Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/114

 a method co-ordinate with the other three. But it unites the advantages of all three, and furnishes still more formative and disciplinary influence of its own. It is, in relation to its subject, an end in itself, and is not to be classed among means and methods; if there be a science, this is the science. And yet, strange to say, this idea, like the others, is apt to be lowered and made vulgar by the impatience and intolerance of utilitarian theory; and of all intolerant things utilitarian theory, or theoretic utilitarianism, is the most so. As however I do not wish to use language unnecessarily strong, I will leave this, and remark upon two other educational theories connected with the subject.

History may be read either backwards or forwards. That is, the man who has time for it may begin at the beginning and read, on to modern times; noting every influence in its origin and effects, the growth and decay, as I have just said, of institutions, the origin, complications, and counter-changes of rights and wrongs; and, whether he reads on a wide scale or on a narrow one, he will, if he lives long enough, arrive at such a knowledge of the situation of things at the present day, as will give him a right to make his opinion heard. This is the way in which members of parliament ought to read history, and I take leave to say that, if they would submit to hold their tongues until they have so read it, it would be all the better for the nation and for themselves.

In working thus through the history of our own country, we should come, no doubt, upon many lines of inquiry as to institutions that have long been obsolete, and influences that have no direct representative among the influences of the day; we shall trace the pedigrees of extinct families, and the growth and disuse of worn-out fashions of thought, dress and manners; but without such reading we cannot trace the origin of existing institutions and influences with anything like a true appreciation of their proportion and relation to national life. We may, as we proceed, have to discard much that has seemed historical as now become archæological, but we cannot dispense with the recollection that without that obsolete material, that obsolete influence or form, that which