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 L I b RARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 U N I VERSITY 
 
 or ILLl NOIS
 
 AN 
 
 INAUGUEAL LECTUEE 
 
 DELIVERED BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH, M.A, 
 
 EEGIU3 PE0FE3S0B OF MODERN HISTOEY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 
 
 NOVEMBER, MDCCCLTX. 
 
 J. H. AND Jas. paeker.
 
 AN INAUGUHAL LECTURE, &c. 
 
 "YTEW Statutes having just been made by the Crown, 
 -^^ on the recommendation of the Council, for the 
 purpose of adapting the Professorship I have the 
 honour to hold to the present requirements of the 
 University, this seems a fit occasion for saying a few 
 w^ords on the study of Modern History in Oxford, 
 and the functions of this Chair in relation to that 
 study. I made some remarks on the subject in com- 
 mencing my first course with my class ; but the new 
 statutes were then only under consideration, and 
 before venturing to address the University, I wished 
 to see something of the state of the Modern History 
 school, and the duties of my Chair. 
 
 This Chair was founded in the reign of George I., 
 and its original object was to train students for the 
 public service. The foundation was double, one Chair 
 here and one at Cambridge. Attached to each Chair 
 were two teachers of modern languages, and twenty 
 King's scholars, wdiose education in history and the 
 modern languages the Professor was to superintend ; 
 and the most proficient among whom he was to re- 
 commend from time to time for employment, at home 
 or abroad, in the service of the State. Diplomacy 
 was evidently the first object of the foundation, for 
 a knowledge of treaties is mentioned in the letters 
 patent of foundation as specially necessary for the 
 public interest. Some subsequent regulations, though 
 
 b2
 
 of doubtful validity, named International Law and 
 Political Economy, with the method of reading Modern 
 History and Political Biography, as the subjects for 
 the Professor's lectures. Thus the whole foundation 
 may be said to have been in great measure an anti- 
 cipation of the late resolution of the University to 
 found a school of Law and Modern History. The 
 Professorship of Modern History, the Professorship 
 of Political Economy, the Chichele Professorship of 
 Diplomacy, the Professor and Teachers of the Modern 
 Languages, do now for the students of our present 
 school just what the Professor of History and his 
 two teachers of Modern Languages were originally 
 intended to do for the twenty King's scholars under 
 their care. The whole of these subjects have further 
 been brought into connection, in the new school, with 
 their natural associate, the study of Law. 
 
 I have failed, in spite of the kind assistance of my 
 friends, the Librarian of the Bodleian and the Keeper 
 of the Archives, to trace the real author of what we 
 must allow to have been an enlightened and far-sighted 
 scheme — a scheme which, had it taken effect, might 
 have filled the Parliament and the public service of 
 the last century with highly -trained legislators and 
 statesmen, and perhaps have torn some dark and 
 disastrous pages from our history. It is not likely 
 that the praise is due to the King himself, who, 
 though not without sense and public spirit, was in- 
 different to intellectual pursuits. Conjecture points 
 to Sir Robert Walpole. That Minister was at the 
 height of power when the Professorship was founded 
 under George I. When the foundation was confirmed 
 under George II., he had just thrust aside the feeble 
 
 pretensions of Sir Spencer Compton, and gathered the 
 
 ^^%, 
 
 owe . 
 % J
 
 reins of government, for a moment placed in the weak 
 hands of the favomite, again into his own strong and 
 skilful grasp. If Walpole was the real founder, if he 
 even as minister approved the foundation, it is a 
 remarkable testimony from a political leader of a turn 
 of mind practical to coarseness, and who had dis- 
 carded the literary statesmen of the Somers and 
 Halifax school, to the value of high political edu- 
 cation as a qualification for the public service. It 
 is also creditable to the memory of a minister, the re- 
 puted father of the system of Parliamentary corrup- 
 tion, that he should have so far anticipated one of the 
 best of modern reforms as to have been willing to 
 devote a large amount of his patronage to merit, and 
 to take that merit on the recommendation of Univer- 
 sities, one of which, at least, was by no means friendly 
 to the Crown. 
 
