and, as Bagehot held, for a very good reason, namely, that without a long accumulated and inherited tendency to discourage originality, society would never have gained the cohesion requisite for effective common action against its external foes. No one, I think, who had not studied as Bagehot had in actual life, first, the vast and unreasoning Conservatism of politically strong societies, like that of rural England, and next, the perilous mobility and impressibility of politically weak societies, like that of Paris, would ever have seen as he did the close connection of these ideas with Mr. Darwin’s principle of natural selection by conflict. And here I may mention, by way of illustrating this point, that Bagehot delighted in observing and expounding the bovine slowness of rural England in acquiring a new idea. Somersetshire, he used to boast, would not subscribe 1,000_l._ ‘to be represented by an archangel;’ and in one letter which I received from him during the Crimean War, he narrated with great gusto an instance of the tenacity with which a Somersetshire rustic stuck to his own notion of what was involved in conquering an enemy. ‘The Somersetshire view,’ he wrote, ‘of the chance of bringing the war to a successful conclusion is as follows:—_Countryman_: “How old, zir, be the Zar?”—_Myself_: “About sixty-three.”—_Countryman_: “Well, now, I can’t think however they be to take he. They do tell I that Rooshia is a very big place, and if he doo goo right into the middle of’n, you could not take he, not nohow.” I talked till the train came (it was at a station), and endeavoured to show how the war might be finished without capturing the Czar, but I fear without effect. At last he said, “Well, zir, I hope, _as you do say, zir_, we shall take he,” as I got into the carriage.’ It is clear that the humorous delight which Bagehot took in this tenacity and density of rural conceptions, was partly the cause of the attention which he paid to the subject. No doubt there was in him a vein of purely instinctive sympathy with this density, for intellectually he could not even have understood it. Writing on the intolerable and fatiguing cleverness of French journals, he describes in one of his Paris letters the true enjoyment he felt in reading a thoroughly stupid article in the _Herald_ (a Tory paper now no more), and I believe he was quite sincere. It was, I imagine, a real pleasure to him to be able to preach, in his last general work, that a ‘cake of custom,’ just sufficiently stiff to make innovation of any kind very difficult, but not quite stiff enough to make it impossible, is the true condition of durable progress.