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The important point is not that we differ and form parties in politics -this would not be worth discussing because it is certainly unavoidable-but that we carry back our party differences into history. practical politics we have a sensible rule not to disturb the settlement once fairly reached of a controverted question, Vestigia nulla retrorsum. If we could in some similar way limit our political controversies retrospectively, and honestly differ about the questions of the day without allowing the dispute to spread back over all past history, no great harm would be done. The important point is that habit of generalising or idealising our party quarrels which leads us to see them reflected in past history. I would not matter so much that we are all either Liberals or Conservatives, if we had not persuaded ourselves that this difference is but a transient phase of an eternal and necessary conflict between two different classes of men. But when we idealise our party-war and picture it as an Armageddon, or battle between the good and evil principles, between the children of light and the children of darkness, we are driven to assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of the present day answer to the Whigs and Tories of the Revolution, and these to the Cavaliers and Roundheads of the Civil War, and these again to the parties of Strafford and Eliot. We go further and assimilate religious parties to political. From the Reformation onwards we regard the Puritans as religious Liberals, and the Anglican party as Conservative. Nay, we go much further, and see the same eternal controversy raging in all countries and ages. Julius Cæsar and Pericles become Liberals, and their opponents, predestined to failure, are Conservatives. All history appears to be typified in the war of the gods and the Titans.

This grand generalisation is never established by reasoning, but is taken for granted, as if its grandeur and the easy explanation it furnishes of so many phenomena at once, made it self-evident instead of making it peculiarly suspicious. I believe it to be almost entirely baseless. Not only do I believe those analogies between Athenian or Roman and modern politics of which so much has been made to be almost entirely fantastic, but I do not admit the analogy between the politics of the present age and those of the seventeenth century, or of the eighteenth before the French Revolution. I do not believe that the modern Liberal answers to the Whig of the Revolution of 1688, nor the modern Conservative to the old Tory, nor the old Tory to the follower of Strafford. The resemblances seem to me to be superficial, and the seductive unity which they give to English history, to be an illusion. In this opinion I am not singular. Lord Stanhope in a well-known passage of his history has made a still stronger statement. He alleges not only that the Whig of Queen Anne's reign does not answer to the Whig of the Reform Bill, nor the Tory to the Tory, but the very contrary, that the Whig answers to the Tory, and the Tory to the Whig, and he supports this extraordinary position by a parallel, which is telling enough, between a Tory of Harley's school and a Whig of the Re form Bill How or when such a marvellous transformation was effected,

varying thing it is commonly imagined to have been, a perp flict between liberty and servility, or between progress and inertness or caution. You say perhaps it has been such a the whole, but at particular points there is so much confusi true character cannot be discerned; the stream flows so, but casional eddies, the tide sets this way, but a single wave ma moving the other. Very pretty metaphors; but few of us are a large and startling are the phenomena which they are inven plain. Let me at least suggest that the true explanation ma different, that this grand theory of a steady uniform tendency aided by all the friends of light, and thwarted by all timid, or or over-cautious friends of darkness, may be an illusion, an party-conflicts of different ages may really have little conne each other. Strafford may have been on the side of the Cour not at all like a Tory. Burke may have been an anxious Co in his old age, after having been at an earlier time the great philosopher of Whiggism, and yet he may, as he said him changed no opinion. Pitt may have sided with the Court, a have been the "foul apostate from his father's fame" that saw in him. It may be that it is not so much the unlikene ties at different periods that needs to be explained as their like may ask why it should be expected that the parties of one a resemble those of another? It does not follow because a perpetual party-conflict among us that there is a difference of opinion. Where Parliament has the fu criticism, an organised Opposition becomes a necessity an Opposition need not represent any opposite theory of p need not have a political doctrine of its own. In fact, Pul not make a less efficient leader of opposition to Walpole bec were Whigs, nor Canning to Addington because both were To the other hand, a perpetual party-conflict will always seem to standing difference of opinion. There is a strong temptat rival parties have once been organized, have lasted some when a new generation has been educated to follow in the ste first party-leaders, to idealize the party-war. At particular parties really are at issue on some grand point of principle, a this happens the conflict is felt to be more interesting, and sions rise into a sort of religion. Hence arises the wish to kee flict always at this high level, and so an attempt is made to parties as united like sects or churches by a common creed, no agreement on some passing question, but by a deeper agreem versal political principles. It would not be very easy to mak

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if the members of the party were critical, but they are not; they readily accept the grand maxims which are put into their mouths. then the last step is taken; the creed of the existing party is identified in the same facile manner with the supposed creed or the famous parties of our past history, and at last with all the famous historical parties that seem to have been in the right anywhere, whether at Florence, or ancient Rome, or ancient Athens.

This has been done with so much success, that I may seem to be suggesting a kind of sceptical doubt, which deprives history of its grandeur and interest. It is so interesting to think that Russell and Sidney died for the principles for which modern Liberals fight, and that Falkland may be invoked as a kind of patron-saint by the modern Conservative. It makes history seem comparatively so dull to suppose that the controversies of that age were really essentially different from those of the present day, that they are essentially extinct, and that we yield to an illusion when we suppose that we are engaged in the same struggle as our ancestors. But the truth is, that it is just this premature generalization, this easy and popular philosophy of history, which in practice makes our history a sealed book to us. It is this which prevents us from learning anything from it, because it prevents us from studying it without prejudice; it is this which prevents English history from taking its proper place in education; it is this which makes the most learned works on it untrustworthy and unauthoritative.

