Nature is like a schoolmaster, at least in this, she gives her finest prizes to her high and most instructed classes; Still, even in the earliest society, nature helps those who can help themselves, and helps them very much.
Walter Bagehot: “Nature is like a schoolmaster, at least in this, she gives her finest prizes to her high and most instructed classes…”
Editor's note · Context
Bagehot compares nature to a schoolmaster, suggesting that it rewards those who are knowledgeable and proactive.
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They say, We reject your Bill for this once or these twice, or even these thrice: but if you keep on sending it up, at last we won't reject it.
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.
Now it is not conceivable that a race of beings with valuable instincts supporting their existence and supplying their wants would need these simple tools.
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.





