How the mob was made
I am a little surprised that the English essayist Walter Bagehot is not a more conspicuous part of our intellectual furniture. His was a gently disabused, quietly penetrating sensibility, at once sophisticated and manly. How much wisdom is packed into his warning that ‘History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.’ Then there was his observation, drawn from the same basket of anthropological canniness, that ‘Civilised ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilised circumstances.
