Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/54

 districts for the purpose of collecting inscriptions, the calendaring and cataloguing of manuscripts,—all sorts, in fact, of investigations on which it was, a priori, reasonably probable that discoveries would he made; provided such investigations were carried out systematically, provided the work were well done, even if, in that sense of result, there were no result but the discovery that there was nothing to discover. I do not mean to say that the successful researcher should be placed on a level with the unsuccessful, although his success would probably be in itself remunerative, and the element of good fortune should not be left out of account.

Well, I should like to see us send an occasional envoy to the Vatican Library, or to the great libraries of the Roman princes; or to send a trained scholar, chosen not by competition, but because his peculiar qualifications forced him upon our notice, to watch the explorations at Olympia or at Troy. More generally, however, I think that the endowment of research should take the form of payment for actual results. Find your man of research, and set him to the work of research; pay him something by way of retaining fee, which you may safely do when you have caught him, but let the liberal remuneration for work actually produced be the real endowment, be it books written, books edited, coins or manuscripts collected, as the case may be. The further point, how to reward men of research when their day of research is over, scarcely belongs to this subject; for the rule must be the same, I conceive, in all departments of knowledge: it is a question of pensioning those who have deserved well of us, not of securing any further addition to the sum of knowledge.

The rule that we should first find the man of research and then endow him, not found a chair of research and then find the man to fill it, applies to another important matter which is very much forced upon our minds at this moment. And I must request you to take what I have to say upon it not as any final conclusion, but as the view which at this moment presents itself to me as most feasible, but which circumstances may at any time modify. If we are to look on the measures