Seton-^Jatson. 
 
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 The historian as a political force in 
 Central Europe 
 
 D . 
 
 16.2 
 
 33 
 
LIBRARY 
 University of 
 
 California 
 Irvine 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 IRVINE, CALIFORNIA 
 
 E HISTORIAN 
 JS A POLITICAL 
 ORCE IN CENTRAL 
 lUROPE. 
 
 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE 
 
 DELIVERED ON 22 NOVEMBER 1922, 
 BY R. W. SETON-WATSON, 
 
 D.Utt., D.Phil., Professor of Central 
 European History in the University of London. 
 
 JBLISHED BY THE SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC STUDIES 
 1 THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, KING'S COLLEGE. 
 
 EYRE AND SPOTTISWOODE, LIMITED, 
 
 His Majesty's Printers, at 9 East Harding Street, E.G. 4. 
 PRICE 2/- NET. 
 
13- 
 
THE HISTORIAN 
 AS A POLITICAL 
 FORCE IN CENTRAL 
 EUROPE. 
 
 AN INAUGURAL LECTURE 
 
 DELIVERED ON 2 NOVEMBER 1922, 
 
 BY R.W. SETON-WATSON, 
 
 D.Litt., D.Phi!., Professor of Central 
 European History in the University of London. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC STUDIES 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, KING'S COLLEGE. 
 
 EYRE AND SPOTTISWOODE, LIMITED, 
 
 His Majesty's Printers, <tt 9 East Harding St., E.G. 4 
 
Je continuerai toujours a dire ce qui me parait bon et juste 
 sans me gener le mains du monde. C'est par Id que je vaux 
 
 si je vaux quelque chose. 
 
 JOSEPH DE MAISTRE (1805). 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THE foundation of this Chair represents a further stage 
 in the organisation of the School of Slavonic Studies at 
 King's College, and it is therefore a duty of piety and friend- 
 ship to recall the immense debt which our School owes to 
 the late Dr. Ronald Burrows. It was he who first brought 
 us into being, and who in this, as in so many other directions, 
 supplied the motive force, the sympathy, the breadth of 
 vision, without which mountains cannot be moved either in 
 the academic or in the political world. 
 
 This is also a fitting occasion on which to express my 
 gratitude to the Rev. Dr. W. A. Fearon, formerly Headmaster 
 of Winchester, who kindly acted as Chairman at my inaugural 
 lecture. To his vivid and inspiring teaching of history, to 
 his scrupulous balancing of rival facts and opinions, and to 
 his untiring interest in the special work which he gave me 
 to do, I owe a debt which can never be fully repaid. 
 
 R. W. SETON-WATSON. 
 i December, 1922. 
 
THE HISTORIAN AS A POLITICAL 
 FORCE IN CENTRAL EUROPE. 
 
 IF it is customary for each new holder of a historical 
 chair to give some account of the faith that is in him 
 and of the lines which he intends to follow, this is doubly 
 necessary in the case of an entirely new Chair, which is the 
 first of its kind to be created in any British University and 
 whose very foundation is in itself a programme. It is part 
 of a new evolution, of which we ourselves are not as yet 
 fully conscious of an experiment in what are known as 
 Regional Studies ; and the very fact that it is an experiment 
 compels me to intrude upon you a little of my own 
 philosophy of history, in the endeavour to define the 
 principles on which such a Chair must be conducted. 
 
 I do not need to remind you how comparatively recent 
 has been the recognition accorded to modern history as a 
 worthy part of an University curriculum, equal in rank with 
 more venerable studies. Even in Oxford the School of 
 Modern History is only celebrating this term its first jubilee 
 of independent existence, 1 though it may already claim to be 
 the pioneer of systematic historical studies in England. 2 
 And yet as late as 1904 the present Regius Professor was 
 still able to quote Bishop Stubbs's deliberate verdict that 
 at Oxford " the historical teaching of history " has been 
 practically left out, and to make his inaugural lecture a 
 plea for its insertion. 3 
 
 At Cambridge there may possibly have been less pre 
 judice to overcome, but there, too, Modern History did not 
 win full recognition till the all too recent period of Seeley 
 
 1 C. H. Firth, Modern History in Oxford, pp. 17-21. 
 
 2 In 1878 Bishop Stubbs expressed his " faith in the permanence 
 and development of a great historical school in England, which 
 will look to Oxford as an Alma Mater and Fons Scientiarum." 
 (Seventeen Lectures, p. 70). 
 
 3 A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, especially p. 30. 
 
and of Acton. In the Scottish Universities, despite very 
 ancient traditions of culture and in certain respects a closer 
 contact with the Continent, the teaching of history con- 
 tinued to play an utterly subordinate part until the turn of 
 the century, and although the Government had long con- 
 ferred the title of Historiographer Royal on a succession of 
 Scottish scholars, it was left to the munificence of a 
 genealogical expert and the successful enterprise of an 
 Exhibition Committee, to endow Scottish history as an 
 academic study in Edinburgh and Glasgow as late as the 
 present century. In the new English Universities, and 
 among them, in our own, historical studies are now firmly 
 established ; but they cannot look back upon a long life or 
 epoch-making achievements. In a word, history as an 
 organised study, still more as a professional career, is even 
 to-day in its infancy in this country. 
 
 It was a matter of course that in its first stage the new 
 science should concentrate mainly upon English political 
 and constitutional history, though it is true that the history 
 of the Greek and Roman world had long been taught as an 
 annexe to classical studies. The second stage was reached 
 when ecclesiastical history and political economy asserted 
 their separate rights. Then as Victorian England entered 
 upon the era of Imperialist expansion, and as the dogma of 
 " splendid isolation " began to crumble, the vital need for 
 studying Colonial, Indian and American history came to be 
 very widely recognised. The provision of Continental history 
 was merely the last link in a chain of logical sequence. The 
 break-neck pace of modern life could not leave historical 
 studies unaffected, and as ever new means of rapid com- 
 munication were devised and the diffusion of the press 
 attained hitherto undreamt-of proportions, the bearing of 
 such studies upon international relations, and even upon 
 the vital issues of peace and war, became increasingly 
 obvious. Finally the Great War brought home to the general 
 consciousness the need for mutual interpretation between 
 nation and nation, and at the same time the crying need for 
 a basis of sound historical knowledge in the statesmen who 
 
 B 2 
 
settle the world's affairs. Consequently there was a sudden 
 outburst of " regional studies," which may have owed its 
 immediate impulse to what our late enemies call " Kriegs- 
 psychose," but is none the less solidly grounded in the 
 requirements of the modern world. This new development 
 was especially marked in our own University, which, we 
 must ourselves admit, was selected not for any reason of 
 tradition or natural preeminence, but because it is entrenched 
 at the heart of the greatest city of the British Commonwealth, 
 endowed with unique opportunities for research and inter- 
 national intercourse, such as are even to-day not realised to 
 the full. Just as Burke, the member for Bristol, claimed to 
 be also member for Britain, so London University may in 
 some degree claim to be the University of all those scattered 
 students of the British Commonwealth, who have not as yet 
 found their alma mater, and to whom the system of external 
 examination offers opportunities not to be found elsewhere. 
 This I believe to be the real underlying reason why chairs 
 of Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian and Modern 
 Greek studies followed each other in swift succession, and 
 for the first time in any British University separate provision 
 was made for the teaching of Czech, Serbian, Polish and 
 Roumanian. The school of Slavonic Studies, mainly due to 
 the initiative of the late Dr. Burrows and inaugurated by 
 President Masaryk in the first year of his exile, is a concrete 
 attempt to concentrate and systematise all such studies in 
 so far as they relate to Slavonic countries and to focus, at a 
 convenient centre which happens to lie in London, the more 
 serious students of matters Slavonic. Its insistence upon the 
 regional aspect of such studies in other words, upon the 
 need of treating each country or nation in its wider setting 
 is merely a practical application of the view upheld by 
 Arnold and Freeman and most of our historical pioneers, and 
 again by Ranke and the great Germans the view, namely, 
 of the essential Unity of History and of the need for 
 bringing special periods and areas into line with universal 
 history. 
 
