Unsuitable for Export
Our peculiar brand of democracy and liberty is a noble thing, but we should be wary of recommending it to other countries.
1896
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Our peculiar brand of democracy and liberty is a noble thing, but we should be wary of recommending it to other countries.
1896
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Historian Mandell Creighton believed unlike our Continental neighbours, when the English laid down our Constitution we were driven not by ideological purity or a passion for order but by a desire to protect our customs and little oddities. Though this worked well for us, foreign nations had some trouble getting it to work for them — and they were starting to notice it.
abridged
IT is difficult to refer the growth of English institutions to any very definite principles. Their development did not come from the expansive power of general ideas, but was largely the result of cautious adjustment to the facts of national life. There was always a dread of the rigidity of any system, however excellent; and there was always a resolute maintenance of national, and even of local, customs, against attempts to read them into the terms of a consistent and orderly arrangement. English customs were put into writing, not with a view to their codification, but that they might be maintained against a logical system which was being imported from abroad. [...]
There is, however, another consequence of the antiquity of our institutions, for which we undeservedly suffer in foreign estimation. We are responsible for having invented a form of government which suits ourselves, and seems simple in its main lines, but which really depends on so much beneath those main lines that it is unfitted for exportation.