Walter Bagehot

So that the theory which would make government by discussion the exclusive patrimony of a single race of mankind is on the face of it untenable.

This is almost as hopeless as asking why Milton was a genius and why Bacon was a philosopher.

Indeed it is the same, because the causes which give birth to the startling varieties of individual character, and those which give birth to similar varieties of national character, are, in fact, the same.

The cause of types must be something outside the tribe acting on something within--something inherited by the tribe.

First, the nation must possess the PATRIA POTESTAS in some form so marked as to give family life distinctness and precision, and to make a home education and a home discipline probable and possible.

While descent is traced only through the mother, and while the family is therefore a vague entity, no progress to a high polity is possible.

If I am at all right, that area could only be enlarged thus slowly, for Custom was in early days the cement of society, and if you suddenly questioned such custom you would destroy society.

But though the existence, of these conditions may be traced historically, and though the reason of them may be explained philosophically, they do not completely solve the question why some nations have the polity and some not; on the…

In this manner politics or discussion broke up the old bonds of custom which were now strangling mankind, though they had once aided and helped it.

I am not going to write an eulogium on liberty, but I wish to set down three points which have not been sufficiently noticed.

Civilised ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilised circumstances.

And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

The rise of physical science, the first great body of practical truth provable to all men, exemplifies this in the plainest way.

Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into being.

And the conclusion is plain that if there had been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them there would have been a great accumulation of proved science ages before there was.

It was the irritable activity, the 'wish to be doing something,' that prevented it.

Most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet and find out things; and even worse--with their idle clamour they 'disturbed the brooding hen,' they would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm…

If we consider how much science has done and how much it is doing for mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why science came so late into the world, and is so small and scanty still, that will convince most…

A hasty general is the worst of generals nowadays; the best is a sort of Von Moltke, who is passive if any man ever was passive; who is 'silent in seven languages;' who possesses more and better accumulated information as to the best way…

This man plays a restrained and considerate game of chess with his enemy.

I wish the art of benefiting men had kept pace with the art of destroying them; for though war has become slow, philanthropy has remained hasty.

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.

Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil.

If they could only have sat idle the other four hours, they would have been rich men.

Even the abstract speculations of mankind bear conspicuous traces of the same excessive impulse.