 The School of Slavonic Studies has already acquired 
 
an individuality of its own which must not be lost; but 
 it would be the first to welcome any further development 
 such as would make it only one of several sections in a 
 comprehensive School of Foreign Studies, similar in purpose 
 and design to the " Auslandshochschule," whose founda- 
 tion Berlin was planning on the eve of the Great War. 
 And here, merely in passing, let me illustrate the capital 
 importance attached to such studies on the Continent. 
 During the summer of 1922, regular courses of Russian 
 language and literature in many cases supplemented by 
 history, in some by economics were given in seventeen 
 German Universities; while the total number of courses 
 relating to Slavonic countries amounted to eighty notably 
 in Berlin, Konigsberg, Leipzig and the " Ost-Europa- 
 Institut " in Breslau. If, then, the Germans should end 
 by securing a predominant position in the new Russia, 
 it will be the result of superior application and knowledge, 
 harder work and more trained workers. Another, no less 
 remarkable, illustration is the fact that the Czechoslovak 
 Republic has thought it worth while to found in Prague, 
 in addition to the already existing Czech and German 
 Universities, a Russian and an Ukrainian University, both 
 admirably appointed, and also to attract to Prague by 
 special facilities a number of Jugoslav students varying 
 from one to two thousand. This is an investment whose 
 return may well be the intellectual leadership of Czecho- 
 slovakia in the Slavonic world a generation hence. 
 
 My own Chair is part of the evolution to which I have 
 just alluded, and it is not for me to enquire into its 
 prospects of success, but simply to strive after tangible 
 results. This much at least may be said that if ever the 
 past neglect of a subject was an adequate reason for the 
 foundation of a Chair devoted to its study, then no new 
 Chair was ever more needed than that of " Central Euro- 
 pean History." For the neglect of Central Europe, in 
 the widest sense of that term, was throughout the nine- 
 teenth century a conspicuous feature of British historical 
 scholarship. In 1876 we find Bishop Stubbs lamenting 
 
8 
 
 that in English there "is no first-class work on German 
 history since Archdeacon Coxe wrote on the House of 
 Austria." This indirect verdict from a man of Stubbs's 
 standards is at once a measure of our neglect and of the 
 distance since travelled in critical tests. For no one to-day 
 would place the worthy Coxe even in the second rank of 
 historians or praise him either for method or accuracy, or 
 indeed, consult him at all save for sheer lack of a substitute. 
 When Stubbs spoke thus, the last quarter of the century 
 had still to run; yet when it closed, he might safely have 
 affirmed that its entire course had brought us only two 
 really outstanding contributions to German history 
 Carlyle's Frederick the Great and Seeley's Stein. Yet both 
 are, of course, first and foremost, biographies, however 
 broadly planned, and there are many who roundly deny 
 the former's claim to rank as history at all. 
 
 Since the turn of the century, it is true that some of 
 the worst gaps have been filled; and I venture to think 
 that British scholarship has not yet received sufficient 
 credit for its remarkable achievement during the war. 
 That three such books as Sir Adolphus Ward's Germany, 
 Mr. Grant Robertson's Bismarck, and the essays on German 
 Culture edited by Professor W. P. Paterson books which 
 are models of impartiality and balanced judgment should 
 have appeared at the very height of a life-and-death 
 struggle with Germany, is a fact which the " Ninety-six 
 German Professors " of sorry fame would do weU to 
 ponder. That the British historian can write without 
 animus has been still further proved since the war by 
 Mr. Headlam-Morley, Mr. Gooch and Mr. Dawson. 
 
 Though these and other writers have redeemed us 
 from utter reproach, it still remains true that German 
 history has been deplorably neglected in Britain; and 
 indeed we have not even taken the trouble to translate 
 many a foreign historical classic. But when we turn 
 South and East from Germany, we seem at once to leave 
 a forest-clearing and plunge into the primeval jungle. 
 To this day the English language does not possess any 
 
history of Austria-Hungary, good, bad or indifferent. It 
 is true that Mr. Steed's brilliant survey of the Habsburg 
 Monarchy on the eve of dissolution offers the reader the 
 clear insight of history that has been lived and felt before 
 it has been written. But all around him stands unexplored 
 and virgin forest. 
 
 Bohemia is more fortunate : for the admirable outline 
 of her history by Mr. C. E. Maurice has been re-inforced 
 by a whole series of scholarly works in English by that 
 gifted historian, the late Count Liitzow. Polish history 
 can only be studied in the most perfunctory of text- 
 books, though Polish national psychology has found 
 more adequate interpreters in Miss Gardner and Pro- 
 fessor Boswell. Of Serbia, we possessed no adequate history 
 until Mr. Temperley published his short survey in 1917; 
 and of the Southern Slavs as a whole, my own very incom- 
 plete book remained both the best and the worst, because 
 the only, account, until the war produced a crop of 
 ephemeral literature on the subject. Of Bulgaria, there is 
 as yet no detailed history in English, though one from 
 the pen of Lady Grogan may soon be expected. On 
 Roumania there is literally nothing save a few trifling 
 pamphlets, hastily compiled for purposes of the war. 
 
 On the Eastern Question as a whole, we have nothing 
 better than Mr. Marriott's hasty collection of war essays; 
 while on Turkey there is a mass of useful and even instruc- 
 tive publications, but no general history which can be 
 mentioned in the same breath with Hammer-PurgstalTs 
 ponderous but irreplaceable classic, or with the still more 
 solid compilations of Zinkeisen and lorga. It is true that, 
 in the work of Mr. Gibbons and Professor Lybyer, we 
 have the first promise of better things. 
 
 On such an occasion my survey of the field was bound 
 to be rapid and to avoid detail; and it is true that closer 
 investigation would reveal here and there individual works 
 of real merit. But those of you who are at all acquainted 
 with the subject, will, I am certain, not quarrel with my 
 main contention, that the history of Central and South- 
 
10 
 
 Eastern Europe has been deplorably neglected in this 
 country, and that at many points the very foundations 
 have still to be laid. It will obviously be my task to 
 appeal for workers in this field, and to those who may respond 
 I can at least hold out the prospect of an embarrassing 
 freedom from competition. I cannot expect that my field 
 of operation will appeal to the ordinary pass student; but 
 I do certainly look to the post-graduate world for recruits, 
 and can assure them that the holder of this Chair will always 
 be at their disposal for advice and co-operation, both at 
 King's College and at the Institute of Historical Research. 
 Moreover, as time goes on, the development of the Slavonic 
 Review and other kindred schemes of publication should 
 offer a means of publishing serious research work, such 
 as has not hitherto existed. We now have a complete 
 machinery for honours degrees not only in the language 
 and literature of the particular Slavonic countries con- 
 cerned but also in their history and economics; and thus 
 we provide the only possible basis for post-graduate study 
 of their whole internal development. 
 
 II. 
 
 This Chair is officially described as one of " Central 
 European History," and it may therefore seem illogical 
 that its province should be defined as " the history of the 
 area covered by the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 
 and the Balkan States, with the exclusion of Greece." 
 In any case I shall feel bound to put the widest possible 
 interpretation upon the term " Central European History " ; 
 and while naturally concentrating my attention mainly 
 upon an area to which I have already devoted the last 
 17 years, to include also from time to time within my 
 purview the history of modern Germany, and general 
 diplomatic history both of them subjects in which the 
 fate of the Habsburg dominions and the evolution of the 
 Eastern question are inextricably involved. But, in saying 
 this, I feel especially bound to express the hope that we 
 
II 
 
 shall not have to wait very long for the foundation of a 
 Chair of specifically German History. If and when it 
 comes, its holder can be assured, despite all political 
 and national issues, of a neighbourly welcome from the 
 holder of this Chair, and of our definite recognition of 
 his right, and even duty, to conduct friendly raids 
 and incursions such as I am conducting to-day, into 
 neighbouring territory. 
 
