en upon
paper, but claiming to develop by a law of organic growth; with
our disbelief in the virtue of definitions and general principles
and our reliance on relative truths, we can have nothing
equivalent to the vivid and prolonged debates in which other
communities have displayed the inmost secrets of political
science to every man who can read. And the discussions of
constituent assemblies, at Philadelphia, Versailles and Paris, at
Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva, Frankfort and Berlin, above nearly
all, those of the most enlightened States in the American Union,
when they have recast their institutions, are paramount in the
literature of politics, and proffer treasures which at home we
have never enjoyed.

To historians the later part of their enormous subject is
precious because it is inexhaustible. It is the best to know
because it is the best known and the most explicit. Earlier
scenes stand out from a background of obscurity. We soon reach
the sphere of hopeless ignorance and unprofitable doubt. But
hundreds and even thousands of the moderns have borne testimony
against themselves, and may be studied in their private
correspondence and sentenced on their own confession. Their
deeds are done in the daylight. Every country opens its archives
and invites us to penetrate the mysteries of State. When Hallam
wrote his chapter on James II, France was the only Power whose
reports were available. Rome followed, and The Hague; and then
came the stores of the Italian States, and at last the Prussian
and the Austrian papers, and partly those of Spain. Where Hallam
and Lingard were dependent on Barillon, their successors consult
the diplomacy of ten governments. The topics indeed are few on
which the resources have been so employed that we can be content
with the work done for us and never wish it to be done over
again. Part of the lives of Luther and Frederic, a little of the
Thirty Years' War, much of the American Revolution and the French
Restoration, the early years of Richelieu and Mazarin, and a few
volumes of Mr. Gardiner, show here and there like Pacific islands
in the ocean. I should not even venture to claim for Ranke, the
real originator of the heroic study of records, and the most
prompt and fortunate of European pathfinders, that there is one
of his seventy volumes that has not been overtaken and in part
surpassed. It is through his accelerating influence mainly that
our branch of study has become