showed that among the republics of ancient Greece those whose constitutions were comparatively democratic fared better on the whole, and did more for humanity, than those in which power was monopolized by very few. But if we remember that Athens had probably a smaller proportion of voters to non-voters, and certainly enforced more rigidly the exclusion of Uitlanders than the much abused Transvaal republic; that the machinery of popular government had not advanced beyond that crudest of all methods, direct voting in one general assembly, and that consequently full membership of a Greek State could never be extended beyond the number that could attend the same meeting and listen to the same speeches; and lastly, if we remember that almost every citizen of the freest Greek community was a slave-owner, we must recognize the impossibility of deducing any but the vaguest generalities from a comparison of the so-called democracies of antiquity with the great representative democracies of modern times.

The utmost that we can hold to be established in this way is that the admission of free discussion and equal voting within however narrow a range has a wholesome and humanizing effect as far as it goes, and that on the other hand, the principle of equal freedom must either go on extending itself or perish; that a group which is externally aggressive, which finds its main employment in preying upon and enslaving weaker groups, cannot long remain internally free. These simple but not superfluous lessons are quite legitimately deduced from the history of ancient Greece, and cannot well be missed under the masterly guidance of such a writer as Grote. But surely they can also be learned much nearer home, from the story of our own political freedom "broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent," from the failures and successes of our colonial policy, or by observing the narrow escape of our American cousins thirtyfive years ago from losing their own

political freedom through denying per sonal freedom to the negro.

The principles of justice, and the unseen power making for justice, were the same two thousand years ago as they are now, and are the same now in London and Pekin. But the average deviations from the true standard differ widely in different places and times, so that conduct which would be reprobated as outrageous in modern En gland might be excused, or even praised as comparatively just and merciful, in a Norman baron or a general of ancient Rome. From this it seems to follow that periods very different from our own, for which very large allowances have to be made, are better suited to exercise the moral judgments of advanced students than of beginners. Still more advanced must be the students who can profitably study history from the evolutionary point of view, i.e., trying to trace some general law of development from the moral ideas of the lowest savage to those of a Tennyson or a Spencer, similar to the physical changes which zoologists trace from the hipparion to the modern racehorse, and which are traced by conjecture from the ape to the lowest known human being.

I must own that I find evolutionary history too advanced for me. I have tried it with Spencer, with Sir H. Maine, and with Kidd, but so far without feeling much the wiser. So I will say nothing more about it, but ask whether, apart from that, modern history is not likely to be more suitable than ancient for elementary instruction.

Here I can imagine an objector saying that the facts are more distorted by partisan prejudice the nearer we approach our own times. On this ground it used to be the fashion to prohibit school debating societies discussing any events less than fifty years old. The answer is that you cannot escape from party feeling so long as there is any analogy between past and present controversies, as we have just seen in the case of Mitford and Grote, and that where the analogy ceases the in

terest and utility of the study cease also.

The only remaining plea for taking the earlier before the later periods is that a knowledge of the earlier is necessary to the proper understanding of the later. But this brings us back to what has been already noticed as the first use of historical study-namely, to help the solution of present problems by ascertaining how things came to be as we find them.

However well primed we may be with general maxims, our opinion as to the merits of any particular dispute will not be worth much unless we have taken the trouble to ascertain at least the immediate antecedents of the transactions whose propriety is in question. And the larger the transactions with which we are concerned, the further may it be necessary to trace their roots back into the past.

To determine a dispute between two children, a retrospect of a few minutes or hours will generally be sufficient. To decide whether Mary or Jane will be the more eligible housemaid, their character for the last five or six years Iwill be the utmost that we shall generally care to inquire into. If Smith wants to know whether Jones has a safe marketable title to the estate he is offering for sale, it may be necessary to go back forty years or more. When the question is whether the Irish claim for a separate Parliament should be conceded, the statesman must carry his mind back at least to the commencement of the present century, when the Act of Union was passed, which the Nationalists propose to repeal; and having got so far he will probably feel that for a complete understanding of that transaction, and of the present state of Irish sentiment, he must go on to explore the three or four preceding centuries, to William III., or to Elizabeth, perhaps even to Earl Strongbow. Indeed, I remember noticing that the editions of Whitaker's Almanack published while the controversy was at its height, contained statistics as to the short reigns and mostly violent deaths of the Irish kings for I forget how

many centuries before the English invasion, apparently in order to suggest the inference that the Irish never had been and never would be capable of maintaining an orderly national government. Still deeper, as will appear shortly, lie the roots of the eternal Eastern question.

In short, there can be no general rule for determining where historical inquiry of this practical kind should end; but it does not seem very difficult to say where it ought to begin. Only after we have ascertained the immediate causes of our phenomena can we be in a position to push our inquiry into the causes of those causes.

It may be said that historical investigation is one thing and the teaching of history another. But all teachers know that the first condition of effective teaching is to arouse attention, to stimulate curiosity; and how can this object be better obtained than by starting from the facts which we cannot help attending to because they directly concern us, and showing just where they need illumination from the past?

No doubt the ordinary way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning, whether it be in the witness-box, in conversation with a friend, or in a three-volume novel. But that is because in these cases the starting-point and the terminus are equally familiar or equally unfamiliar. Where it is. otherwise, we begin at the end. If an old friend turns up unexpectedly, the chances are that our first question will be, "How did you come here?" and toat after explaining the immediate reason for his presence, he will go back to the date of his last meeting with us, and give an outline of his doings in the interval in chronological order. But in making a new acquaintance there is no last meeting to refer to, so conversation finds its starting-point in the incident which brought us together, or in the personality of the friend who introduced us, and thence travels back to earlier events connected with one or the other.