 In the present state of historical study specialisation 
 is inevitable, but this must never serve as an excuse for 
 dispensing with the broad world-aspects of any particular 
 historical problem. " That man's the best cosmopolite," 
 wrote Tennyson in bad verse but admirable sentiment, 
 " Who loves his native country best " ; and this is but 
 another way of saying that nationalism, if properly con- 
 ceived, is not a cul-de-sac of hate and insularity, but is the 
 only sure road leading to the international standpoint. 
 And in this age of darkness, so fitfully illuminated by the 
 great ideal of a League of Nations, the historian cannot 
 surely be convicted of propagandism if he frankly accepts 
 the whole as greater than the part, and therefore quite 
 logically the international as higher than the national. 
 The British historian in particular, as he does not belong 
 to any of the many rival nationalities which jostle each 
 other throughout the wide area of Central Europe, is 
 doubtless saved from the worst pitfall that threatens his 
 Continental colleagues. Though distance may sometimes 
 lend too great enchantment to the view, it at least gives 
 perspective. But this is not enough, for he must bear 
 constantly in mind that should he place undue emphasis 
 upon the purely national or racial aspect of events, he 
 will at once be lowering the standards of the Chair and 
 ignoring the interpretation very wisely placed upon 
 " regional studies " by the University authorities when 
 they first committed themselves to the general principle 
 the view, namely, that small national units (especially 
 those whose cultural development is recent) are not a 
 fitting subject for higher academic study, unless they are 
 
12 
 
 from the outset placed in a wider European or it may 
 even be an universal setting. 1 
 
 Applying this to my own field, I shall endeavour to 
 interpret Habsburg history in the light of a constant and 
 sustained dynastic policy, hampered throughout its course 
 by that peculiar duality of aim and outlook which is 
 inherent in the geography of countries poised midway 
 between East and West. In dealing with the history of 
 the Czechs, I shall lay special stress upon the relations of 
 Bohemia with the medieval Empire, upon the place of 
 Hussitism in the political and religious thought of Europe, 
 upon the interaction of Czech and German culture and 
 political theory during the last century. In dealing with 
 Hungary I shall emphasise those peculiar constitutional 
 doctrines which an Asiatic nomad people, transfused by 
 autochthonous Slav and immigrant Teuton blood, evolved 
 in the heart of Europe and successfully upheld against all 
 the efforts of Habsburg absolutism. In dealing with the 
 Jugoslavs, I shall have especially to consider the rival 
 influences of Rome and Byzantium and all that they imply 
 in intellectual outlook. In a word, unless I am to dis- 
 regard the fundamental issues and sink to the level of a 
 mere chronicler, I am bound to dwell upon all those special 
 problems which affect the border line between Teuton and 
 Slav, as also between Slav and Latin, and upon the 
 momentous mission which Providence would seem to have 
 assigned to the Western Slav Nations, of achieving a 
 synthesis between West and East. 
 
 III. 
 
 The experiment of which the Chair of Central European 
 History forms a part, may be said to have a double side 
 the strictly academic, resting on the scientific and critical 
 treatment of historical subjects, and another side belonging 
 to the field of practical politics. The holder of this Chair 
 
 1 " The unity of history," said Lord Morley in 1912, " is now 
 orthodox doctrine, though accepted as orthodox doctrines sometimes 
 are, in various senses." Notes on Politics and History, p. 51. 
 
13 
 
 is thus from the outset faced by two fundamental issues, 
 which in any case seem a fitting introduction to the more 
 special subject of to-day's lecture. 
 
 First, can contemporary history be adequately and 
 scientifically taught, or, for that matter, written; and, 
 second, what is the true relation between history and 
 politics ? Neither question can be properly evaded on this 
 occasion, for the double reason that the history of the last 
 century (including contemporary history, however we may 
 choose to define that study) is to be the main field of my 
 research : and again, that regional studies resting as they 
 do upon a combination of history, language, literature and 
 economics, have a definitely political no less than an 
 academic value, and belong to the borderland where history 
 and politics intermingle. Every man is likely to answer 
 these two questions according as his outlook upon human 
 development and human achievement is negative or positive. 
 Only a fool will claim for the science of history that 
 exactitude which certain sciences were alleged to possess 
 before the days of Einstein. Yet we must not fall into the 
 opposite extreme of assuming that historic truth is utterly 
 unattainable. Such an attitude, if generally adopted, would, 
 I believe, be as fatal to healthy political development as is 
 the agnostic frame of mind to the life of the soul. 
 
 There is a well-known American University 1 whose 
 historical department has inscribed over the door the dictum 
 of Freeman, that " history is past politics, and politics are 
 present history." In the generation that has passed since 
 Freeman's death historians have grown more suspicious of 
 such generalisations, and are likely to prefer Lord Acton's 
 more cautious verdict that " politics and history are inter- 
 woven, but are not commensurate." 2 The conception of 
 history has broadened since Carlyle declared that " the 
 history of mankind is the history of its great men," and 
 Froude in his " inaugural " endorsed this view. We have 
 
 1 Johns Hopkins. See Herbert Adams, Is History Past Politics ? 
 1896. 
 
 * The Study of History, p. 5. 
 
14 
 
 come to realise that history is not merely a political record, 
 but must take almost equal account of religious, racial, 
 social and economic issues. That insistence on the com- 
 parative method, which was one of Freeman's most 
 outstanding merits, has been increasingly justified by 
 contributions in such fields as philology, ethnography and 
 folklore. Above all, we have come to recognise the capital 
 importance to the historian of psychology and its kindred 
 studies not merely of sympathetic concentration on 
 historical personalities, such as we find in the work of 
 Ste. Beuve (though " to leave out or lessen personality 
 would be to turn the record of social development into 
 a void ") l but of penetrating the thought and catching 
 the spirit of intellectual and of popular movements in the 
 past in other words, the gift of nachfuhlen, or " living 
 oneself into the past," as it has been called by the Swiss 
 historian, Eduard Fueter, 2 in an interesting criticism of 
 Leopold von Ranke. Neglect of psychology is at the root 
 of almost all false historical estimates, for the motives which 
 prompt men and sway events are notoriously mixed, and 
 besides, as Lord Morley reminds us, 8 " improvisation has 
 far more to do in politics than historians or other people 
 think." Lamprecht, it is true, argues that history can 
 never wholly shake off a certain affinity to fiction, because 
 it is impossible to be sure of all the inner motives. 4 But 
 even if she is to be called " a grandchild of Saga " (eine 
 Enkelin der Sage), she need not be more ashamed of her 
 origin than religion or philosophy. 
 
 A useful illustration of this broadening conception of 
 history may be quoted from within the sphere of this new 
 Chair : it is the recognition of the value of popular poetry 
 and folksong as affording an insight into national character 
 and even political development. It is true that Herder 
 already recognised this as "an essential part of the history 
 of the nations," but the professional historian's indifference 
 
 1 Lord Morley, Notes on Politics and History, p. 37. 
 
 * Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, p. 478. 
 3 Morley, op. cit., p. 58. 
 
 Deutsche Geschichte, Bd. IV. (i), p. 134. 
 
15 
 
 to such generous doctrine has only very recently been 
 overcome. Some of you may remember the last address 
 delivered in this college by Lord Bryce, 1 in which he pointed 
 out with his usual felicity the importance of the Norse and 
 Icelandic sagas for the study of certain periods of European 
 history. An even more striking example of this is provided 
 by the splendid popular ballads of the Serbs and, indeed, 
 of all branches of the Jugoslav race as an index to the 
 national character and history. 
 
 If, then, there is a growing tendency to admit that there 
 is " nihil humani " which the historian may reject as 
 altogether outside his sphere, there is something of a truce 
 between the two warring theories which Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison has summed up in the catchwords " mere literature" 
 and " mere history." History has to steer an even course 
 between the Scylla of style and the Charybdis of shall I 
 say? palaeography. Those who concentrate above all 
 upon "making history live," as the phrase goes, only too 
 often themselves become uncritical in their search for effect. 
 Yet the instinct is sound, for unless we can make it live, 
 history must, perforce, remain a poor dead thing mere 
 decaying vegetable matter, unfit for huma n digestion, and 
 of little use even as leaf mould. 
 
