hich may
have, ere they be solved, the most painful consequences to one of the
greatest nations on earth.

So far removed is the sequence of human history from any thing which we
can call irresistible or inevitable. Did one dare to deal in epithets,
crooked, wayward, mysterious, incalculable, would be those which would
rather suggest themselves to a man looking steadily not at a few facts
here and there, and not again at some hasty bird's-eye sketch, which he
chooses to call a whole, but at the actual whole, fact by fact, step by
step, and alas! failure by failure, and crime by crime.

Understand me, I beg. I do not wish (Heaven forbid!) to discourage
inductive thought; I do not wish to undervalue exact science. I only ask
that the moral world, which is just as much the domain of inductive
science as the physical one, be not ignored; that the tremendous
difficulties of analyzing its phenomena be fairly faced; and the hope
given up, at least for the present, of forming any exact science of
history; and I wish to warn you off from the too common mistake of trying
to explain the mysteries of the spiritual world by a few roughly defined
physical laws (for too much of our modern thought does little more than
that); and of ignoring as old fashioned, or even superstitious, those
great moral laws of history, which are sanctioned by the experience of
ages.

Foremost among them stands a law which I must insist on, boldly and
perpetually, if I wish (as I do wish) to follow in the footsteps of Sir
James Stephen: a law which man has been trying in all ages, as now, to
deny, or at least to ignore; though he might have seen it if he had
willed, working steadily in all times and nations. And that is--that as
the fruit of righteousness is wealth and peace, strength and honour; the
fruit of unrighteousness is poverty and anarchy, weakness and shame. It
is an ancient doctrine, and yet one ever young. The Hebrew prophets
preached it long ago, in words which are fulfilling themselves around us
every day, and which no new discoveries of science will abrogate, because
they express the great root-law, which disobeyed, science itself cannot
get a hearing.

For not upon mind, gentlemen, not upon mind, but upon morals, is human
welfare founded. The true subjective history of man is the history not
of his thought, but of his conscience; the true objective history of man
is not that of his inventions, but of his vices and his virtues. S