Page 43 - History 2020

Commons isn’t primarily a deliberative assembly, but an elective one. They choose

the executive.

But Bagehot’s Really Big Idea is his often-quoted distinction between “dignified” and
“efficient” parts of the British Constitution. The dignified parts are the things which
“excite and preserve the reverence of the population.” Chief among these are
monarchy (the House of Lords too, but less so), The efficient parts are “those by
which it in fact works and rules”, chiefly the Cabinet and the House of Commons.
Both parts are significant. “The dignified parts are those which bring it force – which

attract its motive power. The efficient parts only employ that power.” The dignified
parts are not mere show: “they raise the army, though they do not win the battle.”

Bagehot is blunt about why the dignified parts are needed. Britain has an “educated
ten-thousand” while the “lower and middle orders” are “narrow minded, unintelligent
and incurious. It is useless to pile up abstract words”. Bagehot, a scientifically-minded
man, offers this as evidence: “Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens; let

an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain, most
palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the footman and he will
find that what he says seems unintelligible, confused and erroneous – that his
audience think him mad and wild when he is speaking what is in his own sphere of
thought the dullest platitude of cautious soberness.”

Bagehot does not accept the assumption that he says used to pervade political
discussion that “in a little while, perhaps ten years or so, all human beings might be

brought to the same level.” He sees “levelling up” (as some might call it) as a “painful
history” of “slow toil”, a “long and gradual process”. Victorian England still has
“crowds of people scarcely more civilised than the majority two thousand years ago”,
even if the best are more numerous. “Great communities are like great mountains”
with “primary, secondary, and tertiary strata of human progress”. To ignore or forget
these “palpable differences” will “lead men to expect what does not exist and not to

anticipate that which they will find.” Bagehot, we can safely assume, was no
democrat.

This is why the dignified parts of a constitution are needed; they are “theatrical”,
they can “appeal to the senses”, they are “mystic”, they can claim to be
“embodiments of the greatest human ideas” and even “of more than human origin”.
Crucially they are “the only sort of thing which comes home to the mass of men.”
However, even “the most intellectual of men” are moved by tradition – “the dull,
traditional habit of mankind” – “other things being equal, yesterday’s institutions are

by far the best for today”. This is because “they retain the reverence which they alone