 Nowhere, however, is this broadening process more 
 apparent than in the growing recognition that contemporary 
 history is a fit subject for instruction, or at least that the 
 very grave objections to its teaching are outweighed by the 
 urgent need for what is, after all, becoming part of a training 
 in citizenship. I yield to none in my belief in the study of 
 history for its own sake, but surely it is well-nigh impos- 
 sible to-day to maintain the attitude adopted by some highly 
 distinguished historians of the nineteenth century and to 
 deny to history any utilitarian basis whatsoever. This surely 
 savours of that most inane of all the arguments employed 
 in favour of the classics, their complete uselessness in all 
 practical callings of life an argument which is, of course, 
 not merely inane but radically untrue. No; the study of 
 1 At a meeting of the Historical Association last winter. 
 
i6 
 
 history has its uses alike for the statesman and for the plain 
 man, and though each generation will always commit its 
 own blunders and follies, and though history never repeats 
 itself to the extent of being a mathematical and infallible 
 guide for the events of to-day, its study is none the less of 
 all things the most salutary, the most sobering, the most 
 catholic of educations the mirror in which we can see and 
 know ourselves and can also gather courage for the future. 
 And it is just at that ill-defined and indefinable point where 
 history becomes merged in politics, that its right understand- 
 ing becomes most imperative. As early as 1836, in his 
 inaugural lecture at Berlin, Ranke 1 stated the argument as 
 follows : " A knowledge of the past is imperfect without a 
 knowledge of the present. We cannot understand the 
 present without a knowledge of earlier times. The past 
 and the present join hands. Neither can exist or be perfect 
 without the other." The second of these assertions is so 
 widely accepted as to have become a commonplace, but the 
 first is by no means so obvious. And yet I believe that it 
 was no accident that the greatest of modern historians 
 should at the outset of his professional career have laid 
 special stress upon what is the real justification of the 
 teaching of contemporary history. The past as a key to 
 the present this is true of every country and period. The 
 present as a key to the past this is peculiarly true of 
 Central and South-Eastern Europe. 
 
 A few instances selected almost at random should suffice 
 to bring this home. In Hungary throughout the half- 
 century preceding the Great War political parties divided 
 into two main currents, which were widely known by the 
 historical label of '48 and '67, according as their followers 
 stood for the revolutionary settlement of 1848 or the Dualist 
 Compromise of 1867. In Roumania the statue of Michael 
 the Brave, who died in 1601, became a rallying point of 
 irredentist stump-orators, and he himself a symbol of 
 national unity. To the Magyar " Mohacs field," to the 
 Czech the burning of Huss and the disaster of the White 
 
 1 Sammtliche Werke, Bd. XXII. 
 
17 
 
 Mountain, to the Croat the treason and death of Zrinski 
 and Frankopan, are living realities no less than the events 
 of the Great War, and have a direct influence upon popular 
 psychology and national aspirations. In Serbia most 
 memorable instance of all the fatal defeat of Kosovo, 
 which marks the fall of the mediaeval Serbian Empire in 
 1389, became for centuries the symbol of national re-birth 
 and unity a symbol of almost Messianic meaning, of 
 victory through defeat and of perfection through suffering. 
 If, then, past and present are interlocked and react 
 daily upon each other, the importance of studying quite 
 recent history, as well as that of earlier periods, can hardly 
 be gainsaid. The French were the first to recognise con- 
 temporary history as a scientific study, and the labours of 
 such men as Sorel, Rambaud and Lavisse have amply 
 justified their foresight. Scarcely less epoch-making in my 
 own special field has been the work of my friends and col- 
 leagues of the sister Institute of Slav Studies in Paris, the 
 late Professor Ernest Denis and his successor Professor 
 Louis Eisenmann. Several circumstances have combined 
 of late years to habilitate such studies in the public eye. 
 On the one hand the increasing intrusion of men without 
 any diplomatic training into the sphere of international 
 politics has served to lay bare the need for at least a minimum 
 of historical knowledge on the part of those who decide 
 frontiers and the fate of peoples. 1 On the other hand, the 
 sources for contemporary history have year by year swelled 
 in volume until, as Lord Acton once said, " there is more 
 fear of drowning than of drought." Even before war 
 
 1 Marshal Keith, in his Memoirs (1734), passes the following 
 verdict upon the Duke of Mar, the incompetent Jacobite leader of 
 1715 : "He was bred up to the pen, and was early brought into 
 business, had good natural parts, but few acquired, and knew so 
 little of some of the commonest parts of sciences, that a gentle- 
 man of good credit assured me he saw him look for the Dutchy 
 of Deux Fonts in a map of Hungary, Valachia and Transilvania." 
 It would thus appear that the standards of knowledge in statesmen 
 have not risen since Keith's day : and indeed a famous statesman 
 of our own day has been known to ask ' who ever heard of 
 Teschen ? ' and to evolve a policy in Asia Minor without knowing 
 the whereabouts of Cilicia. 
 
i8 
 
 and revolution led certain Governments to publish all, or 
 ostensibly all, their innermost diplomatic secrets, there was 
 a tendency to relax archive restrictions in many directions. 
 Indeed, the first stage in this process may be said to date 
 from the unification of Italy, when the archives of Venice 
 and the evicted dynasties were thrown open. Then, again, 
 the modern Press, while increasing the labour of research, 
 also provides innumerable keys to, and checks upon, infor- 
 mation, such as no previous age possessed. Besides, the 
 Press, and the habits of mind which it has bred, have con- 
 tributed more than any other single factor to the break- 
 down of the old absolute secrecy, and conversely to the 
 practice of indiscretion. To-day there are more people in 
 every secret, more cross-currents of interest and sympathy, 
 greater temptations to speak out, than perhaps ever in the 
 past. This is shown not only by the vast crop of memoirs 
 by public men of every rank, and by the mass of diplomatic 
 papers published by order of almost every Government 
 save our own and the French, but also by the impossibility 
 of keeping secret even the most solemnly guarded agreements 
 and memoranda. 
 
 Let me give but two instances from my own sphere of 
 study. The secret conventions of 1912, upon .which the 
 Balkan League against Turkey was based, were almost cer- 
 tainly made known to Austria-Hungary before ever war broke 
 out that autumn, and in the course of 1913 almost all the 
 important facts bearing upon their conclusion became public 
 property. Then, again, the most rigorous secrecy was a 
 foremost condition of the treaty concluded between the 
 Triple Entente and Italy on 26th April, 1915, and yet its 
 essential details did not merely become known almost 
 instantly to the enemy, but within a week of its conclusion 
 had reached even me, then an entirely unofficial person, 
 from other no less unofficial sources in Petrograd and 
 Paris. (This is the same treaty of which President Wilson 
 professed entire ignorance at the Peace Conference in 1919.) 
 
 The publicity of modern life provides splendid weapons 
 for misrepresentation : but, on the whole, it is steadily 
 
19 
 
 justifying the old adage that " murder will out " even 
 when it is diplomatic or historical. In short, it should be 
 easy, if time and space permitted, to make out a very 
 strong case for contemporary history as a perfectly pract- 
 icable study, possessing even marked advantages over its 
 rivals. And those critics who continue to pour contempt 
 upon modern as opposed to ancient history a contempt 
 which we moderns do not return may be reminded that 
 their argument, if pushed to its logical conclusion, over- 
 throws their own idols Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, 
 probably the three greatest writers of contemporary history 
 that ever lived, and a permanent beacon of hope to us poor 
 moderns. 
 
 If I may permit myself, in passing, a brief raid into a 
 cognate, though highly contentious field, I would submit 
 that the true answer to Lord Loreburn's weighty, and to 
 my mind unanswerable plea, that we are not in any real 
 sense " a self-governing nation in foreign affairs," 1 lies in 
 the fact that as a nation we have so lamentably neglected 
 the study of history, and above all of recent history, as to 
 be unable to exercise that control of foreign affairs which 
 can only come through knowledge. The only cure for the 
 present unsatisfactory and haphazard position is " the 
 growth of knowledge about foreign countries, and of the 
 consciousness that foreign policy is not a monopoly of the 
 few, but the direct and vital concern of every man and 
 woman in these islands. For upon it depends the issue 
 of peace and war, and millions have died in battle since 
 1914, because the last generation refused to interest itself 
 in international politics and hugged itself in the fancied 
 security conferred by a strip of narrow sea." 2 Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison, then, was surely right when he wrote : " Nothing 
 but a thorough knowledge of the social system, based upon 
 a regular study of its growth, can give us the power we 
 require to affect it ! For this end we need one thing above 
 all we need history." 3 
 
 1 How the War Came (1919), p. 225. 
 
 a See my Europe in the Melting Pot, p. xiii. 
 
