m, "Go and examine this thing, and in the name of
God inform me what is necessary to be done with regard to it. You will
see how we may clean out the foul things in it that render it poison
to everybody." Well, they sat down then, and in the course of six
weeks--there was no public speaking then, no reporting of speeches,
and no trouble of any kind; there was just the business in hand--they
got sixty propositions fixed in their minds of the things that
required to be done. And upon these sixty propositions Chancery was
reconstituted and remodelled, and so it has lasted to our time. It had
become a nuisance, and could not have continued much longer.

That is an instance of the manner in which things were done when a
Dictatorship prevailed in the country, and that was what the Dictator
did. Upon the whole, I do not think that, in general, out of common
history books, you will ever get into the real history of this
country, or anything particular which it would beseem you to know. You
may read very ingenious and very clever books by men whom it would be
the height of insolence in me to do any other thing than express
my respect for. But their position is essentially sceptical. Man
is unhappily in that condition that he will make only a temporary
explanation of anything, and you will not be able, if you are like the
man, to understand how this island came to be what it is. You will not
find it recorded in books. You will find recorded in books a jumble
of tumults, disastrous ineptitudes, and all that kind of thing. But to
get what you want you will have to look into side sources, and inquire
in all directions.

I remember getting Collins' _Peerage_ to read--a very poor peerage as
a work of genius, but an excellent book for diligence and fidelity--I
was writing on Oliver Cromwell at the time. (Applause.) I could get no
biographical dictionary, and I thought the peerage book would help
me, at least tell me whether people were old or young; and about all
persons concerned in the actions about which I wrote. I got a great
deal of help out of poor Collins. He was a diligent and dark London
bookseller of about a hundred years ago, who compiled out of all kinds
of treasury chests, archives, books that were authentic, and out
of all kinds of things out of which he could get the information he
wanted. He was a very meritorious man. I not only found the solution
of anything I wanted there, but I began gradually to perceive this
imm