No More Learning

"
119. One of the fathers saith, "That there is but this differ-
ence between the death of old men and young men: that old
men go to death, and death comes to young men. "


## p. 1201 (#627) ###########################################

FRANCIS BACON
12ΟΙ
TRANSLATION OF THE 137TH PSALM
From Works,' Vol. xiv.
WHE
HENAS we sat all sad and desolate,
By Babylon upon the river's side,
Eased from the tasks which in our captive state
We were enforced daily to abide,
Our harps we had brought with us to the field,
Some solace to our heavy souls to yield.
But soon we found we failed of our account,
For when our minds some freedom did obtain,
Straightways the memory of Sion Mount
Did cause afresh our wounds to bleed again;
So that with present gifts, and future fears,
Our eyes burst forth into a stream of tears.
As for our harps, since sorrow struck them dumb,
We hanged them on the willow-trees were near;
Yet did our cruel masters to us come,
Asking of us some Hebrew songs to hear:
Taunting us rather in our misery,
Than much delighting in our melody.
Alas (said we) who can once force or frame
His grieved and oppressèd heart to sing
The praises of Jehovah's glorious name,
In banishment, under a foreign king?
In Sion is his seat and dwelling-place,
Thence doth he shew the brightness of his face.
Hierusalem, where God his throne hath set,
Shall any hour absent thee from my mind?
Then let my right hand quite her skill forget,
Then let my voice and words no passage find;
Nay, if I do not thee prefer in all
That in the compass of my thoughts can fall.
Remember thou, O Lord, the cruel cry
Of Edom's children, which did ring and sound,
Inciting the Chaldean's cruelty,
"Down with it, down with it, even unto the ground. "
In that good day repay it unto them,
When thou shalt visit thy Hierusalem.
11-76


## p. 1202 (#628) ###########################################

1202
FRANCIS BACON
And thou, O Babylon, shalt have thy turn
By just revenge, and happy shall he be,
That thy proud walls and towers shall waste and burn,
And as thou didst by us, so do by thee.
Yea, happy he that takes thy children's bones,
And dasheth them against the pavement stones.
THE WORLD'S A BUBBLE
From Works, Vol. xiv.
THE
HE world's a bubble, and the life of man
less than a span;
In his conception wretched, from the womb
so to the tomb:
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years
with cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
Yet since with sorrow here we live opprest,
what life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
to dandle fools.
The rural parts are turned into a den
of savage men.
And where's the city from all vice so free,
But may be termed the worst of all the three?
Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,
or pains his head.
Those that live single take it for a curse,
or do things worse.
Some would have children; those that have them moan,
or wish them gone.
What is it then to have or have no wife,
But single thraldom, or a double strife?
Our own affections still at home to please
is a disease:
To cross the seas to any foreign soil
perils and toil.
Wars with their noise affright us: when they cease,
we are worse in peace.
What then remains, but that we still should cry
Not to be born, or being born to die.


## p. 1203 (#629) ###########################################

1203
WALTER BAGEHOT
(1826-1877)
BY FORREST MORGAN
M
ALTER BAGEHOT was born February 3d, 1826, at Langport,
Somersetshire, England; and died there March 24th, 1877.
He sprang on both sides from, and was reared in, a nest of
wealthy bankers and ardent Liberals, steeped in political history and
with London country houses where leaders of thought and politics
resorted; and his mother's brother-in-law was Dr. Prichard the eth-
nologist. This heredity, progressive by disposition and conservative
by trade, and this entourage, produced
naturally enough a mind at once rapid of
insight and cautious of judgment, devoted
almost equally to business action and intel-
lectual speculation, and on its speculative
side turned toward the fields of political
history and sociology.
WALTER BAGEHOT
But there were equally important ele-
ments not traceable. His freshness of men-
tal vision, the strikingly novel points of
view from which he looked at every sub-
ject, was marvelous even in a century so
fertile of varied independences: he com
plained that "the most galling of yokes is
the tyranny of your next-door neighbor,"
the obligation of thinking as he thinks. He had a keen, almost reck-
less wit and delicious buoyant humor, whose utterances never pall by
repetition; few authors so abound in tenaciously quotable phrases
and passages of humorous intellectuality. What is rarely found in
connection with much humor, he had a sensitive dreaminess of
nature, strongly poetic in feeling, whence resulted a large apprecia-
tion of the subtler classes of poetry; of which he was an acute and
sympathizing critic. As part of this temperament, he had a strong
bent toward mysticism,-in one essay he says flatly that "mysticism
is true," which gave him a rare insight into the religious nature
and some obscure problems of religious history; though he was too
cool, scientific, and humorous to be a great theologian.

Above all, he had that instinct of selective art, in felicity of words
and salience of ideas, which elevates writing into literature; which


## p. 1204 (#630) ###########################################

1204
WALTER BAGEHOT
long after a thought has merged its being and use in those of wider
scope, keeps it in separate remembrance and retains for its creator
his due of credit through the artistic charm of the shape he gave it.
The result of a mixture of traits popularly thought incompat-
ible, and usually so in reality, -a great relish for the driest business
facts and a creative literary gift, was absolutely unique. Bagehot
explains the general sterility of literature as a guide to life by the
fact that "so few people who can write know anything;" and began
a reform in his own person, by applying all his highest faculties -
the best not only of his thought but of his imagination and his liter-
ary skill to the theme of his daily work, banking and business affairs
and political economy. There have been many men of letters who
were excellent business men and hard bargainers, sometimes indeed
merchants or bankers, but they have held their literature as far as
possible off the plane of their bread-winning; they have not used it
to explain and decorate the latter and made that the motive of art.
Bagehot loved business not alone as the born trader loves it, for its
profit and its gratification of innate likings, - "business is really
pleasanter than pleasure, though it does not look so," he says in sub-
stance, but as an artist loves a picturesque situation or a journalist
a murder; it pleased his literary sense as material for analysis and
composition. He had in a high degree that union of the practical
and the musing faculties which in its (as yet) highest degree made
Shakespeare; but even Shakespeare did not write dramas on how to
make theatres pay, or sonnets on real-estate speculation.
Bagehot's career was determined, as usual, partly by character
and partly by circumstances. He graduated at London University in
1848, and studied for and was called to the bar; but his father
owned an interest in a rich old provincial bank and a good shipping
business, and instead of the law he joined in their conduct. He had
just before, however, passed a few months in France, including the
time of Louis Napoleon's coup d'état in December, 1851; and from
Paris he wrote to the London Inquirer (a Unitarian weekly) a re-
markable series of letters on that event and its immediate sequents,
defending the usurpation vigorously and outlining his political creed,
from whose main lines he swerved but little in after life. Waiving
the question whether the defense was valid, —and like all first-rate
minds, Bagehot is even more instructive when he is wrong than
when he is right, because the wrong is sure to be almost right and
the truth on its side neglected, the letters are full of fresh, acute,
and even profound ideas, sharp exposition of those primary objects
of government which demagogues and buncombe legislators ignore,
racy wit, sarcasm, and description (in one passage he rises for a
moment into really blood-stirring rhetoric), and proofs of his capacity
-
-