 3 The Meaning of History, p. 19. 
 
20 
 
 IV. 
 
 That the questions which I have raised to-day are far 
 from being merely academic, becomes clearly apparent as 
 soon as we turn to consider the part played by historians 
 and historical writings in the shaping of political events. 
 Even in England it has been far greater than is commonly 
 supposed. It is true that no historian has played more 
 than a secondary part in public affairs, though many 
 historians, from Macaulay to the late Lord Bryce and 
 Mr. Fisher, have rendered very high public service. But the 
 work of Hallam, Macaulay, Stubbs and others of lesser fame 
 has, so to say, stabilised constitutional tradition in this 
 country and actually passed into the political consciousness 
 of the nation; while the Teutonic theory expounded by 
 Freeman and Green unquestionably affected the general 
 attitude of this country both towards France and Russia 
 during the Victorian era. Indeed, it ought not to be 
 difficult to demonstrate from modern British history that 
 in the words of Lord Acton " the movement of ideas are 
 not the effect, but the cause of public events." 1 
 
 In France the influence of the historian has been more 
 direct and obvious. Guizot used the history of our own 
 Civil War to point a moral and discredit revolutionary 
 doctrine in France. Mignet's brilliant survey of the French 
 Revolution was, in the words of Mr. Gooch, 2 an incident 
 in the campaign against the Bourbon dynasty ; Lamartine's 
 rhetorical improvisation contributed materially to the fall 
 of Louis Philippe, while Thiers' detailed history of the 
 whole revolutionary period was inspired by essentially 
 political motives. The works of Michelet and of Taine, 
 to-day so riddled by criticism, yet assured of immortality 
 no less by their powers of reasoning than by their seductive 
 style, may fairly be said to have successively revolutionised 
 the whole outlook of the modern Frenchman towards the 
 past which gave him birth and the future towards which 
 
 1 Inaugural lecture on The Study of History (1896). 
 
 * History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, p. 195. 
 
21 
 
 he was still striving when the flood gates of 1914 were 
 opened. 1 
 
 It is, however, when we turn to Central Europe that 
 this influence is seen to be decisive. In the Germany of 
 the nineteenth century, no historian ever reached the same 
 eminence as Guizot and Thiers in France. None the less, 
 the influence of the historians on the direct course of political 
 development was beyond all doubt greater in Germany than 
 in either France or England. " Without their aid," says 
 Schmoller, " the Empire could never have been placed on 
 its feet." And " if anyone will make a list of their names," 
 Lord Acton reminds us, " he will see that such a phalanx 
 was never arrayed before, and will also detect one of the 
 arcana imperil by which the rude strength centred in a 
 region more ungenial than Latium was employed to absorb 
 and to stiffen the diffused, sentimental and strangely 
 impolitic talent of the studious German.") 2 All the greatest 
 Niebuhr, Dahlmann, Waitz, Ranke, Droyssen, Hausser, 
 Mommsen, Sybel, Treitschke a list with which I do not 
 think Lord Acton himself would quarrel were conscious 
 workers for the Prussian idea. Prussia, as the world now 
 knows to its cost, laid too great stress upon discipline and 
 material force; but it also paid full homage to knowledge 
 and education, and reaped the fruits of this policy by 
 rallying the whole intellectual class to its standard. It 
 was thus no mere accident, but a just retribution, that the 
 men whom I have mentioned supplied Prussia with her 
 political driving force, while Austria, thanks to the consistent 
 repression of all thought and culture under Francis, Metter- 
 nich and Bach, during a period extending from 1792 to 
 1859, on ly produced secondary or even tertiary lights in 
 the world of historical, political and social theory. Thus 
 the hackneyed phrase, about the playing-fields of Eton 
 found its counterpart in the German claim that " it was 
 the schoolmaster who won the battle of Koniggratz." 
 
 The first generation of German historians stood under 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 238. 
 
 2 Essays on Modern History, p. 378. 
 
22 
 
 the spell of Herder, who quite logically bases his philosophy 
 of history upon religion, and defining history as the educa- 
 tion of man, speaks boldly of " natural laws of political 
 history." Moreover, his belief in the unchangeableness of 
 national character which, curiously enough, he seems to 
 have derived from Voltaire was to exercise immense in- 
 fluence upon the expanding idea of Nationality in Europe, 
 and infected many of his successors with the conviction 
 that the organic development of a nation cannot be 
 deflected by ideas imported from elsewhere, and that good 
 work can only be done by those who remain true to their 
 own nationality. Obviously this theory of unchangeably 
 is in open conflict with the formative effects of geography 
 and climate, or, again, of conquest and domination by 
 masterful neighbours. That the Italian is essentially un- 
 sentimental, that logic is innate in the French or Scottish 
 mind, that the Englishman has always shown a preference 
 for political compromise and half-measures, may fairly be 
 argued. But it is absurd to say that the French Revolution 
 has left the national character unaffected, or that Scotland 
 possessed in the centuries before the Reformation the 
 democratic outlook which characterises it to-day. Certain 
 fundamental traits endure, but others change, and if there 
 are cycles in history or the weather it is hard to resist the 
 conclusion that there are also cycles in national character. 1 
 The essential difference between the British and the 
 German school of historians is, that the former has, to this 
 day, remained independent of the State, whereas the 
 latter's dependence upon it had steadily increased during 
 the hundred years preceding the Great War, and culminated 
 in an almost Byzantine outlook upon the State and the 
 Sovereign. 2 Even early in the nineteenth century the germ 
 
 1 In this connection Niebuhr may be quoted (I., p. 44). He 
 maintains national character to have been far more sharply defined 
 at the close of the mediaeval and the opening of the modern era. 
 " A man was more French than German, but also the peculiarities 
 of individual branches were stronger and thus a man was more 
 Norman, more Swabian, and so on. 
 
 2 A classic example is to be found in Lamprecht's essay on 
 William II. 
 
23 
 
 of future troubles may be traced in an excessive glorification 
 of the rights of the State, which the Germans oppose to the 
 revolutionary doctrine of the Rights of Man. Moreover, 
 Germany developed its own peculiar legend of the French 
 Revolution, whose underlying ideas are opposed, because 
 they are felt to be a danger to Germany herself. 1 That 
 " alliance between history and politics " which Sybel was, 
 ere long, to advocate, 2 had already begun when Niebuhr 
 and Dahlmann, in two epoch-making courses of lectures, 
 tried to hold the balance between extreme republicanism 
 and monarchical absolutism as equally unsuited to modern 
 ideas, and used the two revolutions of England and of 
 France to point a moral; and, again, when Dahlmann 
 pilloried side by side " the impudent regicide " (den frechen 
 Konigsmord) of 1793, and " the coldly calculated murder of 
 a nation " the Polish partition of 1795. The same process 
 is visible in Droyssen's lectures on the War of Liberation, 
 and in Gervinus' brilliant survey of German literary 
 development. The Revolution of 1848 forced history out 
 of abstract into realistic channels; the masses now entered 
 the political arena, and the historians could not resist the 
 temptation to appeal to and influence them. They already 
 felt the urgency of the problem which, in the days of 
 Universal Suffrage, came to be defined as that of " educating 
 our masters." The historian began to invade the province 
 of the publicist. 
 
 While the romantic movement was still at its height, 
 German historians, led by the great Ranke, tried to keep 
 politics at arms-length. While certainly not unwilling to 
 exercise a direct personal influence upon the actions of 
 monarchs or ministers, Ranke elaborated the theory that 
 no epoch can claim an absolute pre-eminence, " so that we 
 have no special cause either for despair or for pride and 
 arrogance." 3 " Never in our Europe," he argued, " has 
 
 1 Guilland, L'Allemagne et ses Historiens, p. 63. 
 
 2 In his inaugural at Marburg in 1856 : Uber den Stand der 
 neueren deutschen Geschichtsschreibung, p. 12. 
 
 3 Inaugural (1836) see Sdmmtliche Werke, Bd. XXII., p. 292. 
 
24 
 
 any one power or any one dogma attained to solitary 
 supremacy " l a truth which was revealed more strikingly 
 than ever by the issue of the Great War. But he, too, 
 found it impossible to resist the call of contemporary 
 history, and his survey of Serbia since 1804, based very 
 largely upon unwritten material supplied by the great 
 philologist Vuk Karadzic", will always remain one of the 
 most remarkable products, even of his unwearying pen. 
 He could not stop the drift of his pupils from history into 
 politics, and he himself, after shaping the mind of 
 Frederick Wilh'am IV. and Maximilian II., and writing his 
 famous history of the English Civil War, with the con- 
 temporary conflict of Crown and Parliament in Prussia 
 constantly at the back of his mind, was at last, on the 
 5oth anniversary of his doctorate (1883), to receive the 
 public thanks of Bismarck " for his long years of 
 collaboration in the common work for the fatherland." 
 