 King George I., however, or his Minister, was not 
 the first of English rulers who had endeavoured to 
 draw direct from the University a supply of talented 
 and highly-educated men for the service of the State. 
 I almost shrink from mentioning the name which 
 intrudes so grimly into the long list of the Tory and 
 High Church Chancellors of Oxford. But it was at 
 least the nobler part of Cromwell's character which 
 led him to protect Oxford and Cambridge from the 
 levelling fanaticism of his party, to make himself our 
 Chancellor, to foster our learning with his all-perva- 
 ding energy, and to seek to draw our choicest youth 
 to councils which it must be allowed were always 
 filled, as far as the evil time permitted, with an eye 
 to the interest of England and to her interest alone. 
 Cromwell's name is always in the mouths of those 
 who despise or hate high education, who call, in every
 
 6 
 
 public emergency, for native energy and rude common 
 sense, — for no subtle and fastidious philosophers, but 
 strong practical men. They seem to think that he 
 really was a brewer of Huntingdon who left his low call- 
 ing in a fit of fanatical enthusiasm to lead a great cause 
 (great, whether it were the right cause or the wrong,) 
 in camp and council, to win Dunbar against a general 
 who had foiled Wallenstein, to fascinate the imagina- 
 tion of Milton, and by his administration at home and 
 abroad to raise England, in five short years and on the 
 morrow of a bloody civil war, to a height of greatness 
 to which she still looks back with a proud and wistful 
 eye. Cromwell, to use his own words, "was by birth 
 a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height, 
 nor yet in obscurity ;" he was educated, suitably to 
 his birth, at a good classical school; he was at Cam- 
 bridge ; he read law ; but what was much more than 
 this, he, who is supposed to have owed his power to 
 ignorance and narrowness of mind, had brooded almost 
 to madness over the deepest questions of religion and 
 politics, and, as a kinsman of Hampden and an active 
 member of Hampden's party, had held intimate con- 
 verse on those questions with the profoundest and 
 keenest intellects of that unrivalled age. And there- 
 fore his ambition, if it was treasonable, was not low. 
 Therefore he bore himself always not as one who 
 gambled for a stake, but as one who struggled for a 
 cause. Therefore the great soldier loved the glory of 
 peace above the glory of war, and the moment he 
 could do so, sheathed his victorious sword ; therefore, 
 if he was driven to govern by force, he was driven 
 to it with reluctance, and only after long striving to 
 govern by nobler means ; therefore he kept a heart 
 above tinsel, and, at a height which had turned the
 
 head of Ceesar, remained always master of himself; 
 therefore he loved and called to his council-board 
 high and cultivated intellect, and employed it to 
 serve the interest of the State without too anxiously 
 enquiring how it would serve his own ; therefore he 
 felt the worth of the Universities, saved them from 
 the storm which laid throne and altar in the dust, and 
 earnestly endeavoured to give them their due place 
 and influence as seminaries of statesmen. Those who 
 wish to see the conduct of a real brewer turned into 
 a political chief should mark the course of Santerre 
 in the French Revolution. Those who wish to see 
 how power is wielded without high cultivation and 
 great ideas, should trace the course of Napoleon, 
 so often compared with Cromwell, and preferred to 
 him ; — of Napoleon the great despiser of philoso- 
 phers ; — and ask whether a little of the philosophy 
 which he despised might not have mitigated the 
 vulgar vanity which breathes through his bulletins, 
 and tempered his vulgar lust of conquest with some 
 regard for nobler things. It would indeed be a flaw 
 in nature if that which Arnold called the highest 
 earthly work, the work of government, were best per- 
 formed by blind ignorance and headlong force, or by a 
 cunning which belongs almost as much to brutes as 
 man. The men who have really left their mark on 
 England, the founders of her greatness from Alfred to 
 the Elizabethan statesmen, and from the Elizabethan 
 statesmen down to Canning and Peel, have been cul- 
 tivated in various ways ; some more by study, some 
 more by thought ; some by one kind of study, some 
 by another : but in one way or other they have been 
 all cultivated men. The minds of all have been fed 
 and stimulated, through one channel or other, with
 
 the great thoughts of those who had gone before 
 them ; and prepared for action by lofty meditations, 
 the parents of high designs. 
 
