Walter Bagehot

It may be said that in the court of Augustus there was much general intellectual freedom, an almost entire detachment from ancient prejudice, but that there was no free political discussion at all.

Also, no doubt, much intellectual freedom may emanate from countries of free political discussion, and penetrate to countries where that discussion is limited.

Thus the intellectual freedom of France in the eighteenth century was in great part owing to the proximity of and incessant intercourse with England and Holland.

And very naturally, for it would be absurd to call the ancien regime a government without discussion: discussion abounded there, only, by reason of the bad form of the government, it was never sure with ease and certainty to affect…

The despotism 'tempered by epigram,' was a government which permitted argument of licentious freedom within changing limits, and which was ruled by that argument spasmodically and practically, though not in name or consistently.

But though in the earliest and in the latest time government by discussion has been a principal organ for improving mankind, yet, from its origin, it is a plant of singular delicacy.

The essence of it requires that discussion shall be brought home to those members.

But in early time, when writing is difficult, reading rare, and representation undiscovered, those who are to be guided by the discussion must hear it with their own ears, must be brought face to face with the orator, and must feel his…

It is in the market-place of the country town, as we should now speak, and in petty matters concerning the market-town, that discussion began, and thither all the long train of its consequences may be traced back.

These great populations, ruled by a single will, have, doubtless, trodden down and destroyed innumerable little cities who were just beginning their freedom.

Every schoolboy must have felt that nothing but amazing folly and unmatched mismanagement saved Greece from conquest both in the time of Xerxes and in that of Darius.

If the Persian leaders had only shown that decent skill and ordinary military prudence which it was likely they would show, Grecian freedom would have been at an end.

Athens, like so many Ionian cities on the other side of the AEgean, would have been absorbed into a great despotism; all we now remember her for we should not remember, for it would never have occurred.

It was only when she had conquered Italy that she began to measure herself against Asiatic despotisms.

She became great enough to beat them before she advanced far enough to contend with them.

Unnumbered little cities which might have rivalled Rome or Athens doubtless perished without a sign long before history was imagined.

The small size and slight strength of early free states made them always liable to easy destruction.

As soon as discussion begins the savage propensities of men break forth; even in modern communities, where those propensities, too, have been weakened by ages of culture, and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital topic for…

Easily destroyed as are early free states by forces from without, they are even more liable to destruction by forces from within.

By far the most important free institutions, and the only ones which have left living representatives in the world, are the offspring either of the first constitutions of the classical nations or of the first constitutions of the Germanic…

All living freedom runs back to them, and those truths which at first sight would seem the whole of historical freedom, can be traced to them.

In the first place, all the so-called Aryan race certainly is not free.

The eastern Aryans--those, for example, who speak languages derived from the Sanscrit--are amongst the most slavish divisions of mankind.

To offer the Bengalese a free constitution, and to expect them to work one, would be the maximum of human folly.

There then must be something else besides Aryan descent which is necessary to fit men for discussion and train them for liberty; and, what is worse for the argument we are opposing, some non-Aryan races have been capable of freedom.