 Ranke from the first challenged Buckle's view that 
 history is determined by physical laws, virtually beyond 
 the control of mankind. "It is not doctrines," he said, 
 " which convulse the world, but powerful personalities 
 which incarnate doctrines " ; and this, we must acknow- 
 ledge, is a theory, which, if pushed home, inevitably brings 
 politics and history together. Even in 1843 the new 
 Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaft, published by Adolf 
 Schmidt, with the active adhesion of Ranke and Giese- 
 brecht, proclaims history as " a science which more than 
 any other, is related to politics, and is, indeed, its mother 
 and teacher." 2 
 
 Ranke himself never stood committed to the extreme 
 doctrine of Personality as the root-fact in History, and in 
 1882 we find him writing to Manteuffel that " men are 
 made by great occasions " (Grosse Verhaltnisse machen die 
 Manner}. But the current of public, and even of academic, 
 opinion, was already with Sybel when he endorsed the 
 
 1 M. Ritter, L. von Ranke, seine Geistesentwicklung und seine 
 Geschichtsschreibung. (1896), p. 24. 
 
 1 Vol. I., p. iv : " Politics are the blossom of history, and the 
 present its last leaf." 
 
25 
 
 phrase of Treitschke, " Strong men make the age " (die 
 star ken Manner machen die Zeit). At the very moment 
 when materialism began to run wild, the essentially 
 Christian doctrine of personality is stressed and over- 
 stressed. In place of demonic forces working outside man 
 and making of him the merest plaything, an attempt is made 
 to translate Free Will from theological into historical terms, 
 by men who are certainly not products of an age of faith. 
 
 Sybel and Treitschke are the supreme expression of the 
 political historian. Starting from the contention that 
 history is " durch und durch beweisbar," 1 Sybel sets 
 himself to destroy the legend of the revolution, and at the 
 same time " to restore the broken contact between the 
 historic development of Eastern and Western Europe." 2 
 His books, like Hausser's Deutsche Geschichte before them, 
 were in the words of Treitschke " quite as much a political 
 deed as a scientific achievement." Their educational effect 
 upon the German nation was to alienate it finally from 
 French radicalism and thus to strengthen Prussian and 
 Hohenzollern policy. As a younger man, he challenged 
 Giesebrecht's theory that the study of the medieval Empire, 
 of a Germany once powerful and united, might serve to 
 stimulate the modern dream of unity. But after rejecting 
 this in the true spirit of Ranke, as an inroad of history into 
 the field of politics, he himself committed an even bolder 
 inroad. He, and with him Treitschke, provided the 
 reasoned historical basis for the Little German policy 
 which triumphed at Koniggratz in 1866 and at Versailles 
 in 1871 ; and just as the writings of Friedrich List provided 
 the economic cement, so no less surely did the historians 
 (and very notably these two) lay the political foundations 
 on which the structure of German unity was to rest. 
 
 Let me, before I leave this section of my subject, quote 
 a characteristic passage from Sybel's inaugural lecture. 3 
 
 " The historian," he says, " who tries to assume a 
 
 1 Allgemeine Deutsche Biographic, Bd. LIV. (article Sybel), 
 
 P- 655- 
 
 2 Ibid, p. 654. 
 
 3 Sybel, op. tit. (1856), p. 7. 
 
26 
 
 dignified neutrality in respect of the great world-shaking 
 problems of religion, of politics, of nationality, is doomed 
 to become either lifeless or affected; . . . He will 
 have no moral enthusiasm, he will strive in vain for style 
 and beauty. That our historical writers proclaimed their 
 love of country and political conviction, gave them for the 
 first time the possibility to work as an attractive force and to 
 attain clear artistic form." These theories are only too soon 
 transfused by Treitschke, whose highest praise for Hausser is 
 that he looks at German history " with German eyes ;" who 
 insists " that every generation has the right to portray the 
 past as it appears to its own eyes," 1 and who declares, 
 " that he would despair of God and the world, if a history 
 like that of Prussia were to flow into the sand." 2 Fueter 
 may be quite right in asserting that " Treitschke's influence 
 upon historical learning was less than is generally supposed," 3 
 but his influence upon the popular consciousness and upon 
 the journalistic world can hardly be exaggerated. The 
 fact that in our own country his name was hardly known 
 before the War, save to a handful of historical writers, and 
 seemingly never quoted save by the omniscient Lord Acton 
 and the faintly prophetic Professor Cramb, serves to em- 
 phasise still further what I have already said of our neglect 
 of German history and political thought, and of the need 
 for mutual interpretation both between friends and foes, 
 if such events as the Great War are not to come upon us 
 once more like a thief in the night. 
 
 Treitschke certainly did more than any other man to 
 poison the wells of historical science in Germany and to give 
 currency to the seductive but immoral motto, " My country, 
 right or wrong," which fortunately has never stood un- 
 challenged in either of its alleged homes of origin. He 
 thereby contributed to that " debasement and perversion 
 of University ideals and methods in Germany " of which 
 
 1 Deutsche Geschichte, IV., p. 178. 
 
 * Treitschke to Bluntschli, 7 March 1867, cit. Preussische 
 Jahrbticher, August 1920. (H. Ulmann, Treitschke und der Krieg, 
 
 P- I58-) 
 
 1 Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, p. 546. 
 
27 
 
 Professor Zimmern has recently written. 1 There is no 
 greater tragedy in modern history than the process by 
 which the most representatives of a culture of which all 
 Europe had once been justly proud, sought (I again quote 
 Mr. Zimmern) " to readjust their whole philosophy and 
 scheme of values, in order to bring it into conformity with 
 a Government as to whose conduct and motives they were 
 content to be left in the dark." 
 
 This is a lesson which we who would fain build up a new 
 School of Foreign Studies cannot afford to neglect a lesson 
 which brings us back to the question which I raised at the 
 outset, regarding the teaching of contemporary history and 
 the proper relation between history and politics. 
 
 V. 
 
 Let me turn from the forest clearing to the jungle. In 
 Germany the memory of a great past, contrasting with 
 present political miseries, was a prime incentive to the 
 revival of historical studies. But even at the worst Germany 
 lived her own life, and her political inferiority did but throw 
 into greater relief her achievements in literature and in 
 imagination and learned enquiry. But in other parts of 
 Central and Eastern Europe there had been, not merely 
 passing eclipse, but virtual extinction ; and it was here that 
 the historical tradition was to play an absolutely decisive 
 part, to rescue whole nations from oblivion and eventually 
 to present the new generation of schoolboys with a radically 
 different map. 
 
 It is obvious that at this stage in my lecture I cannot 
 begin the survey of a new field so vast and so unfamiliar. I 
 must be content in most cases with the merest passing 
 allusion, in order that I may concentrate on what is perhaps 
 the most striking illustration of my main thesis. (In 
 parenthesis you will notice that on leaving Germany we enter 
 an area where it is not only more convenient, but almost 
 inevitable, to divide the subject by races, and no longer 
 by states.) Among the Austrian Germans, then, as I 
 
 1 Europe in Convalescence, 2nd edition, pp. 70-71. 
 
28 
 
 already hinted, there was no scope for intellect under the 
 old regime, and even in the constitutional era since 1867, such 
 little influence as was exercised by the new intellectual and 
 academic class upon the conduct of affairs came from the 
 economists rather than the historians, who may fairly rank 
 as a mere annexe to the larger historical school of Germany. 
 The role of such men as Schaffle (really a non- Austrian) , 
 Menger, Suess, was valuable, but in no way decisive; and 
 the deplorable part played by the late Dr. Fried jung as the 
 unwitting tool of Count Aehrenthal and his official diplomatic 
 forgers, might well be quoted as a warning to the historian 
 to avoid the whirlpools of political life. His misuse by the 
 Foreign Minister was on a footing with the common practice 
 of Hungarian statesmen to keep a tame historian or publicist 
 to edit their papers, write their memoirs, and rumour has it, 
 produce articles which it suited them to sign. The general 
 attitude of the authorities towards the man of letters as a 
 man of affairs is illustrated by the fate of Professors 
 Lammasch and Redlich, two Austrians of international 
 repute, who were only admitted to office on 28th October, 
 1918, when their prophecies of disaster had been fulfilled 
 and there was nothing left for them save to liquidate the 
 Habsburg State. 
 