 The attempt of the Crown, however, to found a 
 poUtical school at Oxford and Cambridge by means 
 of this Professorship, must be said, at the time, to 
 have failed. Perhaps at Oxford the Whig seed fell on 
 a Jacobite soil. Long after this the evils of a disputed 
 succession were felt here, and the University was the 
 slave of one of the two political factions, to the utter 
 loss of her true power and her true dignity as the im- 
 partial parent of good and great citizens for the whole 
 nation. The Jacobite Hearne has recorded in his Diary 
 his anguish at the base condescension of the Convocation 
 in even returning thanks for the Professorship to the 
 royal founder, whom he styles " the Duke of Bruns- 
 wick, commonly called King George I." Nor does 
 the new study in itself seem to have been more wel- 
 come, at this time, than other innovations. The Con- 
 vocation point their gratitude especially to that part 
 of the royal letter which promises " that the hours 
 for teaching His Majesty's scholars the Modern Lan- 
 guages shall be so ordered, as not to interfere with 
 those already appointed for their academical studies." 
 What the academical studies were which were to be 
 so jealously guarded against the intrusion of Modern 
 History and Modern Languages, what they were even 
 for one who came to Oxford, gifted, ardent, eager to 
 be taught, is written in the autobiography of Gibbon. 
 It is written in every history, every essay, every novel, 
 every play which describes or betrays the manners of 
 the clergy and gentry of England in that dissolute, 
 heartless, and unbelieving age. It is written in the 
 still darker records of faction, misgovernment, ini-
 
 9 
 
 quity in the high places botli of Church and State, 
 and in the poUtical evils and fiscal burdens which 
 have been bequeathed by those bad rulers even to our 
 time. The corruption was not universal, or the nation 
 would never have lifted its head again. The people 
 received the religion which the gentry and clergy 
 had rejected : the people preserved the traditions of 
 English morality and English duty : the people re- 
 paired, by their unflagging industry, the waste of pro- 
 fligate finance, and of reckless and misconducted wars. 
 But as to the character of the upper classes, whose 
 educational discipline the Convocation of that day 
 were so anxious to guard against the intrusion of 
 new knowledge, there cannot be two opinions. We 
 have left that depravity far behind us, but in the 
 day of its ascendancy perhaps its greatest source was 
 here. 
 
 But not only was Oxford lukewarm in encouraging 
 the new studies ; the Crown, almost unavoidably, 
 failed to do its part. At the time of the foundation 
 Walpole was all-powerful, and might have spared a 
 part of the great bribery fund of patronage for the 
 promotion of merit. But soon followed the fierce 
 Parliamentary struggles of his declining hour, when 
 the refusal of a place in a public office might have 
 cost a vote, a vote might have turned a division, and 
 an adverse division might not only have driven the 
 hated minister from place, but have consigned him to . 
 the Tower. After the fall of Walpole came a long 
 reign of corruption, connived at, though not shared, 
 even by the soaring patriotism of Chatham, in which 
 it would have been in vain to hope that anything 
 which could be coveted by a boroughmonger would 
 be bestowed upon a promising student. Under these
 
 10 
 
 most adverse circumstances, few King's Scholars seem 
 ever to have been appointed. The Scholars, and the 
 commission given by the original statutes to the Pro- 
 fessor to recommend the most diligent for employment 
 under the Crown, have now, after long abeyance, been 
 formally abolished by the Council in framing the new 
 statutes ; I confess, a little to my regret. The abuse 
 of patronage drove the nation to the system of com- 
 petitive examination. Competitive examination, in its 
 turn, may be found to have its drawbacks. In that 
 case, there may be a disposition to try honest recom- 
 mendation by public bodies ; and in that event, it 
 might not have been out of place for the Universities 
 to remind the Government of the expressed desire 
 and the old engagement of the Crown. 
 
 In the meantime, Modern History and its associate 
 studies enjoy the more certain encouragement of a 
 Modern History School and academical honours. They 
 also enjoy, or ought to enjoy, the encouragement of 
 being the subjects of examination for the Fellowships 
 of All Souls ; a College destined, by the Statesman 
 who founded it, in great measure for the study of the 
 Civil Law, that study which once formed the States- 
 men of Europe and connected the Universities with 
 the cabinets of Kings, and the wealthy and powerful 
 professors of which, in Italy, its most famous seat, 
 sleep beside great princes, magistrates, and nobles, in 
 many a sumptuous tomb. 
 