Obviously, the study of history re

sembles the second case rather than the first. There is no last meeting to refer to; no remote past already more familiar than the recent past. Each historical personage who comes on the scene is bound to justify his intrusion by tacking himself on to somebody of whom we have heard before; and who can the first introducer be, if not some living contemporary?

See where we are landed by the reverse process. You may interest me in Moses, as the person who brought the Israelites out of Egypt, provided I already know something of their going down into Egypt; and you may interest me in Joseph going down into Egypt, if I already know something of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; but where in this ascending scale shall we come to a person with whom I may be presumed to be familiar before my studies commence? In reality Moses interests us because of his connection, through Hebrew history, the New Testament, and many other links, with that religious atmosphere, described loosely as Christianity, in which we live and move and have our being.

The late Professor Freeman was so great a stickler for "beginning at the beginning," that when he was appointed Regius professor of modern history at Oxford, he objected strongly to the title, but consoled himself by reflecting that the university had not attempted to define "modern history." One friend had told him that modern history began with the French Revolution; and another distinguished scholar had held that it began with the call of Abraham!1 He himself considered the latest real starting-point to be "the first beginnings of the recorded history of Aryan Europe"-that is, I suppose, practically either the poems of Homer, or the first Olympiad.1 It may be that we only need a little more light from the Assyriologists and Egyptologists to display the Greek civilization growing as gradually and naturally out of those older types of social order as the Roman out of the Greek, or the Teutonic out of the Roman.

1 Methods of Historical Study, pp. 21, 27, 114.

In the days, not so very long ago, when it was currently believed that the first man was created exactly four thousand years before the birth of Christ, and that at least one genealogy could be traced without a break from the first Adam to the second, there was perhaps a little more sense in this talk about beginning at the beginning. But for those who accept the modern teaching there is no beginning, only gradually diminishing light as we grope our way further and further back from the present time.

I

Granting that our comprehension of the present will be assisted, more or less, by every extension of our acquaintance with the past; still, the practical question for most of us who do not see our way to mastering all history before the time comes for applying our knowledge is, Which portion had we better make sure of first? say, begin with the living present, and with that branch of public affairs which for any reason excites your interest most strongly. Learn, as best you can, to distinguish truth from falsehood in what you read in the newspapers. Make out from Whitaker's Almanack, or some equally obvious source, the population, resources, expenditure, and constitution of your own country. This done, it will be time to inquire where the need for historical explanations of the phenomena before you comes in, and to take steps for supplying them.

Freeman compares the study of recent history before the earlier periods to building the superstructure before the foundations.1 But why do we build upwards from the ground, instead of downwards from the sky? Surely, because we find ourselves on the ground, and can only approach the higher levels by utilizing the materials that lie around us. Just so we find our selves in this year of grace, 1896, and can only come to know anything about what happened before we were born by utilizing the materials now existing; by applying our sense of hearing to the spoken narratives of our elders, and our sight and touch to the books in our libraries, and to the coins and imple

dian Empire tempt us to approach, step by step, its distant and obscure source in an Elizabethan trading company? Each of these courses would have its special attractions, and all ought undoubtedly to be taken at some time or other. But for the special purpose of contrasting the backward method with ordinary school teaching we shall do best to choose for our starting-point the present acute stage of the Eastern question.

If the last lecture of our preliminary series has answered its purpose, the student will have grasped the general distribution of political power over the face of the planet, and will understand that, while the United States may perhaps claim a predominating influence over the two continents of America, and Japan, the youngest member of the very select company of great civilized powers, may count for a good deal in the politics of the far East; yet, so far as Europe, Africa, and the western half of Asia are concerned, there are six great powers who can practically enforce almost any point about which they are agreed-namely, Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Now, when he learns from the newspapers that these six powers addressed to the Porte last autumn a joint remonstrance against the horrible misgovernment disclosed by the Armenian massacres; that this remonstrance produced no effect beyond some paper reforms; yet that the idea of coercive measures, joint or several, has now been abandoned, he will ask for an explanation, and he will find it in the recent relations between Great Britain and Russia.

Twenty years ago, he will be told, massacres very similar in character took place in the European dominious of the sultan, but with the difference that there the Christians formed a large majority instead of a small minority of the population. Then, as now, the same six powers agreed in pressing on the sultan a scheme of reform, which, however, instead of accepting on paper, he flatly rejected.

But at that point the attitude of the two powers most interested was almost exactly the reverse of what it is now. Great Britain protested against any coercive measures. Russia took up arms alone. Then we only just stopped short of fighting on the side of the Turk, and did actually deprive the Russians of a large part of the fruits of their hard-won victory. This alone would go far to explain why Russia should now be disinclined either to put herself forward in coercing the Turk, or to approve of England's unwonted forwardness. But the student will soon learn that there is much more behind. To explain the diplomatic sparring between England and Russia in 1876 we must go back to the actual conflict in 1854-6, when we supported the Turk in his refusal to allow a general Russian protectorate over his Christian subjects, and not only made this protest good at the cost of a bloody war, but deprived the Russians of their Black Sea fleet, and prevented them for sixteen years from building another.

To explain our attitude on that occasion we should have to refer to the interest, real or supposed, of our Indian Empire; but the history of British India would be, as I have already said, the subject of a separate course. To explain the general opposition to Russia we should have to notice the established habit of European powers combining to prevent the excessive preponderance of any one, the latest previous example of which was the overthrow of Napoleon. But here, again, we must choose between tracing the relations of Christian European powers to each other, and examining their common relation to the one non-Christian power. which constitutes what we call the Eastern question, and it will suit our purpose better to choose the latter. Our next question is, therefore, why the treatment of Turkey by all the powers should be so different from their behavior to each other, even in the case of those most favorable to her. The reason must be either a degree of habitual misgovernment greatly in ex

1