The English Constitution

have explained in the introduction, to say what changes the late Reform Act will make in the House of Commons. ↩

This was said in 1858. ↩

This of course relates to the assemblies of the Empire. ↩

Now Lord Salisbury, who, when this was written, was Indian Secretary.

—⁠Note to second edition

↩

I am happy to state that this evil is much diminishing. The improvement of school education of the middle class in the last twenty-five years is marvellous. ↩

This was written just after the close of the Civil War, but I do not know that the great problem stated in it has as yet been adequately solved. ↩

Of course I am not speaking here of the South and Southeast, as they now are. How any free government is to exist in societies where so many bad elements are so much perturbed, I cannot imagine. ↩

Since the first edition of this book was published several valuable works have appeared, which, on many points, throw much light on our early constitutional history, especially Mr. Stubbs’ Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First, Mr. Freeman’s lecture on “The Growth of the English Constitution,” and the chapter on the Anglo-Saxon Constitution in his History of the Norman Conquest: but we have not yet a great and authoritative work on the whole subject such as I wished for when I wrote the passage in the text, and as it is most desirable that we should have. ↩

So well is our real government concealed, that if you tell a cabman to drive to “Downing Street,” he most likely will never have heard of it, and will not in the least know where to take you. It is only a “disguised republic” which is suited to such a being as the Englishman in such a century as the nineteenth. ↩

Colophon

The English Constitution
was published in 1872 by
Walter Bagehot.

This ebook was produced for
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David Reimer,
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The cover page is adapted from
The House of Commons, 1833,
a painting completed circa 1843 by
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