 Possibly, also, the School of Law and Modern His- 
 tory being practically a modified revival of the Faculty 
 of Law in the University, the subjects of examination 
 for the degree of B.C.L., and the qualifications for 
 the degree of D.C.L. might be modified in a corre- 
 sponding manner. If this were done, I should not
 
 11 
 
 despair of seeing a real value imparted to these 
 degrees. I would commend this point to the con- 
 sideration of the Council. 
 
 The University seems to have had two objects in 
 instituting the New Schools, that of increasing in- 
 dustry by bringing into play the great motive power 
 of love of a special subject, and that of making edu- 
 cation a more direct training for life. These are the 
 titles of the History School to continued support, 
 even if its state for some time to come should need 
 indulgence; as indulgence I fear it will long need, 
 unless the University should see fit to place it under 
 more regular and authoritative guidance, and unless 
 the difficulties which Colleges find in providing per- 
 manent tuition in this department, can be in some way 
 overcome. 
 
 That the love of a special subject is a great spur to 
 industry, needs no proof ; and it has never yet been 
 shewn that the mind is less exercised when it is exer- 
 cised with pleasure. Every experienced student knows 
 that the great secret of study is to read with appetite. 
 Under the old system, the University relied mainly on 
 the motive of ambition. Such ambition is manly and 
 generous, and its contests here, conducted as they 
 are, teach men to keep the rules of honour in the 
 contests of after life. Study pursued under its in- 
 fluence generally makes an aspiring character ; but 
 study pursued, in part, at least, from love of the 
 subject, makes a happier character ; and why should 
 not this also be taken into account in choosing the 
 subjects of education ? But the grand and proved 
 defect of ambition as a motive is, that it fails with 
 most natures, and that it fails especially with those, 
 certainly not the least momentous part of our charge,
 
 12 
 
 whose position as men of wealth and rank is already 
 fixed for them in life. 
 
 To make University education a more direct pre- 
 paration for after life, may be called Utilitarianism. 
 The objection, no doubt, flows from a worthy source. 
 We are the teachers of a great University, and we 
 may take counsel of her greatness. We may act, and 
 are bound to act, on far-sigbted views of the real 
 interests of education, without paying too much defer- 
 ence to the mere fashion of the hour. But the most 
 far-sighted views of the real interests of education 
 would lead us to make our sj^stem such as to draw 
 hither all the mental aristocracy of the country ; its 
 nobiUty, its gentry, its clergy, its great professions, 
 the heads of its great manufactures and trades. It 
 was so in the earlier period of our history, when 
 almost every man of intellectual eminence in any line 
 must have looked back to the Universities not only 
 as the scene of his youth but as the source of the 
 knowledge which was to him power, wealth, and 
 honour. To power, wealth, and honour, our system 
 of education must lead, if it is to keep its hold on 
 England, though it should be to power which shall be 
 nobly used, to wealth which shall be nobly spent, and 
 to honour which shall shine beyond the hour. Utili- 
 tarianism in education is a bad thing. But the great 
 places of national education may avoid Utilitarianism 
 till Government is in the hands of ambitious igno- 
 rance, till the Bench of Justice is filled with petti- 
 foggers, till coarse cupidity and empiricism stand be- 
 side the sick bed, till all the great levers of opinion 
 are in low, uneducated hands. Our care for the 
 education of the middle classes, however it may be 
 applauded in itself, will ill compensate the country
 
 13 
 
 for our failure to perform thoroughly the task of 
 educating our proper charge, the upper classes, and 
 training them to do, and teaching them how to 
 do, their duty to the people. 
 
 There is one class of our students, — I fear of late a 
 diminishing class, — which I believe the University had 
 especially in view in instituting the School of La*v and 
 Modern History, and which it was thought particularly 
 desirable to win to study by the attraction of an inter- 
 esting subject, and to train directly for the duties of 
 after life ; more especially as the education of this 
 class closes here. The duties in after life of the class 
 I refer to are peculiar ; and its position seems fast 
 becoming unique in Europe. 
 
