Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/31

 is only secondary in importance to the habits of judgment formed by the study of it. For we want to train not merely students but citizens; and citizens of the great communities—the church and the civilised world; to be fitted not for criticism or for authority in matters of memory, but for action. And so it is not views of men and states that are to be taught them, but the power of judging that is to be cultivated, and the information on which that power is to be exercised that is to be imparted, and the faculty of accumulation to be directed to good and pure sources. It is not to make proselytes to one system of politics or another that the work of education is to be directed; a university is no political club or propaganda; I desire to use my office as a teacher of facts and of the right habit of using them.

And to do this we must begin at the right end, work from the past forwards, not backwards from the present. Our students ought not to go into the world a prey to newspaper correspondents: they ought not to go into public life ready to be moulded to the political views of the first clique that may catch hold of them. So far as the fundamental principles of politics go, that is indeed impossible, for men are born most certainly with constitutional inclinations, some to order and others to change; and the power of the earliest education is exerted to direct those inclinations into channels most in accordance with the views of the educators: so by attraction or repulsion, by reaction or by hereditary succession, not by the lessons of books or views of philosophers, young men's sides are taken in life before they know it. But there is still far more in common between the wise and sound of opposing parties than there is between the sound and the corrupt of the same; between the thinkers of opposite parties and the thinkers and the fools of the same. We should teach both sides to teach themselves.

Am I to be understood as stating the purpose of the study of History to be the production of scepticism in politics? Surely not. Rather I maintain that there is so much of good in both the opposing views that good men are pretty equally divided between the two; and that there is so much, I will