Walter Bagehot: The Prerequisites of Cabinet Government

A good Somerset man with some contentious thoughts!

"People, in all but the most favoured times and places, are rooted to the places where they were born, think the thoughts of those places, can endure no other thoughts. The next parish even is suspected. Its inhabitants have different usages, almost imperceptibly different, but yet different; they speak a varying accent; they use a few peculiar words; tradition says that their faith is dubious. And if the next parish is a little suspected, the next county is much more suspected. Here is a definite beginning of new maxims, new thoughts, new ways: the immemorial boundary mark begins in feeling a strange world. And if the next county is dubious, a remote county is untrustworthy. "Vagrants come from thence," men know, and they know nothing else. The inhabitants of the north speak a dialect different from the dialect of the south: they have other laws, another aristocracy, another life. In ages when distant territories are blanks in the mind, when neighbourhood is a sentiment, when locality is a passion, concerted co-operation between remote regions is impossible even on trivial matters. Neither would rely enough upon the good faith, good sense, and good judgment of the other. Neither could enough calculate on the other. And if such co-operation is not to be expected in trivial matters, it is not to be thought of in the most vital matter of government-- the choice of the executive ruler. To fancy that Northumberland in the thirteenth century would have consented to ally itself with Somersetshire for the choice of a chief magistrate is absurd; it would scarcely have allied itself to choose a hangman".

In his lecture (for the Dorset Association) on 17th Century Dorchester, Brian Bates suggested that Walter Bagehot was wrong to suggest that Somerset labourers did not know what was going on in London. The study of diarists indicates that people were well informed, as news continually travelled around the country by land and by sea.

Woodrow Wilson on Bagehot
From https://sites.google.com/site/walterbagehotlangport/bagehot-s-bigg

“It is pleasant to see Langport also perched upon one of those infrequent hills, a landmark for the traveller, and to think that it was from this haven Walter Bagehot set out to make his bold voyage into the world of thought. … Neither Somersetshire air nor any certain custom of mental inheritance can explain Walter Bagehot. We must simply accept him as part of the largess of Providence to a race singularly enriched with genius.” [“A wit and a seer”, 1898, pp528-9]

“The power and character of his imagination are proved by the extraordinary range it took. Most of his literary essays in which he has given us so memorable a taste of his quality as a critic and all-round man were written before his marriage between his twenty-sixth and thirty-second years … and there is everywhere to be found in those studies a man whose insight into life was easy, universal and almost unerring; and yet the centre of life for him was quiet Langport in far Somersetshire.” [“A wit and a seer”, 1898, p536]