178 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
of social evolution. Writing before Weismann, he believed with 
most biologists of his day in the inheritance of acquired charac- 
ters although this doctrine is not essential to his argument.! He 
accepted in general the theory of Sir Henry Maine as to the earli- 
est historic form of the family and state,—the patriarchal, — 
but he also accepted the conclusions of Bachofen, McLennan, 
and Lubbock, as to an earlier stage when loose sexual relations 
reigned along with ‘‘ mutterrecht.” ? 
The first problem of primitive times, as Bagehot sees it, is to 
get law, order, polity, — ‘‘a polity first — what sort of polity is 
immaterial; a law first — what kind of law is secondary; a 
person or set of persons to pay deference to — though who he is, 
or they are, by comparison scarcely signifies.” # Despotism and 
slavery were thus angels in disguise, for they were the means of 
disciplining the impulsiveness of primitive man. But the nation 
that went too far in its legalism and its conservatism, cutting off 
all innovators and innovation, was doomed. 
The two essentials to social as well as biological success are, 
then, stability and variation, social stability resulting from imita- 
tion, — mostly unconscious, — and elimination of the disuseful;* 
social variation resulting from invention and free discussion.® 
Bagehot wisely discriminates between the process of race mak- 
ing (confined mostly to prehistoric times), and that of nation 
making, a modern phenomenon.’ 
As the importance of imitation will be discussed later, we will 
consider here only the factors of discussion and animated modera- 
tion, which are his original contributions to sociology. Having 
shown the necessity of custom and custom-imitation together 
with the danger of over-conservatism, he says: ‘‘ The change 
from the age of status to the age of choice was first made in states 
where the government was to a great and a growing extent a gov- 
ernment by discussion, and where the subjects of that discussion 
1 Physics and Politics, pp. 7, 8. 4 Tbid., ch. II. 
2 [bid., pp. 12, 122 f. 5 [bid., pp. 92, 103. 
3 Ibid., pp. 50, 64, 137. § Tbid., pp. 65 f., 156 f. 
7 Ibid., pp. 86, 136. “If we look at the earliest monuments of the human 
race, we find these race-characters as decided as the race-characters now,” ibid., 
p. 107. 
