Thus we see the use of a sort of 'preliminary' age in societies, when trade is bad because it prevents the separation of nations, because it infuses distracting ideas among occupied communities, because it 'brings alien minds to alien shores.
Bagehot argues that trade can disrupt the separation of nations and introduce distracting ideas, which can be detrimental.
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The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.
I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.
These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.
Subject to this saving remark, however, I not only admit, but maintain, that our Constitution is full of curious oddities, which are impeding and mischievous, and ought to be struck out.
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