Walter Bagehot

The higher savages, as the New Zealanders, are less uniform; they have more of the varied and compact structure of civilised nations, because in other respects they are more civilised.

A savage tribe resembles a herd of gregarious beasts; where the leader goes they go too; they copy blindly his habits, and thus soon become that which he already is.

For not only the tendency, but also the power to imitate, is stronger in savages than civilised men.

Children, in the same way, are born mimics; they cannot help imitating what comes before them.

Every educated man has a large inward supply of ideas to which he can retire, and in which he can escape from or alleviate unpleasant outward objects.

If you send a housemaid and a philosopher to a foreign country of which neither knows the language, the chances are that the housemaid will catch it before the philosopher.

But unless she can imitate the utterances, she is lost; she has no life till she can join in the chatter of the kitchen.

The propensity to mimicry, and the power of mimicry, are mostly strongest in those who have least abstract minds.

Every savage cares more for the power of killing than for any other power.

The persecuting tendency of all savages, and, indeed, of all ignorant people, is even more striking than their imitative tendency.

No barbarian can bear to see one of his nation deviate from the old barbarous customs and usages of their tribe.

Very commonly all the tribe would expect a punishment from the gods if any one of them refrained from what was old, or began what was new.

In modern times and in cultivated countries we regard each person as responsible only for his own actions, and do not believe, or think of believing, that the misconduct of others can bring guilt on them.

Guilt to us is an individual taint consequent on choice and cleaving to the chooser.

But in early ages the act of one member of the tribe is conceived to make all the tribe impious, to offend its peculiar god, to expose all the tribe to penalties from heaven.

The early tribe or nation is a religious partnership, on which a rash member by a sudden impiety may bring utter ruin.

If the state is conceived thus, toleration becomes wicked.

It is a sacrifice of the happiness of the greatest number.

It is allowing one individual, for a moment's pleasure or a stupid whim, to bring terrible and irretrievable calamity upon all.

When the street statues of Hermes were mutilated, all the Athenians were frightened and furious; they thought that they should ALL be ruined because some one had mutilated a god's image, and so offended him.

There was such a solidarite then between citizens, that each might be led to persecute the other for fear of harm to himself.

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