Life's Pleasures Quote by Walter Bagehot

Progress, Bagehot suggests, isn’t a triumphant march so much as a painful metabolism problem. The line turns on a wicked reversal: what once nourished a society later sickens it. “Early food” is tradition at its most practical stage - habits, institutions, and beliefs that solved yesterday’s crises. “Late poison” is the same material, kept past its expiration date, defended out of sentiment, status, or fear. Progress becomes rare not because humans lack ingenuity, but because they cling to proven nourishment even after it starts killing them.

The sentence works because it refuses the comforting myth that history is divided into enlightened winners and benighted losers. Instead, Bagehot implicates the winners too: the very structures that make a community stable enough to grow are the ones that later obstruct adaptation. That’s a sharper, more unsettling claim than simple anti-traditionalism. He’s diagnosing a structural trap: success breeds inertia; legitimacy hardens into dogma.

Context matters. Bagehot wrote in Victorian Britain, a period drunk on industrial change yet governed by constitutional rituals and class arrangements that pretended to be timeless. As a keen observer of institutions (and editor of The Economist), he understood that systems don’t fail only from corruption or stupidity; they fail from overfitting. The policies and norms optimized for one era become toxic when conditions shift. Subtext: if you want progress, you need the courage to treat inherited “goods” as provisional - to compost yesterday’s certainties before they rot into poison.