## p. 1205 (#631) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1205
thus early for reducing the confused cross-currents of daily life to
the operation of great embracing laws. No other writing of a youth
of twenty-five on such subjects—or almost none-is worth remem-
bering at all for its matter; while this is perennially wholesome and
educative, as well as capital reading.
From this on he devoted most of his spare time to literature: that
he found so much spare time, and produced so much of a high grade
while winning respect as a business manager, proves the excellent
quality of his business brain. He was one of the editors of the Na-
tional Review, a very able and readable English quarterly, from its
foundation in 1854 to its death in 1863, and wrote for it twenty lit-
erary, biographical, and theological papers, which are among his best
titles to enduring remembrance, and are full of his choicest flavors,
his wealth of thought, fun, poetic sensitiveness, and deep religious
feeling of the needs of human nature. Previous to this, he had writ-
ten some good articles for the Prospective Review, and he wrote
some afterwards for the Fortnightly Review (including the series
afterwards gathered into 'Physics and Politics'), and other period-
icals.
But his chief industry and most peculiar work was determined by
his marriage in 1858 to the daughter of James Wilson, an ex-mer-
chant who had founded the Economist as a journal of trade, banking,
and investment, and made it prosperous and rather influential. Mr.
Wilson was engaging in politics, where he rose to high office and
would probably have ended in the Cabinet; but being sent to India
to regulate its finances, died there in 1860. Bagehot thereupon took
control of the paper, and was the paper until his death in 1877; and
the position he gave it was as unique as his own. On banking,
finance, taxation, and political economy in general his utterances had
such weight that Chancellors of the Exchequer consulted him as to
the revenues, and the London business world eagerly studied the
paper for guidance. But he went far beyond this, and made it an
unexampled force in politics and governmental science, personal to
himself. For the first time a great political thinker applied his mind
week by week to discussing the problems presented by passing poli-
tics, and expounding the drift and meaning of current events in his
nation and the others which bore closest on it, as France and
America. That he gained such a hearing was due not alone to his
immense ability, and to a style carefully modeled on the conversa-
tion of business men with each other, but to his cool moderation and
evident aloofness from party as party. He dissected each like a man
of science: party was to him a tool and not a religion. He gibed at
the Tories; but the Tories forgave him because he was half a Tory
at heart, he utterly distrusted popular instincts and was afraid of


## p. 1206 (#632) ###########################################

1206
WALTER BAGEHOT
popular ignorance. He was rarely warm for the actual measures of
the Liberals; but the Liberals knew that he intensely despised the
pig-headed obstructiveness of the typical Tory, and had no kinship
with the blind worshipers of the status quo. To natives and foreign-
ers alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable: in it
one could find set forth acutely and dispassionately the broad facts
and the real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the
rant and mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and coun-
ter-prejudice of the party press.
An outgrowth of his treble position as banker, economic writer,
and general littérateur, was his charming book 'Lombard Street. '
Most writers know nothing about business, he sets forth, most busi-
ness men cannot write, therefore most writing about business is
either unreadable or untrue: he put all his literary gifts at its serv-
ice, and produced a book as instructive as a trade manual and more
delightful than most novels. Its luminous, easy, half-playful "busi-
ness talk" is irresistibly captivating. It is a description and analysis
of the London money market and its component parts,—the Bank of
England, the joint-stock banks, the private banks, and the bill-brok-
ers. It will live, however, as literature and as a picture, not as a
banker's guide; as the vividest outline of business London, of the
"great commerce" and the fabric of credit which is the basis of mod-
ern civilization and of which London is the centre, that the world
has ever known.
Previous to this, the most widely known of his works-'The Eng-
lish Constitution,' much used as a text-book- had made a new epoch
in political analysis, and placed him among the foremost thinkers
and writers of his time. Not only did it revolutionize the accepted
mode of viewing that governmental structure, but as a treatise on
government in general its novel types of classification are now
admitted commonplaces. Besides its main themes, the book is a
great store of thought and suggestion on government, society, and
human nature,- for as in all his works, he pours on his nominal sub-
ject a flood of illumination and analogy from the unlikeliest sources;
and a piece of eminently pleasurable reading from end to end. Its
basic novelty lay in what seems the most natural of inquiries, but
which in fact was left for Bagehot's original mind even to think of,
-the actual working of the governmental system in practice, as dis-
tinguished from legal theory. The result of this novel analysis was
startling: old powers and checks went to the rubbish heap, and a
wholly new set of machinery and even new springs of force and life
were substituted. He argued that the actual use of the English mon-
archy is not to do the work of government, but through its roots in
the past to gain popular loyalty and support for the real government.