 If we turn to the Magyars, it would be at once an under- 
 and an over-statement, to assert that among them the 
 influence of the historian was supreme. In a certain sense 
 every Magyar of the privileged class was his own historian, 
 or at least his own constitutional theorist. Nowhere pro- 
 bably was a knowledge of precedent and practice more 
 widespread; and this was Hungary's strength in the long 
 centuries of struggle against dynastic infringement and 
 perfidy, her weakness under the changed circumstances of 
 modern life, when ancient constitutional theory left no room 
 for the " natural rights " claimed by the so-called " un- 
 historic nations." 
 
 Among the Poles, again, memories of the historic past 
 were no doubt decisive in rendering the national spirit 
 invincible in the dark days of partition and repression ; but 
 
2 9 
 
 these memories were voiced, not so much by the historian as 
 by the poet and the mystic. Mickiewicz's memorable course 
 of lectures on the Slav nations, delivered in 1840, at the 
 College de France, are poetry, rhetoric, inspiration any- 
 thing but history, though they were in themselves a historical 
 event of real significance. The Messianic doctrine which 
 runs through the poetry of Mickiewicz and his great con- 
 temporaries, is a spiritual experience rather than a political 
 programme. Poland after all was prostrate, bleeding and 
 tortured, yet never dead; and it is of the dead and their 
 resurrection that I have to speak. 
 
 Take for instance the Roumanians. What could be more 
 gloomy and unpromising than their situation in the middle 
 of the XVIIIth century the two principalities ground under 
 the heel of the Sublime Porte and of his jackals, the corrupt 
 Phanariot Princes; the Roumanians of Transylvania sub- 
 jected by the dominant Magyars to all the rigours of political 
 social and religious helotry ? Yet at this very nadir of the 
 national fortunes the voice of History sounded in their ears. 
 A handful of priests trained in the despised Uniate rite 
 which the Jesui ts had devised for their further enthralment, 
 saw with eager eyes the array of captive figures on Trajan's 
 Column in Rome, and invoked the memories of ancient 
 Dacia and their Roman ancestry. These memories struck 
 deep in the consciousness of the whole people, even of the 
 most uneducated; and the historical chronicles composed 
 by the younger Micu, Sincai, and Peter Maior, uncritical 
 and even fantastic as they were, and only circulating in 
 manuscript owing to unfavourable political conditions, none 
 the less secure to their authors the right to rank among the 
 founders of Great Roumania. The Daco-Roman tradition 
 has often overshot the mark, but its main thesis has been 
 endorsed by sober research, and its decisive influence upon 
 the rebirth of the nation cannot be contested. 
 
 Even among the Bulgarians, held as in a vice between 
 Turkish barbarism and Greek ecclesiastical intolerance, and 
 deprived of the very elements of culture to an extent un- 
 known even to the Roumanians even here history played 
 
30 
 
 a first part in quickening the dead soul of the nation. The 
 humble Bulgarian monk Paisi, writing his all too naive and 
 primitive " History of the Bulgarian Peoples, Tsars and 
 Saints " (1762) in the retirement of his cell on Athos, and 
 his pupil Bishop Sofronij , who died an exile at Bucarest in 
 1816 after cruel sufferings from the Turks, were veritable 
 pioneers in the task of awakening patriotic interest in a great 
 if forgotten past, and in a despised and persecuted dialect. 
 
 Among the Serbs the influence of history upon the 
 national revival is even more striking, though it may perhaps 
 be best described as the general influence of the Muse Clio 
 herself rather than any of her special votaries. I should be 
 the very last to minimise the achievement of Dositej 
 Obradovic" and still more of the Jugoslav Grimm, Vuk 
 Karadzic", in stimulating the national sentiment, the lin- 
 guistic and spiritual unity of their disunited race, or again 
 of certain eminent Croats in collecting and interpreting the 
 history and constitutional documents of the Triune Kingdom 
 of Croatia-Slavonia-Dalmatia. But the deciding influence 
 must be sought in the soul of the down-trodden peasantry 
 itself clinging to the vanished memories of Tsar Dusan, 
 lawgiver and warrior, of Lazar, who chose a heavenly rather 
 than an earthly kingdom, of Milos Obilic", the noble knight 
 who set that dangerous Balkan precedent of regicide, of 
 Marko Kraljevic, the hero of fantastic adventures and pro- 
 digious valour. The mourning for Kosovo was perpetuated 
 by the black band upon the Montenegrin's cap ; and the 
 blind guslar chanted the ballads of Serbia's past often, it 
 is true, distorted into highly unhistoric forms. And thus it 
 came about that in 1912 the soldiers of King Peter wept 
 when they debouched upon the sacred field of Kosovo, and 
 at Prilep saw the vision of Marko leading them on to victory ; 
 and that in the bleak Dalmatian uplands a Croat shepherd 
 boy, Ivan Mestrovid, learnt from village bards that passion 
 for national unity which inspires so much even of his art. 
 
 But the crowning example of my thesis is provided by 
 the Czechs and their brothers the Slovaks. Two facts stand 
 out pre-eminent in their history, the extremities of fortune 
 
by which it is marked, and the extent to which it has been 
 shaped and influenced by pure intellect as opposed to mere 
 material force. Bohemia, after leaving her mark upon the 
 late middle ages as a strong national kingdom and leading 
 the vanguard of religious reform, suffered an even more com- 
 plete eclipse than Poland herself and lay like a corpse for 
 two whole centuries, so utterly forgotten and of no account, 
 that her once glorious name could become a label that 
 suggests the art student and the librettist. So low had she 
 fallen, that early last century, when a small group of Czech 
 scholars use to meet in the parlour of a Prague inn, one of 
 them is alleged to have exclaimed, " If this roof should fall, 
 there would be an end of the Czech national movement." 
 
 But if Bohemia's ruin had seemed complete, her resur- 
 rection in the XlXth century is one of the most remarkable 
 turns of fortune's wheel, that the modern world can show; 
 and it was the work not of soldiers and of courtiers, but of 
 thinkers and of scholars. " This, however, was an entirely 
 natural evolution among a people which had long ago 
 selected as its national heroes John Hus, priest, professor, 
 reformer and philosopher truly ' the poor persone ' of his 
 day and Comenius, one of the founders of modern educa- 
 tion. Upon each successive step the savant left his indelible 
 mark. First Dobrovsky and Jungman laid the necessary 
 linguistic and scientific basis, then followed Safafik with 
 his epoch-making studies in Slavonic archaeology, Kollar 
 the prophet of Panslavism in its pre-Moscow days, and 
 Palacky, the founder and inspirer of Czech historical re- 
 search, and the leader of the nation during the revolution 
 of 1848 and throughout the period of constitutional experi- 
 ment in Austria." In the first days of reviving national 
 consciousness, the Czechs were ready, nay eager, for an 
 understanding with Austria ; but since the establishment of 
 Dualism in 1867 and above all since Francis Joseph's public 
 perjury in 1871, the movement became progressively 
 radical, and towards the close of his life Palacky coined the 
 prophetic phrase, " Before Austria was, we were, and when 
 Austria no longer is, we still shall be." 
 
32 
 
 The details of the struggle which led to Czecho-Slovak 
 independence lie quite outside my present purpose. I am 
 merely concerned to emphasise that at every turn it was 
 history which provided the inspiration history in its very 
 widest sense, whether interpreted by the philologist, the 
 antiquarian, the collector of ballads and folk-songs, the 
 ethnographer and folklorist, the philosopher or the historian 
 pure and simple. It was the appeal to the historic past 
 that laid the foundations of the new freedom. 
 
