No More Learning

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.


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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


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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
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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,
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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
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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


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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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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


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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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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


## p. 1226 (#652) ###########################################

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


## p. 1227 (#653) ###########################################

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
―


## p. 1228 (#654) ###########################################

1228
WALTER BAGEHOT
BENEFITS OF FREE DISCUSSION IN MODERN TIMES
From Physics and Politics >
IN
IN THIS manner polities of discussion broke up the old bonds of
custom which were now strangling mankind, though they had
once aided and helped it; but this is only one of the many
gifts which those polities have conferred, are conferring, and will
confer on mankind. I am not going to write a eulogium on
liberty, but I wish to set down three points which have not been
sufficiently noticed.
Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious
in barbarous ages, and that nature is in many respects not at all
suited to civilized circumstances. A main and principal excellence
in the early times of the human races is the impulse to action.
The problems before men are then plain and simple: the man
who works hardest, the man who kills the most deer, the man
who catches the most fish-even later on, the man who tends
the largest herds or the man who tills the largest field—is the
man who succeeds; the nation which is quickest to kill its
enemies or which kills most of its enemies is the nation which
succeeds. All the inducements of early society tend to foster
immediate action, all its penalties fall on the man who pauses;
the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of incul-
cating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man-
the man who roasteth not that which he took hunting"
will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish
out of it: and in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irri-
table desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous fail-
ings of mankind.
Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from "man's
being unable to sit still in a room"; and though I do not go
that length, it is certain that we should have been a far wiser
race than we are if we had been readier to sit quiet,- we should
have known much better the way in which it was best to act
when we came to act. The rise of physical science, the first
great body of practical truth provable to all men, exemplifies
this in the plainest way: if it had not been for quiet people who
sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other quiet peo-
ple had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesimals, or
other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of


## p. 1229 (#655) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
-
1229
chances (the most "dreamy moonshine," as the purely practical
mind would consider, of all human pursuits), if ❝idle star-gazers
had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly
bodies, our modern astronomy would have been impossible, and
without our astronomy "our ships, our colonies, our seamen," all
which makes modern life modern life, could not have existed.
Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before
that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary
students it never could have been brought into being. And
nine-tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is
the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dream-
ers, who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern
them, who as the proverb went "walked into a well from looking
at the stars," who were believed to be useless if any one could
be such. And the conclusion is plain that if there had been
more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there
were, if rather it had encouraged them, there would have been
a great accumulation of proved science ages before there was.
It was the irritable activity, the "wish to be doing something,
that prevented it, most men inherited a nature too eager and
too restless to be quiet and find out things: and even worse,
with their idle clamor they "disturbed the brooding hen"; they
would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of
whose calm thought much good might have come forth.
>>>>
-
>>>
If we consider how much science has done and how much it
is doing for mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved
to be the cause why science came so late into the world and is
so small and scanty still, that will convince most people that our
over-activity is a very great evil; but this is only part and per-
haps not the greatest part, of the harm that over-activity does.
As I have said, it is inherited from times when life was simple,
objects were plain, and quick action generally led to desirable
ends: if A kills B before B kills A, then A survives, and the
human race is a race of A's. But the issues of life are plain no
longer: to act rightly in modern society requires a great deal of
previous study, a great deal of assimilated information, a great
deal of sharpened imagination; and these prerequisites of sound
action require much time, and I was going to say much "lying
in the sun," a long period of "mere passiveness. "
[Argument to show that the same vice of impatience damages war, phi-
lanthropy, commerce, and even speculation. ]


