Walter Bagehot: “All this should have made the progress of mankind--progress at least in this limited sense-exceedingly common; but, in…”

Perhaps such powers as these are what a wise man would most seek to exercise and least fear to possess.

The whole history of civilisation, is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.

We have thus a whole group of ancient republics of non-Aryan race, and one which, being more ancient than the classical republics, could not have borrowed from or imitated them.