English Law, British Political System

Beyond those explicit aims, however, Bagehot gives the reader his own views on the nature of politics itself. Crossman in his Introduction writes that Bagehot wavers between "treating [political science] sometimes as a strictly descriptive discipline, and sometimes as a practical study of the techniques of manipulating power" (28). However, it is safe to say that Bagehot more feared than respected the masses, and his critical "description" of the Constitution and British politics leads to the inevitable conclusion that the middle class would have to take measures to control those masses or lose control of the country.

The difficulty Crossman has in pinning Bagehot down with respect to his perspective and motives is due to the ambiguity of Bagehot's dual role as journalist and historian. This role gives the book a dynamic quality, but it also leads to some confusion. Bagehot, as a journalist, is writing about events and attempting to interpret them while they are still warm, so to speak. He writes about events whose

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, 1994. Lee Holcombe, in Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England, presents a straightforward account of the slow but steady and finally dramatic advances won by advocates of women's property law rights over the course of the 19th century in England. As Holcombe explains, married women in the 19th century in England were seen essentially as the property of their husbands, and therefore they did not have the right to property themselves. The author cites one legal case in which the contents of a woman's purse were considered the property of her husband. As Holcombe puts it in his summary of his book: On the one hand, the law often inflicted grievous practical hardships upon women. On the other, the law, regarding a woman as her husband's servant, even as his chattel, destroyed her independence, her identity, and her self-respect. Reform of the common law affecting married women stands out, therefore, as a major achievement of nineteenth-century feminism (3). Of course, such a significant reform is not an isolated phenomenon, for to reform such a fundamental law as property rights leads to inevitable reform of other laws flowing from and associated in various ways with pro
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)

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