r illustrate the successive phases of national growth,
prosperity, and adversity. The history of morals, of industry, of
intellect, and of art; the changes that take place in manners or
beliefs; the dominant ideas that prevailed in successive periods; the
rise, fall, and modification of political constitutions; in a word,
all the conditions of national well-being became the subjects of their
works. They sought rather to write a history of peoples than a history
of kings. They looked specially in history for the chain of causes and
effects. They undertook to study in the past the physiology of
nations, and hoped by applying the experimental method on a large
scale to deduce some lessons of real value about the conditions on
which the well-being of society mainly depends.

How far have they succeeded in their attempt, and furnished us with a
real compass for political guidance? Let me in the first place frankly
express my own belief that to many readers of history the study is not
only useless, but even positively misleading. An unintelligent, a
superficial, a pedantic or an inaccurate use of history is the source
of very many errors in practical judgment. Human affairs are so
infinitely complex that it is vain to expect that they will ever
exactly reproduce themselves, or that any study of the past can enable
us to predict the future with the minuteness and the completeness that
can be attained in the exact sciences. Nor will any wise man judge the
merits of existing institutions solely on historic grounds. Do not
persuade yourself that any institution, however great may be its
antiquity, however transcendent may have been its uses in a remote
past, can permanently justify its existence, unless it can be shown
to exercise a really beneficial influence over our own society and our
own age. It is equally true that no institution which is exercising
such a beneficial influence should be condemned, because it can be
shown from history that under other conditions and in other times its
influence was rather for evil than for good.

These propositions may seem like truisms; yet how often do we hear a
kind of reasoning that is inconsistent with them! How often, for
example, in the discussions on the Continent on the advantages and
disadvantages of monastic institutions has the chief stress of the
argument been laid upon the great benefits which those institutions
produced in ages that were utterly different from our own,--in th