To get at the worst, you should look where the destroying competition has been least--at America, where sectional civilisation was rare, and a pervading coercive civilisation did not exist; at such religions as those of the Aztecs.
Bagehot examines the impact of competition on civilizations, particularly in America and among the Aztecs.
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There is no ELASTIC element, everything is rigid, specified, dated.
But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.
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.
He gave an excellent moral example to his contemporaries, but he is an instance of those whose good dies with them, while their evil lives after them.
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