 " In Flanders, Holland, Friesland," says Mr. Laing 
 in his well-known work on Europe in 1848, "about 
 the estuaries of the Scheldt, Rhine, Ems, Weser, Elbe 
 and Eyder ; in a great part of Westphalia and other 
 districts of Germany ; in Denmark, Sweden, and Nor- 
 way ; and in the south of Europe, in Switzerland, 
 the Tyrol, Lombardy and Tuscany, the peasants have 
 from very early times been the proprietors of a great 
 proportion of the land. France and Prussia" (it seems 
 he will soon be able to say Russia) " have in our times 
 been added to the countries in which the land is 
 divided into small estates of working peasant pro- 
 prietors. In every country of Europe, under what- 
 ever form of government, however remotely and in- 
 directly affected by the wars and convulsions of the 
 French revolution, and however little the laws, insti- 
 tutions and spirit of the government may as yet be 
 in accordance with this social state of the people, the 
 tendency, during this century, has been to the division 
 and distribution of the land into small estates of
 
 14 
 
 a working peasant proprietary, not to its aggregation 
 into large estates of a nobility and gentry. This has 
 been the real revolution in Europe. , The only excep- 
 tion is Great Britain." In the colonies, we may add, 
 even of Great Britain, the tendency to small estates 
 and working proprietors prevails ; and as colonies are 
 drawn, generally speaking, from the most advanced 
 and enterprising part of the population, their tenden- 
 cies are to their mother country a prophecy of her 
 own future. 
 
 The force of opinion in this age is paramount ; and 
 it runs with the certainty, if not with the speed of 
 electricity round the sympathetic circle of European 
 nations. Of these two systems, the system of great 
 landowners and the system of small working pro- 
 prietors, that will assuredly prevail which European 
 opinion shall decide to be the better for the whole 
 people. But which is the better system for the whole 
 people, is a question with a double aspect. One 
 aspect is that of physical condition ; the other is that 
 of civilization. It may be, that the civilizing influence 
 of a resident class of gentry, well educated themselves, 
 and able and willing to be the moral and social edu- 
 cators of the people, may countervail the material 
 advantages which a landowning peasantry enjoy, and 
 even the accession of moral dignity, the prudence, 
 the frugality, which the possession of property in the 
 lower class, even more than in ours, seems clearly to 
 draw in its train. But then the gentry must know 
 their position, and own their duty to those by whose 
 labour they are fed. They must be resident, they 
 must be well-educated, they must be able and willing 
 to act as the social and moral educators of those 
 below them. They must do their part, and their
 
 15 
 
 Universities must make it a definite and primary 
 object to teach them to do their part, in a system 
 under which, if they will do their part, they at least 
 may enjoy such pure, true, and homefelt happiness as 
 never Spanish grandee or French seigneur knew. If 
 they are to make it their duty, under the influence 
 of overstrained notions of the rights of property, to 
 squander the fruits of the peasant's labour in dull 
 luxury, or in swelling the vice and misery of some 
 great capital, the cry already heard, " the great 
 burden on land is the landlord," may swell till it 
 prevails ; till it prevails in England, as it has pre- 
 vailed in the land, separated from ours only by a few 
 leagues of sea, which, eighty years ago, fed the luxury 
 of Versailles. The luxury of Versailles seemed to 
 itself harmless and even civihzing ; it was graceful 
 and enlightened ; it was not even found wanting in 
 philanthropy, though it was found wanting in active 
 duty. Before the Revolution, the fervour and the 
 austerity of Rousseau had cast out from good so- 
 ciety the levity and sensuality of Voltaire ^. Atheism, 
 frivolity, heartlessness, sybaritism, had gone out of 
 fashion with Madame de Pompadour and Madame 
 Dubarri, Theism, philanthropy, earnestness, even 
 simplicity of life, or at least the praise of simplicity of 
 life, had become the order of the day ; and the beams 
 of better times to come played upon the current, and 
 the rainbow of Utopian hope bent over it, as it drew, 
 with a force now past mortal control, to the most 
 terrible gulf in history. Even the genius of Carlyle 
 has perhaps failed to paint strongly enough this cha- 
 racteristic of the Revolution, and to make it preach 
 
 " See Lavallee, Histoire des Frangais, Bk. iii., section 3, 
 chap. 5.
 
