Page:Study of History.djvu/11

 history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics." Everybody perceives the sense in which this is true. For the science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the stream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action, and a power that goes to the making of the future. In France, such is the weight attached to the study of our own time, that there is an appointed course of contemporary history, with appropriate textbooks. That is a chair which, in the progressive division of labour by which both science and government prosper, may some day be founded in this country. Meantime, we do well to acknowledge