Walter Bagehot: “Philosophers may deride this superstition, but its results are inestimable.”

But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.

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.

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.

Thirdly, we see why so few nations have made rapid advance, and how many have become stationary.