ge 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 #1. 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 text-books #2. That is a chair which, in the progressive
division of labour by which both science and government prosper #3,
may some day be founded in this country. Meantime, we do well to
acknowledge the points at which the two epochs diverge. For the
contemporary differs from the modern in this, that many of its
facts cannot by us be definitely ascertained. The living do not
give up their secrets with the candour of the dead; one key is
always excepted, and a generation passes before we can ensure
accuracy. Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the
reality, as the initiated know it. Even of a thing so memorable
as the war of 1870, the true cause is still obscure; much that we
believed has been scattered to the winds in the last six months,
and further revelations by important witnesses are about to
appear. The use of history turns far more on certainty than on
abundance of acquired information.

Beyond the question of certainty is the question of detachment.
The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated
is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and
our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape
in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the
tempest of active life #4. For a man is justly despised who has one
opinion in history and another in politics, one for abroad and
another at home, one for opposition and another for office.
History compels us to fasten on abiding issues, and rescues us
from the temporary and transient. Politics and history are
interwoven, but are not commensurate. Ours is a domain that
reaches farther than affairs of state, and is not subject to the
jurisdiction of governments. It is our function to keep in view
and to command the movement of ideas, which are not the effect
but the cause of public events #5; and even to allow some priority
to ecclesiastical history over civil, since, by reason of the
graver issues concerned, and the vital consequences of error, it
opened the way in research, and was the first to be treated by
close reasoners and scholars of the higher rank #6.

In the same mann