fatal to a practical politician, is ruin to a student of history,
who is the politician with his face turned backwards #83. It is
playing at study, to see nothing but the unmeaning and unsuggestive
surface, as we generally do. Then we have a curious proclivity
to neglect, and by degrees to forget, what has been certainly known.
An instance or two will explain my idea. The most popular English
writer relates how it happened in his presence that the title of
Tory was conferred upon the Conservative party. For it was an
opprobrious name at the time, applied to men for whom the Irish
Government offered head-money; so that if I have made too sure
of progress, I may at least complacently point to this instance
of our mended manners. One day, Titus Oates lost his temper
with the men who refused to believe him, and, after looking
about for a scorching imprecation, he began to call them Tories
#84. The name remained; but its origin, attested by Defoe,
dropped out of common memory, as if one party were ashamed of
their godfather, and the other did not care to be identified
with his cause and character. You all know, I am sure,
the story of the news of Trafalgar, and how, two days after it
had arrived, Mr. Pitt, drawn by an enthusiastic crowd, went
to dine in the city. When they drank the health of the minister
who had saved his country, he declined the praise. "England,"
he said, "has saved herself by her own energy; and I hope that
after having saved herself by her energy, she will save Europe
by her example." In 1814, when this hope had been realised,
the last speech of the great orator was remembered, and a medal
was struck upon which the whole sentence was engraved, in four
words of compressed Latin: _Seipsam virtute, Europam exemplo_.
Now it was just at the time of his last appearance in public that
Mr. Pitt heard of the overwhelming success of the French in
Germany, and of the Austrian surrender at Ulm. His friends
concluded that the contest on land was hopeless, and that it was
time to abandon the Continent to the conqueror, and to fall back
upon our new empire of the sea. Pitt did not agree with them.
He said that Napoleon would meet with a check whenever he
encountered a national resistance; and he declared that Spain was
the place for it, and that then England would intervene #85. General
Wellesley, fresh from India, was present. Ten years later, when
he had accomplished that which Pitt had seen in the l