Walter Bagehot

Such cases do not vitiate, they confirm, the principle--that a nation which has just gained variability without losing legality has a singular likelihood to be a prevalent nation.

No nation admits of an abstract definition; all nations are beings of many qualities and many sides; no historical event exactly illustrates any one principle; every cause is intertwined and surrounded with a hundred others.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

To make a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.

The history of many nations is like the stage of the English drama: one scene is succeeded on a sudden by a scene quite different,--a cottage by a palace, and a windmill by a fortress.

But the history of Rome changes as a good diorama changes; while you look, you hardly see it alter; each moment is hardly different from the last moment; yet at the close the metamorphosis is complete, and scarcely anything is as it began.

Just so in the history of the great prevailing city: you begin with a town and you end with an empire, and this by unmarked stages?--So shrouded, so shielded, in the coarse fibre of other qualities--was the delicate principle of progress…

The Jewish nation has its type of progress in the prophets, side by side with its type of permanence in the law and Levites, more distinct than any other ancient people.

Nowhere in common history do we see the two forces--both so necessary and both so dangerous--so apart and so intense: Judaea changed in inward thought, just as Borne changed in exterior power.

As respects this essay, Judaea is an example of combined variability and legality not investing itself in warlike power, and so perishing at last, but bequeathing nevertheless a legacy of the combination in imperishable mental effects.

Travellers have noticed that among savage tribes those seemed to answer best in which the monarchical power was most predominant, and those worst in which the 'rule of many' was in its vigour.

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism--despotism during the campaign--is indispensable.

Macaulay justly said that many an army has prospered under a bad commander, but no army has ever prospered under a 'debating society;' that many-headed monster is then fatal.

Despotism grows in the first societies, just as democracy grows in more modern societies; it is the government answering the primary need, and congenial to the whole spirit of the time.

But despotism is unfavourable to the principle of variability, as all history shows.

It tends to keep men in the customary stage of civilisation; its very fitness for that age unfits it for the next.

Some 'standing system' of semi-free discussion is as necessary to break the thick crust of custom and begin progress as it is in later ages to carry on progress when begun; probably it is even more necessary.

There are leaders with or without the royal title; there are men of noble birth, whose noble birth (in whatever the original nobility may have consisted) entitles them to a pre-eminence in every way; but beyond these there is a free and…

But anyhow it is impossible not to trace the supremacy of Teutons, Greeks, and Romans in part to their common form of government.

Much as the old world believed in pure blood, it had very little of it.

Most historic nations conquered prehistoric nations, and though they massacred many, they did not massacre all.

But by one of those legal fictions which Sir Henry Maine describes so well, primitive nations contrived to do what they found convenient, as well as to adhere to what they fancied to be right.

When they did not beget they ADOPTED; they solemnly made believe that new persons were descended from the old stock, though everybody knew that in flesh and blood they were not.

They made an artificial unity in default of a real unity; and what it is not easy to understand now, the sacred sentiment requiring unity of race was somehow satisfied: what was made did as well as what was born.

In Jamaica and in Java the Mulatto cannot reproduce itself after the third generation; but on the continent of America, as everybody knows, the mixed race is now most numerous, and spreads generation after generation without impediment.