## p. 1207 (#633) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1207
which the masses would not obey if they realized its genuine nature;
that "it raises the army though it does not win the battle. " He
showed that the function of the House of Peers is not as a co-
ordinate power with the Commons (which is the real government), but
as a revising body and an index of the strength of popular feeling.
Constitutional governments he divides into Cabinet, where the people
can change the government at any time, and therefore follow its acts
and debates eagerly and instructedly; and Presidential, where they
can only change it at fixed terms, and are therefore apathetic and
ill-informed and care little for speeches which can effect nothing.
Just before 'Lombard Street' came his scientific masterpiece,
'Physics and Politics'; a work which does for human society what
the 'Origin of Species' does for organic life, expounding its method
of progress from very low if not the lowest forms to higher ones.
Indeed, one of its main lines is only a special application of Darwin's
"natural selection" to societies, noting the survival of the strongest
(which implies in the long run the best developed in all virtues that
make for social cohesion) through conflict; but the book is so much
more than that, in spite of its heavy debt to all scientific and institu-
tional research, that it remains a first-rate feat of original construct-
ive thought. It is the more striking from its almost ludicrous brevity
compared with the novelty, variety, and pregnancy of its ideas.
It is scarcely more than a pamphlet; one can read it through in
an evening: yet there is hardly any book which is a master-key to
so many historical locks, so useful a standard for referring scattered
sociological facts to, so clarifying to the mind in the study of early
history. The work is strewn with fertile and suggestive observations
from many branches of knowledge. Its leading idea of the needs and
difficulties of early societies is given in one of the citations.
The unfinished 'Economic Studies' are partially a re-survey of the
same ground on a more limited scale, and contain in addition a mass
of the nicest and shrewdest observations on modern trade and soci-
ety, full of truth and suggestiveness. All the other books printed
under his name are collections either from the Economist or from
outside publications.
As a thinker, Bagehot's leading positions may be roughly sum-
marized thus: in history, that reasoning from the present to the past
is generally wrong and frequently nonsense; in politics, that abstract
systems are foolish, that a government which does not benefit its sub-
jects has no rights against one that will, that the masses had much
better let the upper ranks do the governing than meddle with it
themselves, that all classes are too eager to act without thinking and
ought not to attempt so much; in society, that democracy is an evil
because it leaves no specially trained upper class to furnish models


## p. 1208 (#634) ###########################################

1208
WALTER BAGEHOT
for refinement. But there is vastly more besides this, and his value
lies much more in the mental clarification afforded by his details
than in the new principles of action afforded by his generalizations.
He leaves men saner, soberer, juster, with a clearer sense of per-
spective, of real issues, that more than makes up for a slight diminu-
tion of zeal.
«<
As pure literature, the most individual trait in his writings sprang
from his scorn of mere word-mongering divorced from actual life.
"A man ought to have the right of being a Philistine if he chooses,"
he tells us: "there is a sickly incompleteness in men too fine for the
world and too nice to work their way through it. " A great man of
letters, no one has ever mocked his craft so persistently. A great
thinker, he never tired of humorously magnifying the active and
belittling the intellectual temperament. Of course it was only half-
serious: he admits the force and utility of colossal visionaries like
Shelley, constructive scholars like Gibbon, ascetic artists like Milton,
even light dreamers like Hartley Coleridge; indeed, intellectually he
appreciates all intellectual force, and scorns feeble thought which
has the effrontery to show itself, and those who are cross with the
agony of a new idea. " But his heart goes out to the unscholarly
Cavalier with his dash and his loyalty, to the county member who
"hardly reads two books per existence," and even to the rustic who
sticks to his old ideas and whom "it takes seven weeks to compre-
hend an atom of a new one. " A petty surface consistency must not
be exacted from the miscellaneous utterances of a humorist: all sorts
of complementary half-truths are part of his service. His own quite
just conception of humor, as meaning merely full vision and balanced
judgment, is his best defense: "when a man has attained the deep
conception that there is such a thing as nonsense," he says, "you
may be sure of him for ever after. " At bottom he is thoroughly con-
sistent: holding that the masses should work in contented deference
to their intellectual guides, but those guides should qualify them-
selves by practical experience of life, that poetry is not an amuse-
ment for lazy sybarites but the most elevating of spiritual influences,
that religions cut the roots of their power by trying to avoid super-
naturalism and cultivate intelligibility, and that the animal basis of
human life is a screen expressly devised to shut off direct knowledge
of God and make character possible.
To make his acquaintance first is to enter upon a store of high
and fine enjoyment, and of strong and vivifying thought, which one
must be either very rich of attainment or very feeble of grasp to find
unprofitable or pleasureless.
Horn't Morgan,


## p. 1209 (#635) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
THE VIRTUES OF STUPIDITY
From 'Letters on the French Coup d'État›
――――――
1209
I
FEAR you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be
about the most essential mental quality for a free people
whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large
scale: it is much stupidity. Not to begin by wounding any
present susceptibilities, let me take the Roman character; for with
one great exception, I need not say to whom I allude, - they
are the great political people of history. Now, is not a certain.
dullness their most visible characteristic? What is the history of
their speculative mind? a blank; what their literature? a copy.
They have left not a single discovery in any abstract science,
not a single perfect or well-formed work of high imagination.
The Greeks, the perfection of human and accomplished genius,
bequeathed to mankind the ideal forms of self-idolizing art, the
Romans imitated and admired; the Greeks explained the laws of
nature, the Romans wondered and despised; the Greeks invented
a system of numerals second only to that now in use, the Ro-
mans counted to the end of their days with the clumsy apparatus.
which we still call by their name; the Greeks made a capital and
scientific calendar, the Romans began their month when the
Pontifex Maximus happened to spy out the new moon. Through-
out Latin literature, this is the perpetual puzzle:- Why are we
free and they slaves, we prætors and they barbers? why do the
stupid people always win and the clever people always lose? I
need not say that in real sound stupidity the English are un-
rivaled: you'll hear more wit and better wit in an Irish street
row than would keep Westminster Hall in humor for five weeks.
In fact, what we opprobriously call "stupidity," though not an
enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource
for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion;
it enforces concentration: people who learn slowly, learn only
what they must. The best security for people's doing their duty
is, that they should not know anything else to do; the best se-
curity for fixedness of opinion is, that people should be incapable
of comprehending what is to be said on the other side. These
valuable truths are no discoveries of mine: they are familiar


