Walter Bagehot

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

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

He had seen that LEISURE is the great need of early societies, and slaves only can give men leisure.

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.

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

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

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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…

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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