 16 
 
 clearly enough its tremendous lesson as to the differ- 
 ence between social sentiment and social duty. We 
 know Paley's apologue of the idle pigeon, consuming, 
 squandering, scattering about in lordly wastefulness 
 the store of corn laboriously gathered for him by the 
 subservient flock. That apologue, catching the eye 
 of King George III., is said to have cost Paley a 
 bishopric. But its moral, duly pointed, is nothing 
 more dangerous than that property has its duties. 
 Landed property, fortunately for the moral dignity 
 and real happiness of its possessors, has its obvious 
 duties. Funded property, and other kinds of accu- 
 mulated wealth, have duties less obvious to which 
 the possessors must be guided, if their Universities 
 desire to see them living the life and holding the 
 place in creation not of animals of large, varied, and 
 elaborate consumption, but of men. 
 
 But can education teach the rich to do their duty ? 
 If it cannot, why do the rich come to places of educa- 
 tion ? If it cannot, what have we to do but abdicate 
 that part of our trust? But experience says it can. 
 Look round to the really well-educated men of pro- 
 perty of your acquaintance. Are they not, as a body, 
 good and active members of society, promoters of good 
 social objects, and, if landowners, resident, and endea- 
 vouring to earn the rent the labour of the people pays 
 them, by doing good among the people? In feudal 
 times, when the landed aristocracy and gentry owed 
 the State military service, they were trained to arms ; 
 now they owe the State social service, and they must 
 be trained by education to social duties, not to the 
 duties of schoolmasters, lecturers, or statists, but to 
 the duties of landed gentlemen. Before the late 
 changes, the influence of education had hardly been
 
 17 
 
 tried on them. A little philology and a little geome- 
 try, forgotten as soon as learnt, might sharpen the 
 wits a little, but could awaken no lasting intellectual 
 interests, open no intellectual pleasures to compete 
 with animal enjoyments, kindle generous sympathies 
 and aspirations in no heart. Now we have for the 
 aristocracy and gentry a school, in effect of Social 
 Science, that is, of Jurisprudence, including Consti- 
 tutional Law, and of Political Economy, with History 
 illustrating both. This appeals, as directly as it can, 
 to the interests of the class for whom it was insti- 
 tuted, and by whom it appears not to be rejected. It 
 is an experiment, but it is a rational and practical 
 experiment, and human legislation can be no more. 
 
 I dwell on these points because we have heard ex- 
 pressed, by persons of influence in Council and Congre- 
 gation, a desire, which I doubt not extensively pre- 
 vails, to undo our recent legislation ; a feeling, which 
 if it does not actually bring us back to the old sys- 
 tem, may cripple the operation of the new. The old 
 system stood condemned, as far as the gentry were 
 concerned, not by its theoretical imperfections as a 
 scheme of education, but by its manifest results ; 
 results which are felt and deplored in country pa- 
 rishes by clergymen who uphold the system here. 
 History and its cognate subjects may not prove as 
 much intellectual power as the mixed philosophical 
 and philological culture of the old Classical school. 
 Their true place and value, in a perfect system of edu- 
 cation, will be fixed, when we shall have solved those 
 great educational problems which, in their present un- 
 certainty, and considering their vast importance to 
 society, may worthily employ and well reward the 
 most powerful and aspiring minds. But these studies 
 
 c
 
 18 
 
 at least form a real education, with something that 
 may interest, something that may last, something 
 that may set the student reflecting, and make him 
 unwiUing to live a mere life of idleness by the sweat 
 of other men's brow. If in them, as compared with 
 severer studies, some concession is made to the com- 
 parative feebleness of the principle of industry in those 
 who are not compelled to work for their bread with 
 brain or hand, it is only a reasonable recognition of 
 the real facts of the case, to which all ideals of educa- 
 tion, as well as of politics, must bend. The difficul- 
 ties of education necessarily increase when it has to 
 .do with those who are placed by birth at the level to 
 which other men by labour aspire, and who are heirs 
 to wealth which they have not earned, and honour 
 which they have not won. 
 
