re framed and filled in with a true social intelligence--men
would find that they had at the end of it a fair idea--an idea that
might be of great value, and at any rate an idea much to be preferred
to that blank ignorance which is in so many cases practically the only
alternative--of the large issues of our past, of the antagonistic
principles that strove with one another for mastery, of the chief
material forces and moral currents of successive ages, and above all
of those great men and our fathers that begat us--the Pyms, the
Hampdens, the Cromwells, the Chathams--yes, and shall we not say the
Washingtons--to whose sagacity, bravery, and unquenchable ardour for
justice and order and equal laws all our English-speaking peoples owe
a debt that can never be paid.

Another point is worth thinking of, besides the reduction of history
for your purposes to a comprehensive body of rightly grouped
generalities. Dr. Arnold says somewhere that he wishes the public
might have a history of our present state of society _traced
backwards_. It is the present that really interests us; it is the
present that we seek to understand and to explain. I do not in the
least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me
to see my way more clearly through what is happening to-day. I want to
know what men thought and did in the thirteenth century, not out of
any dilettante or idle antiquarian's curiosity, but because the
thirteenth century is at the root of what men think and do in the
nineteenth. Well then, it cannot be a bad educational rule to start
from what is most interesting, and to work from that outwards and
backwards. By beginning with the present we see more clearly what are
the two things best worth attending to in history--not party intrigues
nor battles nor dynastic affairs, nor even many acts of parliament,
but the great movements of the economic forces of a society on the one
hand, and on the other the forms of religious opinion and
ecclesiastical organisation. All the rest are important, but their
importance is subsidiary.

Allow me to make one more remark on this subject. If a dozen or a
score of wise lectures would suffice for a general picture of the
various phases through which our own society has passed, there ought
to be added to the course of popular instruction as many lectures
more, which should trace the history, not of England, but of the
world. And the history of the world ought to go before the