Endnotes + 

The first edition of this book was published in 1867 but Mr. Bagehot added an important preface to the edition of 1872 which forms an integral part of the work. —⁠E. Bagehot ↩ + 

It is said that at the end of the Cabinet which agreed to propose a fixed duty on corn, Lord Melbourne put his back to the door and said, “Now is it to lower the price of corn or isn’t it? It is not much matter which we say, but mind, we must all say the same.” This is the most graphic story of a Cabinet I ever heard, but I cannot vouch for its truth. Lord Melbourne’s is a character about which men make stories. ↩ + 

It is worth observing that even during the short existence of the Confederate Government these evils distinctly showed themselves. Almost the last incident at the Richmond Congress was an angry financial correspondence with Jefferson Davis. ↩ + 

I leave this passage to stand as it was written, just after the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, and when everyone said Mr. Johnson would be very hostile to the South. ↩ + 

The framers of the Constitution expected that the vice-president would be elected by the Electoral College as the second wisest man in the country. The vice-presidentship being a sinecure, a second-rate man agreeable to the wire-pullers is always smuggled in. The chance of succession to the presidentship is too distant to be thought of. ↩ + 

In accordance with a recent resolution of the House of Lords proxies are now disused. —⁠Note to second edition ↩ + 

I reprint this chapter substantially as it was first written. It is too soon, as I 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. ↩ + 