 One grand advantage the English system of pro- 
 perty and society has over the rival system of the 
 Continent, — and it is an advantage which our new 
 scheme of education for the gentry tends directly, 
 and we may say infallibly, to improve. The con- 
 nexion between the distribution of property, especially 
 landed property in a country, and its political institu- 
 tions is necessarily close ; and countries of peasant 
 proprietors have proved hitherto incapable of sup- 
 porting constitutional government. Those countries 
 gravitate towards centralized and bureaucratic despot- 
 ism with a force which in France, after many years 
 of parliamentary liberty, seems to have decisively 
 resumed its sway. There is no class wealthy and 
 strong enough to form independent Parliaments, or of 
 local influence sufficient to sustain local self-govern- 
 ment through the country. There is nothing to stand 
 between the people and the throne. This is the
 
 19 
 
 great historic serv^ice of the English landed gentry. 
 But it is a service which cannot be well or safely 
 performed without a political education. Europe is 
 filled with the rivalry between the constitutional 
 and imperialist systems, the greatest political contro- 
 versy which has arisen in any age. Those who would 
 watch that controversy with intelligence, and judge it 
 rightly, must remember that Parliaments, like other 
 institutions, are good as they are used. If Parliaments 
 w^ere to tax and legislate as ignorant and bigoted Par- 
 liaments, the blind delegates of class interests, have 
 taxed and legislated in evil times, the case of the 
 advocates of democratic despotism would be strong. 
 Tyranny, the Imperialists might say, is an evil, but the 
 worst tyranny of the worst tyrant is short, partial, 
 intermittent, and it falls on high and low alike, or 
 rather on the high than on the low. There is no 
 tyranny so constant, so searching, so hopeless, no 
 tyi'anny which so surely makes the people its vic- 
 tims, as class taxation and class law. The political 
 ascendancy which the gentry in feudal times owed to 
 arms they must now retain, if they retain it, by supe- 
 riority of intelligence, and by making it felt that their 
 government is a government of reason in the interest 
 of the whole people. Conservatism itself, if it were 
 the special function of Oxford to produce that element 
 of opinion, ought for its own best purposes to be an 
 enlightened Conservatism, not a Conservatism of des- 
 perate positions and ruinous defeats. We may be on 
 the eve of social as well as political change. The new 
 distribution of political power which all parties in the 
 State appear to regard as near at hand, will certainly 
 alter the character of legislation, and will very probably 
 draw with it an alteration of those laws touching the 
 
 c2
 
 20 
 
 settlement and the inheritance of property by which 
 great estates are partly held together. In that case, 
 Oxford may in time cease to have the same class to 
 educate, and may have, accordingly, to qualify her 
 system of education. But the mission of a University 
 is to society as it is ; and the political character and 
 intelligence of the English gentry is, and will be for a 
 long time to come, a main object of our system and 
 a principal test of its success. 
 
 It is impossible not to be struck with the high 
 character and the high intelligence of the English 
 aristocracy and gentry in the early part of the seven- 
 teenth century. Their lot was cast in an evil day, 
 when the deep-seated and long-festering division be- 
 tween Anglo-Catholicism and Protestantism, and be- 
 tween the political tendencies congenial to each, was 
 destined, almost inevitably, to break out in a civil 
 contest. But in that contest the gentlemen of Eng- 
 land bore themselves so that their country has reason 
 to be proud of them for ever. Nothing could be 
 more lofty than their love of principles ; nothing more 
 noble than their disregard of all personal and class 
 interests when those principles were at stake. The 
 age was, no doubt, one of high emotions, such as might 
 constrain the man who best loved his ancestral title and 
 his hereditary lands to hold them well lost for a great 
 cause. But it appears likely that education had also 
 played its part. The nobility and gentry as a class 
 seem to have been certainly more highly educated in 
 the period of the later Tudors and the earlier Stuarts 
 than in any other period of our history. Their edu- 
 cation was classical. But a classical education meant 
 then not a gymnastic exercise of the mind in phi- 
 lology, but a deep draught from what was the great,
 
