"In happy States, the Conservative party must rule upon the whole a much longer time than their adversaries. In well-framed polities, innovation—great innovation that is—can only be occasional. If you are always altering your house, it is a sign either that you have a bad house, or that you have an excessively restless disposition—there is something wrong somewhere. Just so a nation which is for ever having great eras, changing fundamental laws, founding new constitutions, is either very unfortunate in its old polity, or very fickle in its disposition—perhaps it may be both. In any case there is no hope for steady happiness in such a State. Happiness, as far as it is affected by politics, needs a good, or at any rate a suitable, inherited polity, and a tenacious resolution not to change that polity without reason shown. The most successful nations have erred on the other side, and have evinced a stupid inability to admit even the best reasons. Not to cite the Romans and other common book examples, let any one try at the present moment to persuade the Americans to alter any of the clauses in the “Washington Constitution,” and then he will comprehend how hard it is to induce a practical people to change its fundamental political code; how keenly it values a “deed of settlement” of that kind; how much it feels that it gains by it; how unwilling it is to venture out into the unknown. Nations eminent in practical politics have always possessed a singular constancy to old institutions, and have inherited institutions more or less deserving that constancy."
--- THE CHANCES FOR A LONG CONSERVATIVE REGIME IN ENGLAND / Walter Bagehot
