Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/43

 And this leads me to recur to the other principle upon which I proposed to act, and which struck the imagination of my reviewer as illusory or useless. My idea was and is, that, as mankind is roughly divided between the advocates of order and the advocates of change, and as both classes contain about an equal number of good, bad, and indifferent, of the wise, of the sensible and of the stupid, it was a function of the historical teacher, not to try to make them all think alike or to set himself up as a judge, saying to the one side you are all wrong, or to the other you are all right, but to present to both the facts and courses of events, which are the stores out of which both sides must draw their weapons, in such a fair and just view that they might be safely used by either. Simply, it was not my work to make men Whigs or Tories, but to do my best, having Whigs and Tories by nature as the matter I was to work upon, to make the Whigs good, wise, sensible Whigs, and the Tories good, wise, sensible Tories; to teach them to choose their weapons and to use them fairly and honestly. Well, I still adhere to that view, and every year what I see in public life around me confirms my belief in the truth and value of the principle. How far I have been successful in acting upon it I cannot of course say; but I feel sure that the growth of sound historical teaching would have spared us such national humiliation as we have undergone, during the last few years, in the treatment of the Public Worship Act, the Judicature Act, and the Royal Titles Act. I am quite sure that both the speakers and writers on those subjects would have been very much wiser and more modest men, if they had, I will not say attended my lectures, but passed a stiff examination in the History School: if we could not have made them wiser, we would at all events have made them sadder.

Well, are these statements of principle made merely to cover the sad fact that I have not been a successful lecturer? that I have to join in the professorial chorus of complaint that the professorial and tutorial systems have not yet dove-tailed into one another with all the completeness that could be wished? Perhaps it is so. I have sometimes felt a little hurt that, after preparing and advertising a good course of