## p. 1210 (#636) ###########################################

1210
WALTER BAGEHOT
enough to people whose business it is to know them. Hear what
a douce and aged attorney says of your peculiarly promising bar-
rister: "Sharp? Oh, yes! he's too sharp by half. He is not
safe, not a minute, isn't that young man. " I extend this, and
advisedly maintain that nations, just as individuals, may be too
clever to be practical and not dull enough to be free.
And what I call a proper stupidity keeps a man from all the
defects of this character: it chains the gifted possessor mainly to
his old ideas, it takes him seven weeks to comprehend an atom
of a new one; it keeps him from being led away by new theo-
ries, for there is nothing which bores him so much; it restrains
him within his old pursuits, his well-known habits, his tried expe-
dients, his verified conclusions, his traditional beliefs. He is not
tempted to levity or impatience, for he does not see the joke
and is thick-skinned to present evils. Inconsistency puts him
out: "What I says is this here, as I was a-saying yesterday,” is
his notion of historical eloquence and habitual discretion. He is
very slow indeed to be excited, — his passions, his feelings, and
his affections are dull and tardy strong things, falling in a cer-
tain known direction, fixed on certain known objects, and for the
most part acting in a moderate degree and at a sluggish pace.
You always know where to find his mind. Now, this is exactly
what (in politics at least) you do not know about a Frenchman.
REVIEW WRITING
From The First Edinburgh Reviewers'
R
EVIEW writing exemplifies the casual character of modern lit-
erature: everything about it is temporary and fragmentary.
Look at a railway stall: you see books of every color,
blue, yellow, crimson, "ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted,” — on
every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every con-
ceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent—
but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they
take sandwiches on a journey.
And the change in appearance of books has been accompanied
-has been caused by a similar change in readers. What a
transition from the student of former ages! from a grave man
with grave cheeks and a considerate eye, who spends his life in
study, has no interest in the outward world, hears nothing of its


## p. 1211 (#637) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1211
din and cares nothing for its honors, who would gladly learn
and gladly teach, whose whole soul is taken up with a few
books of Aristotle and his Philosophy,'-to the merchant in the
railway, with a head full of sums, an idea that tallow is "up,"
a conviction that teas are "lively," and a mind reverting per-
petually from the little volume which he reads to these mundane
topics, to the railway, to the shares, to the buying and bargain-
ing universe. We must not wonder that the outside of books is
so different, when the inner nature of those for whom they are
written is so changed.
་་
In this transition from ancient writing to modern, the review-
like essay and the essay-like review fill a large space. Their
small bulk, their slight pretension to systematic completeness,
their avowal, it might be said, of necessary incompleteness,—the
facility of changing the subject, of selecting points to attack, of
exposing only the best corner for defense, are great temptations.
Still greater is the advantage of our limits. " A real reviewer
always spends his first and best pages on the parts of a subject
on which he wishes to write, the easy comfortable parts which
he knows. The formidable difficulties which he acknowledges,
you foresee by a strange fatality that he will only reach two
pages before the end; to his great grief, there is no opportunity
for discussing them. As a young gentleman at the India House
examination wrote "Time up" on nine unfinished papers in suc-
cession, so you may occasionally read a whole review, in every
article of which the principal difficulty of each successive ques-
tion is about to be reached at the conclusion. Nor can any one
deny that this is the suitable skill, the judicious custom of the
craft.
-
LORD ELDON
From The First Edinburgh Reviewers'
Α
S FOR Lord Eldon, it is the most difficult thing in the world
to believe that there ever was such a man; it only shows
how intense historical evidence is, that no one really doubts
it. He believed in everything which it is impossible to believe
in, in the danger of Parliamentary Reform, the danger of
Catholic Emancipation, the danger of altering the Court of Chan-
cery, the danger of altering the courts of law, the danger of


## p. 1212 (#638) ###########################################

1212
WALTER BAGEHOT
abolishing capital punishment for trivial thefts, the danger of
making land-owners pay their debts, the danger of making any-
thing more, the danger of making anything less. It seems as if
he maturely thought, "Now, I know the present state of things
to be consistent with the existence of John Lord Eldon; but if
we begin altering that state, I am sure I do not know that it
will be consistent. " As Sir Robert Walpole was against all com-
mittees of inquiry on the simple ground, "If they once begin
that sort of thing, who knows who will be safe? " so that great
Chancellor (still remembered in his own scene) looked pleasantly
down from the woolsack, and seemed to observe, "Well, it is a
queer thing that I should be here, and here I mean to stay. "
TASTE
From Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning'
The
TH
HERE is a most formidable and estimable insane taste.
will has great though indirect power over the taste, just
as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs
from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks,
to which at first no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind
upon them, they have a power over us, just because of their
natural offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood.
Experienced soldiers tell us that at first, men are sickened by the
smell and newness of blood, almost to death and fainting; but
that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds,
as soon as they will bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter,
a tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood (at least for the
moment) with a deep, eager love. It is a principle that if we
put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself
by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason, the
most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions.
They will not let their mind alone; they force it toward some
ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect
recommends: and nature punishes their disregard of her warning
by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so, the most
industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust
to rest in their instinctive natural horror; they overcome it, and
angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to
detestable stanzas.


## p. 1213 (#639) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1213
CAUSES OF THE STERILITY OF LITERATURE
From Shakespeare, the Man,' etc.
HE reason why so few good books are written is, that so few
people that can write know anything. In general, an
author has always lived in a room, has read books, has
cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of
the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own
eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see.
His life is a vacuum. The mental habits of Robert Southey,
which about a year ago were so extensively praised in the pub-
lic journals, are the type of literary existence, just as the praise
bestowed on them shows the admiration excited by them among
literary people. He wrote poetry (as if anybody could) before
breakfast; he read during breakfast. He wrote history until
dinner; he corrected proof-sheets between dinner and tea; he
wrote an essay for the Quarterly afterwards; and after supper,
by way of relaxation, composed The Doctor'a lengthy and
elaborate jest. Now, what can any one think of such a life? —
except how clearly it shows that the habits best fitted for com-
municating information, formed with the best care, and daily
regulated by the best motives, are exactly the habits which are
likely to afford a man the least information to communicate.
Southey had no events, no experiences. His wife kept house
and allowed him pocket-money, just as if he had been a Ger-
man professor devoted to accents, tobacco, and the dates of
Horace's amours.
The critic in the 'Vicar of Wakefield' lays down that you
should always say that the picture would have been better if
the painter had taken more pains; but in the case of the prac-
ticed literary man, you should often enough say that the writings.
would have been much better if the writer had taken less pains.
He says he has devoted his life to the subject; the reply is,
"Then you have taken the best way to prevent your making
anything of it. Instead of reading studiously what Burgersdicius
and Ænesidemus said men were, you should have gone out
yourself and seen (if you can see) what they are. " But there
is a whole class of minds which prefer the literary delineation
of objects to the actual eyesight of them. Such a man would
naturally think literature more instructive than life. Hazlitt


