Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/30

 the conscious possession of truth, a condition which, might oi all others the best afford to be tolerant, the most merciful and pitiful of error: that all generalisations, however sound m logic, are in morals and practical matters ipso facto false; that there is no room for sweeping denunciations, or trenchant criticisms in the dealings of a world whose falsehoods and veracities are separated by so very thin a barrier: to learn that simple assertion however reiterated can never make proof: that a multitude of half believers can never make faith: that argument never convinces any man against his will: that silence is not acquiescence: that the course of this world is anything but even and uniform: that such by-words as reaction and progress are but the political slang which each side uses to express their aversions and their propensions; above all, that no material success, no energy of development, no eventual progress or consolidation, can atone for the mischief done by one act of falsehood, treachery or cruelty. Most of these lessons are truisms. Yes, but there are no truisms in facts: there are no truths which may not be stated as truisms, but there are no truths which a sound judgment can be warranted in despising.

When the student comes to apply these lessons to the judgment of the characters and events of the history that he is studying, and to carry his experience of the past into the present, he finds, if his study has taught him facts as well as maxims, that the great necessity of practical judgment is patience and tolerance, and that the highest justice must rest content for a time to see many things continue wrong that cannot be righted without a greater wrong.

The stock of information from which the student draws these practical lessons is itself the matter on which in the further stages of present history he is called upon to exercise them. He has a part to play in the politics of his own age: he must have made himself acquainted with the national identity of nations, the rights and claims, the sins and punishments and probations of dynasties; the origins and accretions of parties; the growth of the influences to which their owners give the name of principles. The stock of information