Walter Bagehot

The strongest nation has always been conquering the weaker; sometimes even subduing it, but always prevailing over it.

Every intellectual gain, so to speak, that a nation possessed was in the earliest times made use of--was INVESTED and taken out--in war; all else perished.

Each nation tried constantly to be the stronger, and so made or copied the best weapons; by conscious and unconscious imitation each nation formed a type of character suitable to war and conquest.

Conquest improved mankind by the intermixture of strengths; the armed truce, which was then called peace, improved them by the competition of training and the consequent creation of new power.

Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself.

And the way in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and the conquerors.

But what makes one tribe--one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe--to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence.

The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest.

Civilisation begins, because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage.

Probably if we had historic records of the ante-historic ages--if some superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages before they could set them down for themselves--we should know that this first step in civilisation…

But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next step.

Ordinary civilisation begins near the Mediterranean Sea; the best, doubtless, of the ante-historic civilisations were not far off.

But in the regions of rivalry--the regions where the better man pressed upon the worse man--such half-made associations could not last.

They died out and history did not begin till after they were gone.

The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step.

What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first…

A large part, a very large part, of the world seems to be ready to advance to something good--to have prepared all the means to advance to something good,--and then to have stopped, and not advanced.

India, Japan, China, almost every sort of Oriental civilisation, though differing in nearly all other things, are in this alike.

They look as if they had paused when there was no reason for pausing--when a mere observer from without would say they were likely not to pause.

The reason is, that only those nations can progress which preserve and use the fundamental peculiarity which was given by nature to man's organism as to all other organisms.

By a law of which we know no reason, but which, is among the first by which Providence guides and governs the world, there is a tendency in descendants to be like their progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to DIFFER from…

The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork--part resemblance, part contrast.

In certain respects each born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other respects it is like the last.

But the peculiarity of arrested civilisation is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that is, in early childhood, and before they can develop.

The fixed custom which public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all minds, whether it suits them or not.