It does not matter where we go in the history of England since the accession of the Stuarts, we cannot escape the influence of our party connexions. We cannot dream of looking simply at the facts, though in all other departments of study we recognize this to be the indispensable condition of obtaining trustworthy knowledge. In every statesman, whose career we study, we see a member either of our own party, or the party opposed to us. We form our opinion of each statesman, not by studying hin, but simply by marking the uniform he wears. If that uniform is the wrong one he is condemned, and all his merits sink to the level of redeeming features, only pleaded in mitigation of sentence. Now, the reason of this is not simply that there are parties, nor that we belong to a party, but that by a theory we have put those parties into history.

And what is it that prevents history from taking its proper place in education? Prima facie, you would say that no study could be more important. In theory what can be more desirable than that every Englishman should have the history of his country at his fingers' ends, that he should understand its position and vocation in the world, that in political questions he should be well-furnished with precedents, and practiced in forming a judgment? But practically there is the same difficulty that meets us in theology. Is the teacher to teach his own opinions, which may chance to be entirely opposed to all that the pupil has been taught in his father's house? Or are we to have a conscience

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far into the past, that they are for the most part purely pract occasional, and that the sublime platitudes which we suppose lie them are for the most part only the weapons used in the r war or dreams of our own fussy imagination.

And once more, what is it which disquiets us when we read esteemed histories? Can we pretend that we follow the teaching aulay or even Hallam with the same confidence which we giv teachers of abstract science? Who would for a moment pret Macaulay is an impartial writer? He does not pretend it And this is because he identifies the Whigs of the Revolution Whigs of the Reform Bill, to whom he himself belonged. P he could have rid himself of the influence of a name, if he co rendered himself a candid account of all the changes of meani that name had suffered in travelling through a century and a alised fully how different were the Whigs of Walpole's time fr of the Revolution, and the Rockingham Whigs from both, and ites from all; and if from all these considerations he could hay the conclusion that his party-ties put him under no obligati Junto of Queen Anne's time, and that his connexion with Lord left him perfectly free in respect to Lord Russell's ancestor, have been impartial as well as brilliant. As it is, the differe tween historians and investigators in other departments in re dispassionate candour is most startling. In other departme acknowledged that prejudice or partiality disqualifies a man fo taining the truth. On a serious scientific question, who care rhetorical arguments of a partisan? We put them on one side as not worthy of attention. It is not so in history. doubt, we acknowledge impartiality to be a virtue, impartiality in a secondary and very modified sense. It is partiality of one who can acknowledge faults in his own side, an the virtues of an antagonist. It is the impartiality of one who his inclination by a violent effort. It is not that more complet tiality which the Germans call objectivity. It is not the cool ence of a judge who does not form any opinion at all until the gation is finished, and who, if he detected in himself any in towards either side, would desire to withdraw from the decisio case. In a historian impartiality of this kind would seem alm strous. What! When he narrates some war in which his cou have been engaged, is he not to betray the smallest personal in the cause or the conduct of his countrymen, no inclination to their cause just, no wish to find their valour heroic? To expe

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him would surely be to require him to divest himself of his humanity.

But I suppose it is none the less true that all such personal feelings are fatal to scientific investigation, because they are natural or praiseworthy in themselves. If we cannot see this when we read our own historians, because their prejudices are our own, we see it without the least difficulty in foreign historians. What reader of Michelet, for example, does not smile at the furious zeal with which he pleads the cause of France on all occasions, the petulant contempt with which he treats all nations that may pretend to rival her? What reader does not feel that it would be waste of time to argue with such transparent partiality, and that it cannot be regarded seriously? We do not question that Michelet's patriotism is a very proper feeling, nevertheless we are sorry to see into what puerilities it can betray a grave writer. It is no doubt difficult to say how this particular bias, which is given by national prejudice, should be overcome, though it is easy to see the necessity of overcoming it. But the other bias, with which I am now principally concerned, the bias which arises from party-spirit, cannot this be dealt with? It may seem at first sight not less natural and inevitable. You cannot require the Whig to give up his love of liberty, or the Tory his dread of innovation or anarchy, any more than you can require the patriot to give up his patriotism.

Well! but if it should turn out on examination that these simple issues have not been so often tried in our party-war as is commonly supposed, then the difficulty may be very much diminished. If it should appear that this popular conception of the rival parties is not derived from plain undeniable facts, but that it is a generalisation, and a very loose and questionable one; if it is certain that Whigs have sometimes been what Tories are thought to be, and that Tories have over and over again played the part of Whigs; if the questions agitated in past times turn out on examination to have been much less closely similar to those agitated at the present day than we are apt to suppose; then we may take up past history in a more unprejudiced spirit. Let us only not assume too readily that universal history has for a second title, like a modern novel, Old Friends with New Faces. Let us think it possible that the controversies of our day have not always occupied mankind-nay, that they may have been unknown and inconceivable to our forefathers at no very distant time. Possibly if we give ourselves this chance, we may gradually come to think that we have been all along the victims of a superstition in supposing that an eternal war has always gone forward between the prin ciples of progress and conservation, between youth and age, between the past and the future, and that this grandiose generalisation, so far from explaining the history of the world, disguises and perverts it, which is worse than if it left it unexplained.

I may enter more fully into this question later. Meanwhile let me

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