Most Oriental communities live on land which in theory is the property of a despotic sovereign, and neither they nor their families could have the elements of decent existence unless they held the land upon some sort of fixed terms.
Walter Bagehot
The Public Record
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).
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Land in that state of society is (for all but a petty skilled minority) a necessary of life, and all the unincreasable land being occupied, a man who is turned out of his holding is turned out of this world, and must die.
And our notion of written leases is as out of place in a world without writing and without reading as a House of Commons among Andaman Islanders.
Only one check, one sole shield for life and good, is then possible;--usage.
And it is but too plain how in such places and periods men cling to customs because customs alone stand between them and starvation.
Dryden had a dream of an early age, 'when wild in woods the noble savage ran;' but 'when lone in woods the cringing savage crept' would have been more like all we know of that early, bare, painful period.
Not only had they no comfort, no convenience, not the very beginnings of an epicurean life, but their mind within was as painful to them as the world without.
They fancied there were powers behind it which must be pleased, soothed, flattered, and this very often in a number of hideous ways.
This is the archaic part of that very world which we look at as so ancient; an 'antiquity' which descended to them, hardly altered, perhaps, from times long antecedent, which were as unintelligible to them as to us, or more so.
To get at the worst, you should look where the destroying competition has been least--at America, where sectional civilisation was rare, and a pervading coercive civilisation did not exist; at such religions as those of the Aztecs.
At first sight it seems impossible to imagine what conceivable function such awful religions can perform in the economy of the world.
But one use they assuredly had: they fixed the yoke of custom thoroughly on mankind.
They put upon a fixed law a sanction so fearful that no one could dream of not conforming to it.
Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty.
Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.
The customary discipline, which could only be imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions, continued with those sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the propensities to variation which are the principle--of progress.
Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the principle of originality.
They will admit it in theory, but in practice the old error--the error which arrested a hundred civilisations--returns again.
At this very moment there are the most rigid Comtists teaching that we ought to be governed by a hierarchy--a combination of savans orthodox in science.
Yet who can doubt that Comte would have been hanged by his own hierarchy; that his essor materiel, which was in fact troubled by the 'theologians and metaphysicians' of the Polytechnic School, would have been more impeded by the government…
They want to 'organise society,' to erect a despot who will do what they like, and work out their ideas; but any despot will do what he himself likes, and will root out new ideas ninety-nine times for once that he introduces them.
Arnold, whose poems we know by heart, and who has, as much as any living Englishman, the genuine literary impulse; and yet even he wants to put a yoke upon us--and, worse than a political yoke, an academic yoke, a yoke upon our minds and…
The true scientific method is to explain the past by the present--what we see by what we do not see.
Of course the nation we are supposing must keep the virtues of its first stage as it passes into the after stage, else it will be trodden out; it will have lost the savage virtues in getting the beginning of the civilised virtues; and the…
But these nations have come out of the 'pre-economic stage' too soon; they have been put to learn while yet only too apt to unlearn.
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