Walter Bagehot

What is there requisite is a single government--call it Church or State, as you like--regulating the whole of human life.

To gain that obedience, the primary condition is the identity--not the union, but the sameness--of what we now call Church and State.

How to get the obedience of men is the hard problem; what you do with that obedience is less critical.

But to gain that rule, what may be called the impressive elements of a polity are incomparably more important than its useful elements.

A good rule is better than a bad one, but any rule is better than none; while, for reasons which a jurist will appreciate, none can be very good.

What you want is a comprehensive rule binding men together, making them do much the same things, telling them what to expect of each other--fashioning them alike, and keeping them so.

In early times the quantity of government is much more important than its quality.

We reckon, as the basis of our culture, upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture.

Perhaps every young Englishman who comes now-a-days to Aristotle or Plato is struck with their conservatism: fresh from the liberal doctrines of the present age, he wonders at finding in those recognised teachers so much contrary teaching.

But, though the origin of polity is dubious, we are upon the terra firma of actual records when we speak of the preservation of polities.

The strongest killed out the weakest, as they could.

Whatever may be said against the principle of 'natural selection' in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history.

It describes, and truly describes, a kind of life antecedent to our present politics, and the conclusion I have drawn from it will be strengthened, not weakened, when we come to examine and deal with an age yet older, and a social bond far…

I do not myself believe that the suggestion of Sir Henry Maine--for he does not, it will be seen, offer it as a confident theory--is an adequate account of the true origin of politics.

Of this we may at least be certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason except this for their holding together in…

The first ascent of civilisation was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.

But it is their greatest difficulty, as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of their reach, as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it.

To sum up--LAW--rigid, definite, concise law--is the primary want of early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is requisite before they can gain anything else.

But so much as this is plain, a nation means a LIKE body of men, because of that likeness capable of acting together, and because of that likeness inclined to obey similar rules; and even this Homer's Cyclops--used only to sparse human…

We on the other hand cannot imagine those to whom it is a difficulty; 'we know what it is when you do not ask us,' but we cannot very quickly explain or define it.

Again, the primitive man could not have imagined what we mean by a nation.

So in these days, when we cannot by any effort drive out of our minds the notion of law, we cannot imagine the mind of one who had never known it, and who could not by any effort have conceived it.

Everybody who has studied mathematics knows how many shadowy difficulties he seemed to have before he understood the problem, and how impossible it was when once the demonstration had flashed upon him, ever to comprehend those indistinct…

If we set aside all the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left.

They never could have known what to expect; the whole habit of steady but varied anticipation, which makes our minds what they are, must have been wholly foreign to theirs.