 In passing it is only right to remind you of the part 
 played by legendary history, and even falsified history, in 
 reshaping a nation's mind. Hanka's deliberate forgery of 
 mediaeval Czech ballads had a direct political effect such as 
 cannot be claimed for his nearest literary affinity, James 
 Macpherson, and it is one of President Masaryk's many titles 
 to fame that he risked popular obloquy by their exposure, 
 lest a lie should poison the sources of national tradition. To 
 another category belongs the false history by which rival 
 Balkan propagandists Serb, Bulgar, Greek, Albanian, Vlach 
 and Turk alike have sought to justify purely political 
 claims to disputed territory ; to yet another the calculated 
 camouflage by which Havlicek, the first and greatest of Czech 
 journalists, wrote of Ireland and O'Connelland Repeal, when 
 he meant Bohemia and her long-lost liberties, and thus for 
 a time was able to evade the censorship of Metternich. 1 
 
 1 A special niche must be reserved for the false history to which 
 the founder of the Sinn Fein movement gave currency in 1905, 
 when he put forward Hungarian abstention in the sixties as a 
 proper model for Ireland in her struggle against England. The 
 full measure of Mr. Griffith's misapprehension may be gathered 
 from a comparison between the positive statesmanship of Deak 
 and his hardly less great associates, Andrassy and Eotvos, and the 
 negative and barren policy of abstention pursued by the Czechs 
 from 1867 to 1879. Deak owed his victory, not to abstention, 
 but to active collaboration at the psychological moment. The 
 phrase by which he won Francis Joseph : " Hungary asks nothing 
 more after Koniggratz than before it " is widely famous, but less 
 so his explanation of its meaning : " because it was not a question 
 of asking all we could get, but of not asking more than we were 
 sure of being able to keep." Mr. Griffith, though he misconceived 
 the lessons of Hungarian history, did pass this highest test of 
 statesmanship in 1921 in a similar situation to Deak's, and thereby 
 saved himself from the crushing verdict which history is likely to 
 pass against his Republican rivals. 
 
33 
 
 Let me reaffirm the view that the history of Czecho- 
 slovak renaissance and independence sets the crown upon 
 my present argument. It is no mere accident, but a 
 perfectly natural evolution, that placed the leadership of 
 the new nation in the hands of a triumvirate of savants 
 the veteran philosopher and historian, Thomas Masaryk, 
 and his two young lieutenants, Benes, the lecturer in 
 political economy, Stefanik the astronomer and explorer. 
 I thus conclude my hurried survey with a name which 
 (with pride, be it said) is inseparably associated with our 
 young School of Slavonic Studies. President Masaryk is 
 the true successor of Hus, Comenius and Palacky. His 
 severely logical mind fixed upon " realism " as the true 
 aim of politics, no less than of history and of thought and 
 life, and he has given a new and honourable interpretation 
 to that Realpolitik which has deservedly become a byeword 
 with honest men. " Politics," as the Corriere della Sera 
 has well said, " is the art of possibilities." 1 Masaryk has 
 done his best to teach us that the realist can aim at nothing 
 higher than to be a real man, and that true realism in 
 politics is not a cynical disregard of principles, but a 
 scrupulous reckoning with the facts of a given situation. 
 He has taught us that character, not sleight-of-hand, is the 
 first requirement of the statesman ; that to be honest is not 
 to be naive or to nurse illusions, and that a straight fencer, 
 fully trained to the use of his weapon, will prove a match 
 for the bravo who plays foul. Masaryk, the leader of a 
 new political school and of new diplomatic methods, beat 
 the Ballplatz and the Wilhelmstrasse at their own game, 
 and set us all that measured ideal of " optimism without 
 illusions " (as I once tried to define it), upon which alone the 
 New Europe and the new Society of Nations can build. 
 This, then, is the creed which I make bold to set in the 
 forefront of this budding enterprise in the University of 
 London, for his is one of the chief names that illumine the 
 border-land between history and politics. 
 
 I have tried to show how great has been, and still is, the 
 influence of the historian upon the political and social 
 
 1 (7 February 1920) " La politico, e I'arte delle possibility." 
 
34 
 
 development of Central Europe. Where the past and the 
 present are so closely interwoven, it would seem specially 
 incumbent upon the student of history to maintain contact 
 with the men who are shaping the daily destinies of whatever 
 country he may be studying. This is presumably the 
 underlying motive of a clause included in the charter of 
 foundation of my Chair, as of certain other Chairs devoted 
 to analogous " Regional Studies " providing for special 
 leave for foreign travel and of this clause I intend to take 
 full advantage. 
 
 It is only by such contact with history in the making, 
 that the historian can hope to escape from the faults of 
 pedantry and unreality. It performs the same function as 
 practical laboratory work to the pure scientist, for it helps 
 to give a certain insight into the political methods of all 
 ages, into the motives of politicians and diplomatists, and 
 so helps towards a more balanced and human judgment, 
 and offers a key to the riddles of the past. It is, indeed, a 
 difficult problem, how to combine, on the one hand, academic 
 calm and that aloofness and impartiality which we would 
 fain associate with it, and on the other hand a knowledge of 
 life and a sense of realities. And yet the historian must 
 take his courage in both hands, and live at once in the 
 present and in the past, drawing upon both as warnings for 
 the future. There is obvious danger in a too free acceptance 
 of Sybel's policy of " clothing the Universities in the colours 
 of the present " (in die Farben der Gegenwart kleiden) 1 but 
 it is just one more risk that must be taken, and, after all, 
 Sybel and his followers are living signposts to warn us off 
 marshy ground. 
 
 In conclusion, I feel bound to express my conviction that 
 the surest test of a sound historian, or of a good teacher, 
 lies in his attitude to the capital problem of omission and 
 selection; for the selection of one's facts is, in itself, a 
 judgment, and yet selection there must inevitably be, if we 
 are to avoid drowning. To delay judgment till all the 
 facts are before us, is to abandon all idea of criticism, 
 
 1 Allgemeine Deutsche Biographic, article on Sybel, p. 652. 
 
35 
 
 since we can never have all the facts; it also leads 
 to that frame of mind satirised by Goethe when he 
 wrote : 
 
 " \Yas man nicht weiss, das eben brauchte man, 
 Und was man weiss, kann man nicht brauchen." 
 
 Though an enthusiast for formidable arrays of facts, and, I 
 fear, a grave sinner in this direction, I submit that the 
 possession of too many facts is sometimes a fatal handicap, 
 just as a sound judgment of the essential truth can often 
 be reached without a knowledge of anything like all the 
 facts. This simply means that while any fact, however 
 trifling and worthless if detached, may provide some 
 valuable clue and should, therefore, be preserved, yet on 
 the other hand all facts are by no means essential, 
 just as Dr. Barker has recently reminded us that all 
 documents are not necessarily valuable because they are 
 unprinted. 
 
 In a word, the only fundamental rule is never consciously 
 to suppress essential facts ; and to find the right line between 
 omission and suppression must depend on the sound 
 judgment or the honesty of the individual writer. What the 
 average pupil or reader demands is, I believe, not so much 
 abstention from any opinion or verdict that merely 
 produces boredom as the provision of facts and documents 
 by which such an opinion can be tested. He is then able 
 to draw his own conclusions by the comparative method, 
 which is the soundest of all methods. I believe, with Sir 
 Thomas Browne, that " morality is not ambulatory," that 
 certain historical standards of truth do exist, and that just 
 as there is a retributive justice which destroys great empires, 
 so the historian who suppresses or perverts the truth will 
 soon, rather than late, stand convicted before the bar of 
 history. 
 
 It would be hard to find a better definition of the true 
 historian's duty than that of Bacon " to steer a middle 
 course between the presumption of dogmatism and the 
 despair of scepticism.". Complete perfection lies beyond 
 
36 
 
 us, and we can but echo the words of Ranke in his 
 memorable inaugural, " Non attingunt metam, sed meta 
 posita est." I, too, shall not attain the final goal of 
 perfection, but at least the goal has been set, and I trust 
 that nothing will drive me from the course. 
 
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