It is typical of the English that, retaining what was a good in the past, but reconstruing it—reconstruing the past itself if necessary—they have clu… - Herbert Butterfield

Under the whig system, reforms have been overdue on many occasions; yet by the passage of time they have been able to come by a more easy and natural route, and with less accompaniment of counter-evil; and we have at least been spared that common nemesis of revolutions—the generation of irreconcilable hatreds within the state. And while conflict can be mitigated in this way, the world has a chance to grow in reasonableness. So in fact it has happened that the transition to democracy in England was happier, more assured, less violent than in some other countries of the continent.

Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs who taught us that we must nurse this blessing—reconciling continuity with change, discovering mediations between past and present, and showing what can be achieved by man's reconciling mind. Perhaps it is not even the whigs that we should praise, but rather something in our traditions which captured the party at the moment when it seemed ready to drift into unmeasurable waters. Perhaps we owe most in fact to the solid body of Englishmen, who throughout the centuries have resisted the wildest aberrations, determined never for the sake of speculative ends to lose the good they already possessed; anxious not to destroy those virtues in their national life which need long periods of time for their development; but waiting to steal for the whole nation what they could appropriate in the traditions of monarchy, aristocracy, bourgeoisie and church.

Down to the 20th century the English liberals were affected by the persistence of their alliance with Nonconformity. The churches in their turn, since they were not politically endangered, saw no necessity to lock themselves away in a political die-hard-ism. So the new and the old were allowed to mingle and frontiers were blurred, producing another piece of that English history which, like a weed, grows over the fences, chokes and smothers the boundaries—luxurious and wanton as life itself—to drive the geometers and the heavy logicians to despair. The whigs, and indeed the English in general, were saved from some of the excesses of that secular liberalism which came to prevail on the continent, and which, though never entirely absent here, has not yet been allowed to govern the character of our politics.