## p. 1214 (#640) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1214
said of Mackintosh, "He might like to read an account of India;
but India itself, with its burning, shining face, would be a mere
blank, an endless waste to him. Persons of this class have no
more to say to a matter of fact staring them in the face, without
a label in its mouth, than they would to a hippopotamus. "
After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to
be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken
anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy
from; he looked at things for himself. Anyhow the modern sys-
tem fails, for where are the amusing books from voracious stu-
dents and habitual writers?
Moreover, in general, it will perhaps be found that persons
devoted to mere literature commonly become devoted to mere
idleness. They wish to produce a great work, but they find they
cannot. Having relinquished everything to devote themselves to
this, they conclude on trial that this is impossible; they wish to
write, but nothing occurs to them: therefore they write nothing
and they do nothing. As has been said, they have nothing to
do; their life has no events, unless they are very poor; with any
decent means of subsistence, they have nothing to rouse them
from an indolent and musing dream. A merchant must meet
his bills, or he is civilly dead and uncivilly remembered; but a
student may know nothing of time, and be too lazy to wind up
his watch.
THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS
From William Cowper›
F THERE be any truly painful fact about the world now toler-
ably well established by ample experience and ample records,
it is that an intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly
denied to the children of men.
That most valuable author,
Lucretius, who has supplied us and others with an almost inex-
haustible supply of metaphors on this topic, ever dwells on the
life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling that no such
life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth. In general,
the two opposing agencies are marriage and lack of money;
either of these breaks the lot of literary and refined inaction at
once and forever. The first of these, as we have seen, Cowper
had escaped; his reserved and negligent reveries were still free,


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WALTER BAGEHOT
1215
at least from the invasion of affection. To this invasion, indeed,
there is commonly requisite the acquiescence or connivance of
mortality; but all men are born - not free and equal, as the
Americans maintain, but, in the Old World at least-basely sub-
jected to the yoke of coin. It is in vain that in this hemisphere
we endeavor after impecuniary fancies. In bold and eager youth
we go out on our travels: we visit Baalbec and Paphos and
Tadmor and Cythera,— ancient shrines and ancient empires, seats
of eager love or gentle inspiration; we wander far and long;
we have nothing to do with our fellow-men,—what are we,
indeed, to diggers and counters? we wander far, we dream to
wander forever. - but we dream in vain. A surer force than the
subtlest fascination of fancy is in operation; the purse-strings tie
us to our kind. Our travel coin runs low, and we must return,
away from Tadmor and Baalbec, back to our steady, tedious
industry and dull work, to "la vieille Europe" (as Napoleon said),
"qui m'ennuie. ” It is the same in thought: in vain we seclude
ourselves in elegant chambers, in fascinating fancies, in refined
reflections.
―――――――――
ON EARLY READING
From Edward Gibbon >
IN
-
N SCHOOL Work Gibbon had uncommon difficulties and unusual
deficiencies; but these were much more than counterbal-
anced by a habit which often accompanies a sickly child-
hood, and is the commencement of a studious life, the habit
of desultory reading. The instructiveness of this is sometimes
not comprehended. S. T. Coleridge used to say that he felt a
great superiority over those who had not read-and fondly
read-fairy tales in their childhood: he thought they wanted a
sense which he possessed, the perception, or apperception — we
do not know which he used to say it was-of the unity and
wholeness of the universe. As to fairy tales, this is a hard
saying; but as to desultory reading, it is certainly true. Some
people have known a time in life when there was no book they
could not read. The fact of its being a book went immensely
in its favor. In early life there is an opinion that the obvious
thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it;
with sixpence, to spend it. A few boys carry this further, and
――――――


## p. 1216 (#642) ###########################################

1216
WALTER BAGEHOT
think the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. There
is an argument from design in the subject: if the book was not
meant for that purpose, for what purpose was it meant ? Of
course, of any understanding of the works so perused there is
no question or idea. There is a legend of Bentham, in his
earliest childhood, climbing to the height of a huge stool, and
sitting there evening after evening, with two candles, engaged
in the perusal of Rapin's history; it might as well have been
any other book. The doctrine of utility had not then dawned
on its immortal teacher; cui bono was an idea unknown to him.
He would have been ready to read about Egypt, about Spain,
about coals in Borneo, the teak-wood in India, the current in
the River Mississippi, on natural history or human history, on
theology or morals, on the state of the Dark Ages or the state
of the Light Ages, on Augustulus or Lord Chatham, on the
first century or the seventeenth, on the moon, the millennium,
or the whole duty of man. Just then, reading is an end in
itself. At that time of life you no more think of a future con-
sequence of the remote, the very remote possibility of deriving
knowledge from the perusal of a book, than you expect so great
a result from spinning a peg-top. You spin the top, and you
read the book; and these scenes of life are exhausted. In such
studies, of all prose, perhaps the best is history: one page is
so like another, battle No. 1 is so much on a par with battle
No. 2. Truth may be, as they say, stranger than fiction,
abstractedly; but in actual books, novels are certainly odder and
more astounding than correct history.
It will be said, What is the use of this? why not leave the
reading of great books till a great age? why plague and perplex
childhood with complex facts remote from its experience and
inapprehensible by its imagination? The reply is, that though in
all great and combined facts there is much which childhood can-
not thoroughly imagine, there is also in very many a great deal
which can only be truly apprehended for the first time at that
age. Youth has a principle of consolidation; we begin with the
whole. Small sciences are the labors of our manhood; but the
round universe is the plaything of the boy. His fresh mind
shoots out vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal.
Nothing is hid from the depth of it; there are no boundaries to
its vague and wandering vision. Early science, it has been said,
begins in utter nonsense; it would be truer to say that it starts


