We unconsciously assume around us the existence of a great miscellaneous social machine working to our hands, and not only supplying our wants, but even telling and deciding when those wants shall come.
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).
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This is what, according to ethnology, we should expect the first historic man to be, and this is what we in fact find him.
Where then, so to say, are the rats and horses of the primitive civilisation?
Nor could a common force expel the horse from South America since the Spaniards took him thither; if we did not know the contrary we should suppose him a principal aboriginal animal.
The English rat--not the pleasantest of our domestic creatures--has gone everywhere; to Australia, to New Zealand, to America: nothing but a complicated rat-miracle could ever root him out.
If these savages did care to cultivate wheat, where is the wild wheat gone which their abandoned culture must have left? if they did give up using good domestic animals, what has become of the wild ones which would, according to all…
Again, if there had been an excellent aboriginal civilisation in Australia and America, where, botanists and zoologists, ask, are its vestiges?
The savage with simple tools--tools he appreciates--is like a child, quick to learn, not like an old man, who has once forgotten and who cannot acquire again.
Many races use the rifle--the especial and very complicated weapon of civilised man--better, upon an average, than he can use it.
The South American uses the horse which the European brought better than the European.
And not only may the miscellaneous races of the world be justly described as being upon various edges of industrial civilisation, approaching it by various sides, and falling short of it in various particulars, but the moment they see the…
On the contrary, you find it beginning--as new scientific discoveries and inventions now begin--here a little and there a little, the same thing half-done in various half-ways, and so as no one who knew the best way would ever have begun.
You cannot trace the roots of an old perfect system variously maimed and variously dying; you cannot find it, as you find the trace of the Latin language in the mediaeval dialects.
But you cannot imagine mankind giving up the plain utensils of personal comfort, if they once knew them; still less can you imagine them giving up good weapons--say bows and arrows--if they once knew them.
Nothing is more intelligible than a moral deterioration of mankind--nothing than an aesthetic degradation--nothing than a political degradation.
The conclusive arguments against the imagined original civilisation are indeed plain to everyone.
Perhaps it is the most valuable, as it is clearly the most sure result of that science, that it has dispelled the dreams of other days as to a primitive high civilisation.
The families of Jacob and Esau separate and form two nations; but the families of Jacob's children hold together and become a people.
His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood…
Here physical causes do not create the moral, but moral create the physical; here the beginning is by the higher energy, the conservation and propagation only by the lower.
It is the action of the will that causes the unconscious habit; it is the continual effort of the beginning that creates the hoarded energy of the end; it is the silent toil of the first generation that becomes the transmitted aptitude of…
A Freewillist may admit as much as a Necessarian that such improved conditions tend to improve human action, and that deteriorated conditions tend to deprave human action.
Better motives--better impulses, rather--come from a good body: worse motives or worse impulses come from a bad body.
Every Freewillist holds that, upon the whole, if you strengthen the motive in a given direction, mankind tend more to act in that direction.
Every Freewillist holds that the special force of free volition is applied to the pre-existing forces of our corporeal structure; he does not consider it as an agency acting in vacuo, but as an agency acting upon other agencies.
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