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.
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).
gutenberg.org
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.
But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
To make a single nation illustrate a principle, you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
The true scientific method is to explain the past by the present--what we see by what we do not see.
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…
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.
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…
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.
They will admit it in theory, but in practice the old error--the error which arrested a hundred civilisations--returns again.
Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to encourage the principle of originality.
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.
Those who surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way who did not.
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.
They put upon a fixed law a sanction so fearful that no one could dream of not conforming to it.
Politicians like Walter Bagehot