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WALTER BAGEHOT
1217
with boyish fancies. How absurd seem the notions of the first
Greeks! Who could believe now that air or water was the prin-
ciple, the pervading substance, the eternal material of all things?
Such affairs will never explain a thick rock. And what a white
original for a green and sky-blue world! Yet people disputed
in these ages not whether it was either of those substances, but
which of them it was. And doubtless there was a great deal, at
least in quantity, to be said on both sides. Boys are improved;
but some in our own day have asked, "Mamma, I say, what did
God make the world of? " and several, who did not venture on
speech, have had an idea of some one gray primitive thing, felt a
difficulty as to how the red came, and wondered that marble
could ever have been the same as moonshine. This is in truth the
picture of life. We begin with the infinite and eternal, which we
shall never apprehend; and these form a framework, a schedule,
a set of co-ordinates to which we refer all which we learn later.
At first, like the old Greek, "We look up to the whole sky, and
are lost in the one and the all;" in the end we classify and
enumerate, learn each star, calculate distances, draw cramped
diagrams on the unbounded sky, write a paper on a Cygni and
a treatise on Draconis, map special facts upon the indefinite
void, and engrave precise details on the infinite and everlasting.
So in history: somehow the whole comes in boyhood, the details
later and in manhood. The wonderful series, going far back to
the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-
eyed Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth
Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East,
the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and
classical civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages,
the vague warm picture of ourselves and home, - when did we
learn these? Not yesterday nor to-day: but long ago, in the first
dawn of reason, in the original flow of fancy. What we learn
afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the
dates and tedious facts. Those who begin late learn only these;
but the happy first feel the mystic associations and the progress
of the whole.
However exalted may seem the praises which we have given
to loose and unplanned reading, we are not saying that it is the
sole ingredient of a good education. Besides this sort of educa-
tion, which some boys will voluntarily and naturally give them-
selves, there needs, of course, another and more rigorous kind,
11-77


## p. 1218 (#644) ###########################################

1218
WALTER BAGEHOT
which must be impressed upon them from without. The terrible
difficulty of early life- the use of pastors and masters really is,
that they compel boys to a distinct mastery of that which they
do not wish to learn. There is nothing to be said for a pre-
ceptor who is not dry. Mr. Carlyle describes, with bitter satire,
the fate of one of his heroes who was obliged to acquire whole
systems of information in which he, the hero, saw no use, and
which he kept, as far as might be, in a vacant corner of his
mind. And this is the very point: dry language, tedious math-
ematics, a thumbed grammar, a detested slate form gradually
an interior separate intellect, exact in its information, rigid in
its requirements, disciplined in its exercises. The two grow
together; the early natural fancy touching the far extremities of
the universe, lightly playing with the scheme of all things; the
precise, compacted memory slowly accumulating special facts,
exact habits, clear and painful conceptions. At last, as it were
in a moment, the cloud breaks up, the division sweeps away;
we find that in fact these exercises which puzzled us, these lan-
guages which we hated, these details which we despised, are the
instruments of true thought; are the very keys and openings,
the exclusive access to the knowledge which we loved.
THE CAVALIERS
From Thomas Babington Macaulay'
WHA
HAT historian has ever estimated the Cavalier character?
There is Clarendon, the grave, rhetorical, decorous law-
yer, piling words, congealing arguments; very stately, a
little grim. There is Hume, the Scotch metaphysician, who has
made out the best case for such people as never were, for a
Charles who never died, for a Strafford who would never have
been attainted; a saving, calculating North-countryman, fat, im-
passive, who lived on eightpence a day. What have these people
to do with an enjoying English gentleman? It is easy for a
doctrinaire to bear a post-mortem examination, it is much the
same whether he be alive or dead; but not so with those who
live during their life, whose essence is existence, whose being is
in animation. There seem to be some characters who are not
made for history, as there are some who are not made for old
age.
A Cavalier is always young. The buoyant life arises before
―


## p. 1219 (#645) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1219
us, rich in hope, strong in vigor, irregular in action; men young
and ardent, "framed in the prodigality of nature"; open to every
enjoyment, alive to every passion, eager, impulsive; brave with-
out discipline, noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising
danger; capable of high sentiment, but in each of whom the
"Addiction was to courses vain,
His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow,
His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports,
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity. "
We see these men setting forth or assembling to defend their
king or church, and we see it without surprise; a rich daring
loves danger, a deep excitability likes excitement. If we look
around us, we may see what is analogous: some say that the
battle of the Alma was won by the "uneducated gentry"; the
"uneducated gentry" would be Cavaliers now. The political
sentiment is part of the character; the essence of Toryism is
enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome con-
servatism throughout this country! Give painful lectures, dis-
tribute weary tracts (and perhaps this is as well, you may be
able to give an argumentative answer to a few objections, you
may diffuse a distinct notion of the dignified dullness of politics);
but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are con-
cerned, try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs
to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present
state of things is to enjoy that state of things. Over the "Cava-
lier» mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an
exaltation in a daily event, zest in the "regular thing," joy at
an old feast.
MORALITY AND FEAR
From Bishop Butler'
-
HE moral principle (whatever may be said to the contrary by
complacent
to most men a
of fear. The delights of a good conscience may be reserved
for better things, but few men who know themselves will say
that they have often felt them by vivid and actual experience;
a sensation of shame, of reproach, of remorse, of sin (to use the


