Walter Bagehot

But a caste nation is various and composite; and has in a mode suited to early societies the constant co-operation of contrasted persons, which in a later age is one of the greatest triumphs of civilisation.

Little popular and little deserving to be popular now-a-days as are priestly hierarchies, most probably the beginnings of science were made in such, and were for ages transmitted in such.

An intellectual class was in that age only possible when it was protected by a notion that whoever hurt them would certainly be punished by heaven.

But such a community is necessarily unwarlike, and the superstition which protects priests from home murder will not aid them in conflict with the foreigner.

Few nations mind killing their enemies' priests, and many priestly civilisations have perished without record before they well began.

But such a civilisation will not perish if a warrior caste is tacked on to it and is bound to defend it.

On the contrary, such a civilisation will be singularly likely to live.

The head of the sage will help the arm of the soldier.

But, as we now see, when founded it is a likely nation to last.

A party-coloured community of many tribes and many usages is more likely to get on, and help itself, than a nation of a single lineage and one monotonous rule.

No English majority dare vote for an exceedingly bad treaty; it would rather desert its own leader than ensure its own ruin.

And an English minority, inheriting a long experience of Parliamentary affairs, would not be exceedingly ready to reject a treaty made with a foreign Government.

They know that the next time they are in office the same sort of sharp practice may be used against them, and therefore they will not use it.

They refuse, out of interest as well as out of patriotism, to engage the country in a permanent foreign scrape, to secure for themselves and their party a momentary home advantage.

I say 'at first,' because I apprehend that in this case, as in so many others in the puzzling history of progress, the very institutions which most aid at step number one are precisely those which most impede at step number two.

The whole of a caste nation is more various than the whole of a non-caste nation, but each caste itself is more monotonous than anything is, or can be, in a non-caste nation.

Gradually a habit of action and type of mind forces itself on each caste, and it is little likely to be rid of it, for all who enter it are taught in one way and trained to the same employment.

But all caste nations have stopped early, though some have lasted long.

They could not become a real nation without binding themselves by a fixed law and usage, and it is the fixity of that law and usage which has kept them as they were ever since.

Nor does it absolutely depend on wealth; for, though great wealth is almost always a protection from social ignominy, and will always ensure a passive respect, it will not in a miscellaneous group of men of itself gain an active power to…

On this account in early society a dignified manner is of essential importance; it is, then, not only an auxiliary mode of acquiring respect, but a principal mode.

Men are gratified or offended, according to the mode in which these favourite refreshments are offered.

You welcome a visitor, or send him off, by the way in which you call for a pipe or a cup of coffee.

In ancient customary societies the influence of manner, which is a primary influence, has been settled into rules, so that it may aid established usages and not thwart them--that it may, above all, augment the HABIT of going by custom, and…

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