ABSTRACT
Political reform in England was postponed for forty years by the terror born of the French Revolution and there was a moment when it seemed not unlikely that the compromise of 1832 would not be effected peacefully. Governments are now made and unmade by public opinion outside the House of Commons rather than by parliamentary opinion inside it. In these circumstances, the picture painted by Bagehot of its impact on mid-Victorian opinion could hardly be true of our own time. No system of representative government has a history so continuous or so successful as that of Great Britain. On Lord Baldwin's view, the safety of democratic government in Great Britain seems to involve a willingness on the part of the Labour Party to be an instrument of social reform on the old model. The British Constitution is the expression of a politically democratic government, it is not the expression of a democratic society. The implications of that distinction are important.