## p. 1220 (#646) ###########################################

1220
WALTER BAGEHOT
word we instinctively shrink from because it expresses the mean-
ing), is what the moral principle really and practically thrusts
on most men. Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves; we
expect a penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, "where there
is shame there is fear"; where there is the deep and intimate
anxiety of guilt,- the feeling which has driven murderers and
other than murderers forth to wastes and rocks and stones and
tempests, we see, as it were, in a single complex and indivisible
sensation, the pain and sense of guilt and the painful anticipa-
tion of its punishment. How to be free from this, is the ques-
tion; how to get loose from this; how to be rid of the secret tie
which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes
him angry at the beauty of the universe,-which will not let.
him go forth like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in
the glory of his might, but restrains him with an inner fear and
a secret foreboding that if he do but exalt himself he shall be
abased, if he do but set forth his own dignity he will offend
ONE who will deprive him of it. This, as has often been
pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites of heathendom.
You are going to battle, you are going out in the bright sun
with dancing plumes and glittering spear; your shield shines, and
your feathers wave, and your limbs are glad with the con-
sciousness of strength, and your mind is warm with glory and
renown; with coming glory and unobtained renown: for who
are you to hope for these; who are you to go forth proudly
against the pride of the sun, with your secret sin and your
haunting shame and your real fear? First lie down and abase.
yourself; strike your back with hard stripes; cut deep with a
sharp knife, as if you would eradicate the consciousness; cry
aloud; put ashes on your head; bruise yourself with stones,-
then perhaps God may pardon you. Or, better still (so runs the
incoherent feeling), give him something-your ox, your ass,
whole hecatombs if you are rich enough; anything, it is but a
chance, you do not know what will please him; at any rate,
what you love best yourself,- that is, most likely, your first-born
son. Then, after such gifts and such humiliation, he may be
appeased, he may let you off; he may without anger let you go
forth, Achilles-like, in the glory of your shield; he may not send
you home as he would else, the victim of rout and treachery,
with broken arms and foul limbs, in weariness and humiliation.
Of course, it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a
-
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## p. 1221 (#647) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1221
prelate of the English Church; human sacrifices are not respect-
able, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But though the
costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart does
not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same conscious-
ness of personal sin which led in barbarous times to what has
been described, show themselves in civilized life as well. In this
quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity: a care
about the ritual of life; an attention to meats and drinks, and
"cups and washings. " Being so unworthy as we are, feeling
what we feel, abased as we are abased, who shall say that those
are beneath us? In ardent, imaginative youth they may seem
so; but let a few years come, let them dull the will or contract
the heart or stain the mind; then the consequent feeling will
be, as all experience shows, not that a ritual is too mean, too
low, too degrading for human nature, but that it is a mercy we
have to do no more,- that we have only to wash in Jordan, that
we have not even to go out into the unknown distance to seek
for Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. We have no right
to judge; we cannot decide; we must do what is laid down for
us, we fail daily even in this; we must never cease for a
moment in our scrupulous anxiety to omit by no tittle and to
exceed by no iota.
THE TYRANNY OF CONVENTION
From Sir Robert Peel''
T MIGHT be said that this [necessity for newspapers and states-
men of following the crowd] is only one of the results of
that tyranny of commonplace which seems to accompany
civilization. You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tibe-
rius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door
neighbor. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he
does? What yoke is so galling as the necessity of being like
him? What espionage of despotism comes to your door so effect-
ually as the eye of the man who lives at your door? Public
opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to
itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak
other men's words, to follow other men's habits. Of course, if
we do not, no formal ban issues; no corporeal pain, no coarse
penalty of a barbarous society is inflicted on the offender; but


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WALTER BAGEHOT
1222
we are called "eccentric"; there is a gentle murmur of "most
unfortunate ideas," "singular young man," "well-intentioned, I
dare say; but unsafe, sir, quite unsafe. ”
Whatever truth there may be in these splenetic observations
might be expected to show itself more particularly in the world
of politics: people dread to be thought unsafe in proportion as
they get their living by being thought to be safe. Those who
desire a public career must look to the views of the living pub-
lic; an immediate exterior influence is essential to the exertion
of their faculties. The confidence of others is your fulcrum:
you cannot many people wish you could go into Parliament
to represent yourself; you must conform to the opinions of the
electors, and they, depend on it, will not be original.
word, as has been most wisely observed, "under free institutions.
it is necessary occasionally to defer to the opinions of other
people; and as other people are obviously in the wrong, this is
a great hindrance to the improvement of our political system
and the progress of our species. ”
In a
HOW TO BE AN INFLUENTIAL POLITICIAN
From Bolingbroke
I
T is very natural that brilliant and vehement men should depre-
ciate Harley; for he had nothing which they possess, but had
everything which they commonly do not possess. He was by
nature a moderate man. In that age they called such a man a
"trimmer," but they called him ill: such a man does not con-
sciously shift or purposely trim his course,- he firmly believes
that he is substantially consistent. "I do not wish in this House,"
he would say in our age, "to be a party to any extreme course.
Mr. Gladstone brings forward a great many things which I can-
not understand; I assure you he does. There is more in that
bill of his about tobacco than he thinks; I am confident there is.
Money is a serious thing, a very serious thing.
And I am sorry
to say Mr. Disraeli commits the party very much: he avows
sentiments which are injudicious; I cannot go along with him,
nor can Sir John. He was not taught the catechism; I know he
was not. There is a want in him of sound and sober religion,-
and Sir John agrees with me,—which would keep him from dis-
tressing the clergy, who are very important. Great orators are


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WALTER BAGEHOT
1223
very well; but as I said, how is the revenue? And the point is,
not be led away, and to be moderate, and not to go to an
extreme. As soon as it seems very clear, then I begin to doubt.
I have been many years in Parliament, and that is my experi-
ence. » We may laugh at such speeches, but there have been
plenty of them in every English Parliament. A great English
divine has been described as always leaving out the principle
upon which his arguments rested; even if it was stated to him,
he regarded it as far-fetched and extravagant. Any politician
who has this temper of mind will always have many followers;
and he may be nearly sure that all great measures will be passed
more nearly as he wishes them to be passed than as great orators
wish. Nine-tenths of mankind are more afraid of violence than
of anything else; and inconsistent moderation is always popular,
because of all qualities it is most opposite to violence,—most
likely to preserve the present safe existence.
CONDITIONS OF CABINET GOVERNMENT
From The English Constitution >
TH
HE conditions of fitness are two: first, you must get a good
legislature; and next, you must keep it good. And these
are by no means so nearly connected as might be thought
at first sight. To keep a legislature efficient, it must have a suf-
ficient supply of substantial business: if you employ the best set
of men to do nearly nothing, they will quarrel with each other
about that nothing; where great questions end, little parties
begin. And a very happy community, with few new laws to
make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign rela-
tions to adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature,-
there is nothing for it to enact and nothing for it to settle.
Accordingly, there is great danger that the legislature, being
debarred from all other kinds of business, may take to quarrel-
ing about its elective business; that controversies as to minis-
tries may occupy all its time, and yet that time be perniciously
employed; that a constant succession of feeble administrations,
unable to govern and unfit to govern, may be substituted for the
proper result of cabinet government, a sufficient body of men
long enough in power to evince their sufficiency. The exact
amount of non-elective business necessary for a parliament which


