itical pre-eminence of the English people has been most
conspicuously shown. It is difficult to overrate its importance. It is
the institutions of a country that chiefly maintain the sense of its
organic unity, its essential connection with its past. By their
continuous existence they bind together as by a living chain the past
with the present, the living with the dead.

Few greater calamities can befall a nation than to cut herself off, as
France did in her great Revolution, from all vital connection with her
own past. This is one of the chief lessons you will learn from
Burke--the greatest and truest of all our political teachers. Bacon
expressed in an admirable sentence the best spirit of English politics
when he urged that 'men in their innovations should follow the example
of Time itself, which indeed innovated greatly, but quietly, and by
degrees scarcely to be perceived.'

There is a third department of history which appears to me especially
valuable to political students. It is the history of those vast
Revolutions for good or for ill which seem to have transformed the
characters or permanently changed the fortunes of nations, either by a
sudden and violent shock or by the slow process of gradual renovation.
You will find on this subject, in our country, two great and opposite
exaggerations. There is a school of writers, of which Buckle is an
admirable representative, who are so struck by the long chain of
causes, extending over many centuries, that preceded and prepared
Revolutions, that they teach a kind of historic fatalism, reducing
almost to nothing the action of Individualities; and there is another
school, which is specially represented by Carlyle, who reduce all
history into biographies, into the action of a few great men upon
their kind.

The one class of writers will tell you with great truth that the Roman
Republic was not destroyed by Caesar, but by the long train of
influences that made the career of Caesar a possibility. They will show
how influences working through many generations had sapped the
foundations of the Republic--how the beliefs and habits on which it
once rested had passed away--how its institutions no longer
corresponded with the prevailing wants and ideas--how a form of
government which had proved excellently adapted for a restricted
dominion failed when the Roman eagles flew triumphantly over the whole
civilised world, and how in this manner the strongest tendencies of
the tim