It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.

Trollope’s remark is a dry rebuke to political restlessness—the impulse to legislate, reorganize, or “make a mark” simply to appear energetic. The “great fault” is not incompetence but a kind of performative activism: politicians treating office as a stage for initiatives rather than as a trust requiring restraint, patience, and respect for complex social realities. The line implies that in public life, doing “something” can be worse than doing nothing when action is driven by vanity, party advantage, or the need to seem decisive. It also reflects a conservative skepticism about constant reform: good governance may consist in maintaining workable institutions and intervening only when necessity, not ambition, demands it.