## p. 1230 (#656) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1230
But it will be said, What has government by discussion to do
with these things? will it prevent them, or even mitigate them?
It can and does do both, in the very plainest way. If you want
to stop instant and immediate action, always make it a condition
that the action shall not begin till a considerable number of
persons have talked over it and have agreed on it. If those
persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and
different educations, you have an almost infallible security that
nothing or almost nothing will be done with excessive rapidity.
Each kind of persons will have their spokesman; each spokes-
man will have his characteristic objection and each his charac-
teristic counter-proposition: and so in the end nothing will
probably be done, or at least only the minimum which is plainly
urgent. In many cases this delay may be dangerous, in many
cases quick action will be preferable; a campaign, as Macaulay
well says, cannot be directed by a "debating society," and
many other kinds of action also require a single and absolute
general: but for the purpose now in hand—that of preventing
hasty action and insuring elaborate consideration - there is no
device like a polity of discussion.
The enemies of this object-the people who want to act
quickly-see this very distinctly: they are forever explaining
that the present is "an age of committees," that the committees
do nothing, that all evaporates in talk. Their great enemy is
parliamentary government: they call it, after Mr. Carlyle, the
"national palaver"; they add up the hours that are consumed in
it and the speeches which are made in it, and they sigh for a
time when England might again be ruled, as it once was, by a
Cromwell, that is, when an eager absolute man might do
exactly what other eager men wished, and do it immediately.
All these invectives are perpetual and many-sided; they come
from philosophers each of whom wants some new scheme tried,
from philanthropists who want some evil abated, from revolu-
tionists who want some old institution destroyed, from new-eraists
who want their new era started forthwith: and they all are dis-
tinct admissions that a polity of discussion is the greatest hin-
drance to the inherited mistake of human nature, -to the desire
to act promptly, which in a simple age is so excellent, but which
in a later and complex time leads to so much evil.
The same accusation against our age sometimes takes a more
general form: it is alleged that our energies are diminishing,
-


## p. 1231 (#657) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1231
that ordinary and average men have not the quick determination
nowadays which they used to have when the world was younger,
that not only do not committees and parliaments act with rapid
decisiveness, but that no one now so acts; and I hope that in
fact this is true, for according to me it proves that the heredi-
tary barbaric impulse is decaying and dying out. So far from
thinking the quality attributed to us a defect, I wish that those
who complain of it were far more right than I much fear they
are. Still, certainly, eager and violent action is somewhat dimin-
ished, though only by a small fraction of what it ought to be;
and I believe that this is in great part due, in England at least,
to our government by discussion, which has fostered a general
intellectual tone, a diffused disposition to weigh evidence, a con-
viction that much may be said on every side of everything
which the elder and more fanatic ages of the world wanted.
This is the real reason why our energies seem so much less
than those of our fathers. When we have a definite end in
view, which we know we want and which we think we know
how to obtain, we can act well enough: the campaigns of our
soldiers are as energetic as any campaigns ever were; the specu-
lations of our merchants have greater promptitude, greater
audacity, greater vigor than any such speculations ever had
before. In old times a few ideas got possession of men and
communities, but this is happily now possible no longer: we see
how incomplete these old ideas were; how almost by chance one
seized on one nation and another on another; how often one set
of men have persecuted another set for opinions on subjects of
which neither, we now perceive, knew anything. It might be
well if a greater number of effectual demonstrations existed
among mankind: but while no such demonstrations exist, and
while the evidence which completely convinces one man seems to
another trifling and insufficient, let us recognize the plain posi-
tion of inevitable doubt; let us not be bigots with a doubt and
persecutors without a creed. We are beginning to see this, and
we are railed at for so beginning: but it is a great benefit, and
it is to the incessant prevalence of detective discussion that our
doubts are due; and much of that discussion is due to the long
existence of a government requiring constant debates, written.
and oral.


## p. 1232 (#658) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1232
ORIGIN OF DEPOSIT BANKING
From Lombard Street>
IN
'N THE last century, a favorite subject of literary ingenuity was
"conjectural history," as it was then called: upon grounds of
probability, a fictitious sketch was made of the possible origin
of things existing. If this kind of speculation were now applied
to banking, the natural and first idea would be that large systems
of deposit banking grew up in the early world just as they grow
up now in any large English colony. As soon as any such com-
munity becomes rich enough to have much money, and compact
enough to be able to lodge its money in single banks, it at once
begins so to do. English colonists do not like the risk of keep-
ing their money, and they wish to make an interest on it; they
carry from home the idea and the habit of banking, and they
take to it as soon as they can in their new world. Conjectural
history would be inclined to say that all banking began thus;
but such history is rarely of any value, the basis of it is false.
It assumes that what works most easily when established is that
which it would be the most easy to establish, and that what seems
simplest when familiar would be most easily appreciated by the
mind though unfamiliar; but exactly the contrary is true,—many
things which seem simple, and which work well when firmly
established, are very hard to establish among new people and not
very easy to explain to them. Deposit banking is of this sort.
Its essence is, that a very large number of persons agree to trust
a very few persons, or some one person: banking would not be a
profitable trade if bankers were not a small number, and depos-
itors in comparison an immense number. But to get a great
number of persons to do exactly the same thing is always very
difficult, and nothing but a very palpable necessity will make
them on a sudden begin to do it; and there is no such palpable
necessity in banking.
If you take a country town in France, even now, you will not
find any such system of banking as ours: check-books are un-
known, and money kept on running account by bankers is rare;
people store their money in a caisse at their houses. Steady sav-
ings, which are waiting for investment and which are sure not to
be soon wanted, may be lodged with bankers; but the common


