politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters,
the witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate
of the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary
power, of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues
among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom
one enemy says that his cleverness was enough to strike terror, and
another, that genius poured in torrents from his eyes. For the minds
that are greatest and best alone furnish the instructive examples. A
man of ordinary proportion or inferior metal knows not how to think
out the rounded circle of his thought, how to divest his will of its
surroundings and to rise above the pressure of time and race and
circumstance,[21] to choose the star that guides his course, to
correct, and test, and assay his convictions by the light within,[22]
and, with a resolute conscience and ideal courage, to re-model and
reconstitute the character which birth and education gave him.[23]

[Sidenote: FOREIGN CONSTITUTIONS]

For ourselves, if it were not the quest of the higher level and the
extended horizon, international history would be imposed by the
exclusive and insular reason that parliamentary reporting is younger
than parliaments. The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his
government, and no _arcanum imperii_. For him, the foundations have
been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism is
accounted for as distinctly as the works of a watch. But with our
indigenous constitution, not made with hands or written upon paper,
but claiming to develope by a law of organic growth; with our
disbelief in the virtue of definitions and general principles and our
reliance on relative truths, we can have nothing equivalent to the
vivid and prolonged debates in which other communities have displayed
the inmost secrets of political science to every man who can read.
And the discussions of constituent assemblies, at Philadelphia,
Versailles and Paris, at Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva, Frankfort and
Berlin, above nearly all, those of the most enlightened States in the
American Union, when they have recast their institutions, are
paramount in the literature of politics, and proffer treasures which
at home we have never enjoyed.

[Sidenote: RESOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY]

[Sidenote: BEGINNING OF THE DOCUMENTARY AGE]

To historians the later part of their enormous subject is precious
because it is inexhaustible. It is the be