ABSTRACT
'As I write for Englishmen', remarked Walter Bagehot casually in 1874, 'I need not draw out a formal proof that England is a country successful in politics.' 1 Even foreigners accepted this claim, as they compared the uncertainties of their own government with the stability, even in change, of the British system Tolstoy noticed in War and Peace (1868-9) how an Englishman was 'self-assured as being a citizen of the best organized state in the world'. Yet Victorian England possessed no written constitution. Practice in government and politics had been formed and reformed little by little since the middle ages, and especially since the civil war and 'Glorious Revolution' of the seventeenth century. Matthew Arnold quoted in Culture and Anarchy (1869) what he described as the 'thoroughly British' thoughts of The Times of 7.7.1868. 'Art is long and life is short; for the most part we settle things first and understand them afterwards.' This pragmatic approach still predominated in 1914. A history book published in that year emphasized how Britain had produced no Rousseau, no Marx. 'The dominant feature of British public life has been the growth not of philosophic schools, but of political parties and social expenditure.' 2