## p. 1233 (#659) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1233
floating cash of the community is kept by the community them-
selves at home, they prefer to keep it so, and it would not
answer a banker's purpose to make expensive arrangements for
keeping it otherwise. If a "branch," such as the National Pro-
vincial Bank opens in an English country town, were opened in
a corresponding French one, it would not pay its expenses: you
could not get any sufficient number of Frenchmen to agree to
put their money there.
And so it is in all countries not of British descent, though
in various degrees. Deposit banking is a very difficult thing
to begin, because people do not like to let their money out of
their sight; especially, do not like to let it out of sight without
security; still more, cannot all at once agree on any single per-
son to whom they are content to trust it unseen and unsecured.
Hypothetical history, which explains the past by what is sim-
plest and commonest in the present, is in banking, as in most
things, quite untrue.
The real history is very different. New wants are mostly
supplied by adaptation, not by creation or foundation; something
having been created to satisfy an extreme want, it is used to
satisfy less pressing wants or to supply additional conveniences.
On this account, political government, the oldest institution in the
world, has been the hardest worked: at the beginning of history,
we find it doing everything which society wants done and for-
bidding everything which society does not wish done. In trade,
at present, the first commerce in a new place is a general shop,
which, beginning with articles of real necessity, comes shortly
to supply the oddest accumulation of petty comforts. And the
history of banking has been the same: the first banks were not
founded for our system of deposit banking, or for anything like
it; they were founded for much more pressing reasons, and hav-
ing been founded, they or copies from them were applied to
our modern uses.
[Gives a sketch of banks started as finance companies to make or float
government loans, and to give good coin; and sketches their function of remit-
ting money. ]
These are all uses other than those of deposit banking, which
banks supplied that afterwards became in our English sense de-
posit banks: by supplying these uses, they gained the credit that
afterwards enabled them to gain a living as deposit banks; being
111-78


## p. 1234 (#660) ###########################################

WALTER BAGEHOT
1234
trusted for one purpose, they came to be trusted for a purpose
quite different, ultimately far more important, though at irst
less keenly pressing. But these wants only affect a few persons,
and therefore bring the bank under the notice of a few only.
The real introductory function which deposit banks at first per-
form is much more popular; and it is only when they can
perform this most popular kind of business that deposit banking
ever spreads quickly and extensively.
This function is the supply of the paper circulation to the
country; and it will be observed that I am not about to overstep
my limits and discuss this as a question of currency. In what
form the best paper currency can be supplied to a country is a
question of economical theory with which I do not meddle here:
I am only narrating unquestionable history, not dealing with an
argument where every step is disputed; and part of this certain.
history is, that the best way to diffuse banking in a community
is to allow the banker to issue bank notes of small amount that
can supersede the metal currency. This amounts to a subsidy to
each banker to enable him to keep open a bank till depositors
choose to come to it.
――――――
The reason why the use of bank paper commonly precedes
the habit of making deposits in banks is very plain: it is a far
easier habit to establish. In the issue of notes the banker, the
person to be most benefited, can do something, he can pay
away his own "promises" in loans, in wages, or in payment of
debts, but in the getting of deposits he is passive; his issues
depend on himself, his deposits on the favor of others. And to
the public the change is far easier too: to collect a great mass
of deposits with the same banker, a great number of persons
must agree to do something; but to establish a note circulation,
a large number of persons need only do nothing,—they receive
the banker's notes in the common course of their business, and
they have only not to take those notes to the banker for payment.
If the public refrain from taking trouble, a paper circulation is
immediately in existence. A paper circulation is begun by the
banker, and requires no effort on the part of the public,
the contrary, it needs an effort of the public to be rid of notes
once issued; but deposit banking cannot be begun by the banker,
and requires a spontaneous and consistent effort in the commu-
nity: and therefore paper issue is the natural prelude to deposit
banking.
on
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