Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/33

 from the rigorous line drawn by the less practical design of their elders. So the world moves on in a line straighter than the rules of either party would have made it; and it is well that it is so, the education of a political life is long, and the time for active work in it, for the most part, extremely short. A good deal of enthusiasm is worn out before the action begins, or else the difference between the result and the design would be intolerable to a sincere believer in his own system.

We must, I repeat, if we are to qualify ourselves for forming a sound judgment on these matters, begin at the beginning. We must not work back from popular prejudices, or from philosophic ideas, or from the prominent subject of to-day. The history of Poland cannot be truly viewed by one who starts from the Partition; the history of Turkey cannot be truly read from the standing point of the balance of power; that of Germany does not begin, as politicians nowadays join in insisting, from the treaties of Vienna. There are rights that are not turned into wrongs, and wrongs that cannot be turned into rights, by any treaties. There are hopes that cannot, ought not to, be dashed into despair by any pacifications. There are sentiments, if you please to call. them so, which depend on long ages of deeply implanted sympathies, of long experience of common suffering and common success, on a firm basis of right and popular love, that may be dismissed by an aggressive politician as emptiness and vanity, but which are the only true basis of free government, the only safe support of thrones, the only true tie of nationalities.

With these things and the deep wide range of facts from which they spring, the student of history must make himself acquainted, and being acquainted he learns to sympathise. Unlike the genealogist and the local antiquary, he does not work back from the particular sympathy to the old foundation, but begins with the beginning and works up to the situation, the sentiment, the sympathy, or the antipathy of the day. Need I adduce the parallel from the sacred sister study? Who ever became a theologian by working back from the doctrinal or ritual questions of yesterday? Nay, who is