Walter Bagehot

Nothing is more intelligible than a moral deterioration of mankind--nothing than an aesthetic degradation--nothing than a political degradation.

But you cannot imagine mankind giving up the plain utensils of personal comfort, if they once knew them; still less can you imagine them giving up good weapons--say bows and arrows--if they once knew them.

You cannot trace the roots of an old perfect system variously maimed and variously dying; you cannot find it, as you find the trace of the Latin language in the mediaeval dialects.

On the contrary, you find it beginning--as new scientific discoveries and inventions now begin--here a little and there a little, the same thing half-done in various half-ways, and so as no one who knew the best way would ever have begun.

And not only may the miscellaneous races of the world be justly described as being upon various edges of industrial civilisation, approaching it by various sides, and falling short of it in various particulars, but the moment they see the…

The South American uses the horse which the European brought better than the European.

Many races use the rifle--the especial and very complicated weapon of civilised man--better, upon an average, than he can use it.

The savage with simple tools--tools he appreciates--is like a child, quick to learn, not like an old man, who has once forgotten and who cannot acquire again.

Again, if there had been an excellent aboriginal civilisation in Australia and America, where, botanists and zoologists, ask, are its vestiges?

If these savages did care to cultivate wheat, where is the wild wheat gone which their abandoned culture must have left? if they did give up using good domestic animals, what has become of the wild ones which would, according to all…

The English rat--not the pleasantest of our domestic creatures--has gone everywhere; to Australia, to New Zealand, to America: nothing but a complicated rat-miracle could ever root him out.

Nor could a common force expel the horse from South America since the Spaniards took him thither; if we did not know the contrary we should suppose him a principal aboriginal animal.

Where then, so to say, are the rats and horses of the primitive civilisation?

This is what, according to ethnology, we should expect the first historic man to be, and this is what we in fact find him.

We unconsciously assume around us the existence of a great miscellaneous social machine working to our hands, and not only supplying our wants, but even telling and deciding when those wants shall come.

They never could have known what to expect; the whole habit of steady but varied anticipation, which makes our minds what they are, must have been wholly foreign to theirs.

If we set aside all the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left.

Everybody who has studied mathematics knows how many shadowy difficulties he seemed to have before he understood the problem, and how impossible it was when once the demonstration had flashed upon him, ever to comprehend those indistinct…

So in these days, when we cannot by any effort drive out of our minds the notion of law, we cannot imagine the mind of one who had never known it, and who could not by any effort have conceived it.

Again, the primitive man could not have imagined what we mean by a nation.

We on the other hand cannot imagine those to whom it is a difficulty; 'we know what it is when you do not ask us,' but we cannot very quickly explain or define it.

But so much as this is plain, a nation means a LIKE body of men, because of that likeness capable of acting together, and because of that likeness inclined to obey similar rules; and even this Homer's Cyclops--used only to sparse human…

To sum up--LAW--rigid, definite, concise law--is the primary want of early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is requisite before they can gain anything else.

But it is their greatest difficulty, as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of their reach, as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it.

The first ascent of civilisation was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.