times the love of truth, sometimes the more
amiable dispositions, that are most valued, and occupy the foremost
place in the moral type. The men of each age must be judged by the
ideal of their own age and country, and not by the ideal of ours. Men
look at life in very different aspects, and they differ greatly in
their ways of reasoning, in the qualities they admire, in the aims
which they chiefly prize. In few things do they differ more than in
their capacity for self-government; in the kinds of liberty they
especially value; in their love or dislike of government guidance or
control.

The power of realising and understanding types of character very
different from our own is not, I think, an English quality, and a
great many of our mistakes in governing other nations come from this
deficiency. Some thirty or forty years ago especially it was the
custom of English statesmen to write and speak as if the salvation of
every nation depended mainly upon its adoption of a miniature copy of
the British Constitution. Now, if there is a lesson which history
teaches clearly, it is that the same institutions are not fitted for
all nations, and that what in one nation may prove perfectly
successful, will in another be supremely disastrous. The habits and
traditions of a nation; the peculiar bent of its character and
intellect; the degree in which self-control, respect for law, the
spirit of compromise, and disinterested public spirit are diffused
through the people; the relations of classes, and the divisions of
property, are all considerations of capital importance. It is a great
error, both in history and in practical politics, to attach too much
value to a political machine. The essential consideration is by what
men and in what spirit that machine is likely to be worked. Few
Constitutions contain more theoretical anomalies, and even
absurdities, than that under which England has attained to such an
unexampled height of political prosperity; while a servile imitation
of some of the most skilfully-devised Constitutions in Europe has not
saved some of the South American States from long courses of anarchy,
bankruptcy, and revolution.

These are some of the political lessons that may be drawn from
history. Permit me, in conclusion, to say that its most precious
lessons are moral ones. It expands the range of our vision, and
teaches us in judging the true interests of nations to look beyond the
immediate future. Few good judges