Walter Bagehot: “Nowadays, the power of leaders over their followers is strictly and wisely limited: they can take their followers but a…”

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.

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

No doubt this momentary gain is bought at a ruinous after-cost.

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.