Walter Bagehot

As people now-a-days believe that 'murder will out,' and that great crime will bring even an earthly punishment, so in early times people believed that for any breach of sacred custom certain retribution would happen.

To this day many semi-civilised races have great difficulty in regarding any arrangement as binding and conclusive unless they can also manage to look at it as an inherited usage.

One set of causes, events, and associations would act on one, and another set on another; sectional differences would soon arise, and, for speaking purposes, what philologists call a dialectical difference often amounts to real and total…

These are by their incessant fractures of old images, and by their constant infusion of new elements, the real regenerators of society.

In general, too, the conquerors would be better than the conquered (most merits in early society are more or less military merits), but they would not be very much better, for the lowest steps in the ladder of civilisation are very steep…

The experience of the English in India shows--if it shows anything--that a highly civilised race may fail in producing a rapidly excellent effect on a less civilised race, because it is too good and too different.

The higher being is not and cannot be a model for the lower; he could not mould himself on it if he would, and would not if he could.

Consequently, the two races have long lived together, 'near and yet far off,' daily seeing one another and daily interchanging superficial thoughts, but in the depths of their mind separated by a whole era of civilisation, and so affecting…

It is in the interior of these customary groups that national characters are formed.

By proscribing nonconformist members for generations, and cherishing and rewarding conformist members, nonconformists become fewer and fewer, and conformists more and more.

Most men mostly imitate what they see, and catch the tone of what they hear, and so a settled type--a persistent character--is formed.

I cannot agree, though the greatest authorities say it, that no 'unconscious selection' has been at work at the breed of man.

If neither that nor conscious selection has been at work, how did there come to be these breeds, and such there are in the greatest numbers, though we call them nations?

In societies tyrannically customary, uncongenial minds become first cowed, then melancholy, then out of health, and at last die.

A Shelley in New England could hardly have lived, and a race of Shelleys would have been impossible.

Nature disheartened in each generation the ill-fitted members of each customary group, so deprived them of their full vigour, or, if they were weakly, killed them.

The Spartan character was formed because none but people with, a Spartan make of mind could endure a Spartan existence.

Perhaps all very marked national characters can be traced back to a time of rigid and pervading discipline.

In modern times, when society is more tolerant, new national characters are neither so strong, so featurely, nor so uniform.

Secondly, this principle and this conception of pre-historic times explain to us the meaning and the origin of the oldest and strangest of social anomalies--an anomaly which is among the first things history tells us--the existence of…

Nothing is at first sight stranger than the aspect of those communities where several nations seem to be bound up together--where each is governed by its own rule of law, where no one pays any deference to the rule of law of any of the…

But if our principles be true, these are just the nations most likely to last, which would have a special advantage in early times, and would probably not only maintain themselves, but conquer and kill out others also.

The characteristic necessity of early society as we have seen, is strict usage and binding coercive custom.

But the obvious result and inevitable evil of that is monotony in society; no one can be much different from his fellows, or can cultivate his difference.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.