or a gain. Ranke, who
was my own master, rejected the view that I have stated;[36] Comte,
the master of better men, believed that we drag a lengthening chain
under the gathered weight of the dead hand;[37] and many of our recent
classics, Carlyle, Newman, Froude, were persuaded that there is no
progress justifying the ways of God to man, and that the mere
consolidation of liberty is like the motion of creatures whose advance
is in the direction of their tails. They deem that anxious precaution
against bad government is an obstruction to good, and degrades
morality and mind by placing the capable at the mercy of the
incapable, dethroning enlightened virtue for the benefit of the
average man. They hold that great and salutary things are done for
mankind by power concentrated, not by power balanced and cancelled and
dispersed, and that the whig theory, sprung from decomposing sects,
the theory that authority is legitimate only by virtue of its checks,
and that the sovereign is dependent on the subject, is rebellion
against the divine will manifested all down the stream of time.

[Sidenote: CERTAINTY]

[Sidenote: DEPENDENT ON RESERVE]

I state the objection not that we may plunge into the crucial
controversy of a science that is not identical with ours, but in order
to make my drift clear by the defining aid of express contradiction.
No political dogma is as serviceable to my purpose here as the
historian's maxim to do the best he can for the other side, and to
avoid pertinacity or emphasis on his own. Like the economic precept
_Laissez-faire_[38] which the eighteenth century derived from Colbert,
it has been an important, if not a final step in the making of method.
The strongest and most impressive personalities, it is true, like
Macaulay, Thiers, and the two greatest of living writers, Mommsen and
Treitschke, project their own broad shadow upon their pages. This is a
practice proper to great men, and a great man may be worth several
immaculate historians. Otherwise there is virtue in the saying that a
historian is seen at his best when he does not appear.[39] Better for
us is the example of the Bishop of Oxford, who never lets us know what
he thinks of anything but the matter before him; and of his
illustrious French rival, Fustel de Coulanges, who said to an excited
audience: "Do not imagine you are listening to me; it is history
itself that speaks."[40] We can found no philosophy on the observation
of four hundred