That clear and able English writer, Walter Bagehot, well describes "the contempt for physical weakness and for women which marks early society.
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