Lectures on Modern history | Page 6

all down the stream of time.
I state the objection not that we may plunge into the crucial controversy
of a science that is not identical with ours, but in order to make my drift
clear by the defining aid of express contradiction. No political dogma is
as serviceable to my purpose here as the historian's maxim to do the
best he can for the other side, and to avoid pertinacity or emphasis on
his own. Like the economic precept laissez faire #38, which the
eighteenth century derived from Colbert, it has been an important, if
not a final step in the making of method. The strongest and most
impressive personalities, it is true, like Macaulay, Thiers, and the two
greatest of living writers, Mommsen and Treitschke, project their own
broad shadow upon their pages. This is a practice proper to great men,
and a great man may be worth several immaculate historians.

Otherwise there is virtue in the saying that a historian is seen at his best
when he does not appear #39. Better for us is the example of the
Bishop of Oxford, who never lets us know what he thinks of anything
but the matter before him; and of his illustrious French rival, Fustel de
Coulanges, who said to an excited audience: "Do not imagine you are
listening to me; it is history itself that speaks." #40 We can found no
philosophy on the observation of four hundred years, excluding three
thousand. It would be an imperfect and a fallacious induction. But I
hope that even this narrow and dis-edifying section of history will aid
you to see that the action of Christ who is risen on mankind whom he
redeemed fails not, but increases #41; that the wisdom of divine rule
appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world #42;
and that achieved liberty is the one ethical result that rests on the
converging and combined conditions of advancing civilisation #43.
Then you will understand what a famous philosopher said, that History
is the true demonstration of Religion #44.
But what do people mean who proclaim that liberty is the palm, and the
prize, and the crown, seeing that it is an idea of which there are two
hundred definitions, and that this wealth of interpretation has caused
more bloodshed than anything, except theology? Is it Democracy as in
France, or Federalism as in America, or the national independence
which bounds the Italian view, or the reign of the fittest, which is the
ideal of Germans #45? I know not whether it will ever fall within my
sphere of duty to trace the slow progress of that idea through the
chequered scenes of our history, and to describe how subtle
speculations touching the nature of conscience promoted a nobler and
more spiritual conception of the liberty that protects it #46, until the
guardian of rights developed into the guardian of duties which are the
cause of rights #47, and that which had been prized as the material
safeguard for treasures of earth became sacred as security for things
that are divine. All that we require is a workday key to history, and our
present need can be supplied without pausing to satisfy philosophers.
Without inquiring how far Sarasa or Butler, Kant or Vinet, is right as to
the infallible voice of God in man, we may easily agree in this, that
where absolutism reigned, by irresistible arms, concentrated
possessions, auxiliary churches, and inhuman laws, it reigns no more;

that commerce having risen against land, labour against wealth, the
State against the forces dominant in society #48, the division of power
against the State, the thought of individuals against the practice of ages,
neither authorities, nor minorities, nor majorities can command implicit
obedience; and, where there has been long and arduous experience, a
rampart of tried conviction and accumulated knowledge, where there is
a fair level of general morality, education, courage, and self-restraint,
there, if there only, a society may be found that exhibits the condition
of life towards which, by elimination of failures, the world has been
moving through the allotted space #50. You will know it by outward
signs: Representation, the extinction of slavery, the reign of opinion,
and the like; better still by less apparent evidences: the security of the
weaker groups #51 and the liberty of conscience, which, effectually
secured, secures the rest.
Here we reach a point at which my argument threatens to abut on a
contradiction. If the supreme conquests of society are won more often
by violence than by lenient arts, if the trend and drift of things is
towards convulsions and catastrophes #52, if the world owes religious
liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the
English, federal republicanism to the American, political equality to the