Walter Bagehot

But in the regions of rivalry--the regions where the better man pressed upon the worse man--such half-made associations could not last.

Ordinary civilisation begins near the Mediterranean Sea; the best, doubtless, of the ante-historic civilisations were not far off.

But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next step.

Probably if we had historic records of the ante-historic ages--if some superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages before they could set them down for themselves--we should know that this first step in civilisation…

Civilisation begins, because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage.

The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest.

But what makes one tribe--one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe--to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence.

And the way in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and the conquerors.

Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself.

Conquest improved mankind by the intermixture of strengths; the armed truce, which was then called peace, improved them by the competition of training and the consequent creation of new power.

Each nation tried constantly to be the stronger, and so made or copied the best weapons; by conscious and unconscious imitation each nation formed a type of character suitable to war and conquest.

Every intellectual gain, so to speak, that a nation possessed was in the earliest times made use of--was INVESTED and taken out--in war; all else perished.

The strongest nation has always been conquering the weaker; sometimes even subduing it, but always prevailing over it.

The Roman legionaries or Homeric Greeks were about as superior to the men of the shell mounds and the flint implements as we are superior to them.

Before history began, there was at least as much progress in the military art as there has been since.

Modern science explains the wasting away of savage men; it says that we have diseases which we can bear, though they cannot, and that they die away before them as our fatted and protected cattle died out before the rinderpest, which is…

On the contrary, in Gaul, in Spain, in Sicily--everywhere that we know of--the barbarian endured the contact of the Roman, and the Roman allied himself to the barbarian.

If anything like this had happened in antiquity, the classical moralists would have been sure to muse over it; for it is just the large solemn kind of fact that suited them.

The New Zealanders say that the land will depart from their children; the Australians are vanishing; the Tasmanians have vanished.

Savages waste away before modern civilisation; they seem to have held their ground before the ancient.

The breed of ancient times was impaired for war by trade and luxury, but the modern breed is not so impaired.

But now-a-days in all countries the great cities could pour out multitudes wanting nothing but practice to make good soldiers, and abounding in bravery and vigour.

In ancient times city people could not be got to fight--seemingly could not fight; they lost their mental courage, perhaps their bodily nerve.

Somehow or other civilisation does not make men effeminate or unwarlike now as it once did.

The military vices, too, of civilisation seem to decline just as its military strength augments.