"There is a general folk belief, derived largely from Burke and the nineteenth-century historians, that political stability is of slow, coral-like growth; the growth of time, circumstances, prudence, experience, wisdom, slowly building up over the centuries. Nothing is, I think, further from the truth {...} political stability, when it comes, often happens to a society quite quickly as suddenly as water becomes ice."
J.H. Plump, The Growth of Political Stability in Early Eighteenth Century England.