## p. 1224 (#650) ###########################################

1224
WALTER BAGEHOT
is to elect the executive cannot, of course, be formally stated,-
there are no numbers and no statistics in the theory of constitu-
tions; all we can say is, that a parliament with little business,
which is to be as efficient as a parliament with much business,
must be in all other respects much better. An indifferent parlia-
ment may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave
affairs; but a parliament which has no such affairs must be
intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.
But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature is evidently
secondary to the difficulty of first getting it. There are two
kinds of nations which can elect a good parliament. The first is
a nation in which the mass of the people are intelligent, and in
which they are comfortable. Where there is no honest poverty,
where education is diffused and political intelligence is common,
it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair legislature.
The ideal is roughly realized in the North American colonies of
England, and in the whole free States of the Union: in these
countries there is no such thing as honest poverty, physical
comfort, such as the poor cannot imagine here, is there easily
attainable by healthy industry; education is diffused much, and
is fast spreading,-ignorant emigrants from the Old World often
prize the intellectual advantages of which they are themselves
destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where
rudimentary culture is so common. The greatest difficulty of
such new communities is commonly geographical: the population
is mostly scattered; and where population is sparse, discussion is
difficult. But in a country very large as we reckon in Europe, a
people really intelligent, really educated, really comfortable,
would soon form a good opinion. No one can doubt that the
New England States, if they were a separate community, would
have an education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such
as the numerical majority of no people equally numerous has
ever possessed: in a State of this sort, where all the community
is fit to choose a sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost
easy, to create that legislature. If the New England States
possessed a cabinet government as a separate nation, they would
be as renowned in the world for political sagacity as they now
are for diffused happiness.
--
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## p. 1225 (#651) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1225
WHY EARLY SOCIETIES COULD NOT BE FREE
-
From Physics and Politics'
I
BELIEVE the general description in which Sir John Lubbock
sums up his estimate of the savage mind suits the patri-
archal mind: "Savages," he says, "have the character of
children with the passions and strength of men. "
And this is precisely what we should expect. "An inherited
drill," science says, "makes modern nations what they are; their
born structure bears the trace of the laws of their fathers: " but
the ancient nations came into no such inheritance,- they were
the descendants of people who did what was right in their own
eyes; they were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds,
and therefore they were at the mercy of every impulse and blown
by every passion.
Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions
(as they must have been) of morals which then existed.
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. The residuum was somehow and in some vague
way intelligible to the ante-political man; but it must have been.
uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended upon. In the
best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty now
exists in minds sensitive but untaught,-a still small voice of
uncertain meaning, an unknown something modifying everything
else and higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that
when you looked for it, it was gone; or if this be thought the
delicate fiction of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be
found in the wild spasms of "wild justice," half punishment,
half outrage: but anyhow, being unfixed by steady law, it was
intermittent, vague, and hard for us to imagine.
To sum up: Law-rigid, definite, concise law is the pri-
mary want of early mankind; that which they need above anything
else, that which is requisite before they can gain anything else.
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. In later ages, many races have gained
much of this discipline quickly though painfully,-a loose set of
scattered clans has been often and often forced to substantial


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1226
WALTER BAGEHOT
settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans did half the work
for above half Europe. But where could the first ages find
Romans or a conqueror? men conquer by the power of govern-
ment, and it was exactly government which then was not. The
first ascent of civilization was at a steep gradient, though when
now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.
How the step from no polity to polity was made, distinct
history does not record.
But when once polities were
begun, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted
Whatever may be said against the principle of "natural selec-
tion" in other departments, there is no doubt of its predom-
inance in early human history: the strongest killed out the
weakest as they could. And I need not pause to prove that any
form of polity is more efficient than none; that an aggregate of
families owning even a slippery allegiance to a single head
would be sure to have the better of a set of families acknowl-
edging no obedience to any one, but scattering loose about the
world and fighting where they stood. Homer's Cyclops would be
powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular
that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable
and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even
a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness
it became valuable in poetry.
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. Perhaps every young Englishman who comes nowa-
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 recognized teachers so much contrary teaching.
They both, unlike as they are, hold with Xenophon so unlike
both, that man is "the hardest of all animals to govern. " Of
Plato it might indeed be plausibly said that the adherents of an
intuitive philosophy, being "the Tories of speculation," have
commonly been prone to conservatism in government; but Aris-
totle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought according
to that doctrine to have been a Liberal if any one ever was a
Liberal. In fact, both of these men lived when men "had not
had time to forget" the difficulties of government: we have for-
gotten them altogether. We reckon as the basis of our culture
upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive gov-
ernability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal


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WALTER BAGEHOT
1227
result of their culture; we take without thought as a datum what
they hunted as a quæsitum.
In early times the quantity of government is much more.
important than its quality. 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: what this rule is, does not
matter so much. 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. But to gain that rule, what
may be called the "impressive" elements of a polity are incom-
parably more important than its useful elements.
How to get
the obedience of men, is the hard problem; what you do with
that obedience is less critical.
To gain that obedience, the primary condition is the identity
not the union, but the sameness of what we
now call
"church" and "state. "
No division of power is then
endurable without danger, probably without destruction: the
priest must not teach one thing and the king another; king must
be priest and prophet king,—the two must say the same because
they are the same. The idea of difference between spiritual pen-
alties and legal penalties must never be awakened,- indeed, early
Greek thought or early Roman thought would never have com-
prehended it; there was a kind of rough public opinion, and
there were rough—very rough-hands which acted on it. We
now talk of "political penalties" and "ecclesiastical prohibition "
and "the social censure"; but they were all one then. Nothing
is very like those old communities now, but perhaps a trades-
union is as near as most things: to work cheap is thought to be
"wicked" thing, and so some Broadhead puts it down.
The object of such organizations is to create what may be
called a cake of custom. All the actions of life are to be sub-
mitted to a single rule for a single object,—that gradually created
"hereditary drill" which science teaches to be essential, and
which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too. That
this régime forbids free thought is not an evil, or rather,
though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it
is necessary for making the mold of civilization and hardening
the soft fibre of early man.
-
a
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