Walter Bagehot

Equally various likewise in various cases has been the fate of the mixed race between the white man and the native American; sometimes it prospers, sometimes it fails.

Early in history the continual mixtures by conquest were just so many experiments in mixing races as are going on in South America now.

Like the Irish element and the Scotch element in the English House of Commons, the variety of French races contributes to the play of the polity; it gives a chance for fitting new things which otherwise there would not be.

We know now the Anglo-Indian suspicion or contempt for 'half-castes.' The union of the Englishman and the Hindoo produces something not only between races, but BETWEEN MORALITIES.

It added to the probability of variability, and therefore of improvement; and if that improvement even in part took the military line, it might give the mixed and ameliorated state a steady advantage in the battle of nations, and a greater…

The most important of these--slavery--arises out of the same early conquest as the mixture of races.

A slave is an unassimilated, an undigested atom; something which is in the body politic, but yet is hardly part of it.

But the evils which we have endured from slavery in recent ages must not blind us to, or make us forget, the great services that slavery rendered in early ages.

Refinement is only possible when leisure is possible; and slavery first makes it possible.

It creates a set of persons born to work that others may not work, and not to think in order that others may think.

The sort of originality which slavery gives is of the first practical advantage in early communities; and the repose it gives is a great artistic advantage when they come to be described in history.

The patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob could not have had the steady calm which marks them, if they had themselves been teased and hurried about their flocks and herds.

But originality in war does, and slave-owning nations, having time to think, are likely to be more shrewd in policy, and more crafty in strategy.

When other sources of leisure become possible, the one use of slavery is past.

But wholesale slavery, where men are but one of the investments of large capital, and where a great owner, so far from knowing each slave, can hardly tell how many gangs of them he works, is an abominable state.

This is the slavery which has made the name revolting to the best minds, and has nearly rooted the thing out of the best of the world.

Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.

War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline.

Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

And the success of the nations which possess these martial virtues has been the great means by which their continuance has been secured in the world, and the destruction of the opposite vices insured also.

Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

In spite of his great genius, after a long life of writing, it is a question still whether even a single work of his can take a lasting place in high literature.

There is a want of sanity in their manner which throws a suspicion on their substance (though it is often profound); and he brandishes one or two fallacies, of which he has himself a high notion, but which plain people will always detect…

Before his time people laughed at Cromwell's saying, 'Trust in God, and keep your powder dry.' But we now know that the trust was of as much use as the powder, if not of more.

Those kinds of morals and that kind of religion which tend to make the firmest and most effectual character are sure to prevail, all else being the same; and creeds or systems that conduce to a soft limp mind tend to perish, except some…