 21 
 
 and almost the only spring of philosophy, science, 
 history and poetry at that time. It is not to philolo- 
 gical exercise that our earliest Latin grammar exhorts 
 the student, nor is it a mere sharpening of the facul- 
 ties that it promises as his reward. It calls to the 
 study of the language wherein is contained a great 
 treasure of wisdom and knowledge ; and, the student's 
 labour done, wisdom and knowledge were to be his 
 meed. It was to open that treasure, not for the sake 
 of philological niceties or beauties, not to shine as the 
 inventor of a canon or the emendator of a corrupt 
 passage, that the early scholars undertook those ar- 
 dent, lifelong, and truly romantic toils which their 
 massy volumes bespeak to our days — our days which 
 are not degenerate from theirs in labour, but in which 
 the most ardent intellectual labour is directed to 
 a new prize. Besides, Latin was still the language 
 of literary, ecclesiastical, diplomatic, legal, academical 
 Europe ; familiarity with it was the first and most 
 indispensable accomplishment, not only of the gen- 
 tlemen, but of the high-born and royal ladies of the 
 time. We must take all this into account when we 
 set the claims of classical against those of modern 
 culture, and balance the relative amount of motive 
 power we have to rely on for securing industry in 
 either case. In choosing the subjects of a boy's 
 studies you may use your own discretion ; in choos- 
 ing the subjects of a man's studies, if you desire any 
 worthy and fruitful effort, you must choose such as 
 the world values and such as may win the allegiance 
 of a manly mind. It has been said that six months' 
 study of the lang-uage of Schiller and Goethe will now 
 open to the student more high enjoyment than six 
 years' study of the languages of Greece and Rome. It
 
 22 
 
 is certain that six months' study of French will now 
 open to the student more of Europe than six years 
 study of that which was once the European tongue. 
 These are changes in the circumstances and conditions 
 of education which cannot be left out of sight in deal- 
 ing with the generality of minds. Great discoveries 
 have been made by accident ; but it is an accidental 
 discovery, and must be noted as such, if the studies 
 which were first pursued as the sole key to wisdom 
 and knowledge, now that they have ceased not only 
 to be the sole but the best key to wisdom and know- 
 ledge, are still the best instruments of education. 
 
 It would be rash to urge those who are destined to 
 be statesmen, and some here may well by birth and 
 talent be destined to that high calling, to leave the 
 severer and therefore more highly valued training for 
 that which is less valued because it is less severe. 
 But those who are to be statesmen ought to under- 
 go a regular political education, and they opght to 
 undergo it before they are plunged into party, and see 
 all history, all social and constitutional questions, and 
 all questions of legislation, through its haze. There 
 is a mass of information and established principles to 
 be mastered before a man can embark usefully or even 
 honestly in public life. The knowledge got up for 
 debating societies, though far from worthless, is not 
 sufficient. It is necessarily got up with the view of 
 maintaining a thesis ; and even the oratory so formed, 
 being without pregnancy of thought or that mastery 
 of language which can only be acquired by the use of 
 the pen, is not the oratory that will live. Nor will the 
 ancient historians and the ancient writers on political 
 philosophy serve the turn. The classics are indeed in 
 this, as in other departments, a wonderful and precious
 
 23 
 
 manual of humanity ; but the great questions of 
 political and social philosophy with which this age 
 has to deal, — and surely no age ever had to deal with 
 greater, — have arisen in modern times, and must be 
 studied in modern writers. The great problems which 
 perplex our statesmen touching the rights of the 
 labouring population and the distribution of political 
 power among all classes of the people, were completely 
 solved for the ancients by slavery, which placed at 
 once out of the pale of political existence those whose 
 capability of using rightly political power is now the 
 great and pressing doubt. The problems and difficul- 
 ties of the representative system were equally un- 
 known to a State which was a city, and all whose free 
 citizens met with ease to debate and vote in their own 
 persons in the public place. So, again, with all the 
 great questions that have arisen out of the relations 
 between the spiritual and the temporal power em- 
 bodied in Church and State, the duty of the State 
 towards religion. Church establishments, toleration, 
 liberty of conscience. So, again, with the question of 
 the education of the people, which was a simple one 
 when the people were all freemen, supported in intel- 
 lectual leisure by a multitude of slaves. In the history 
 of the ancient republics we see indeed all the political 
 motives and passions at work in their native form, and 
 through a medium of crystal clearness ; but under 
 circumstances so different that few direct lessons can 
 be drawn. Compare any revolution of Athens, Cor- 
 cyra, or Rome, its simple springs and simple pas- 
 sions, with the vast complexity of the motives, senti- 
 ments, ideas, theories, aspirations, which are upon the 
 scene in the great drama of the French Revolution. 
 New political, as well as new physical maladies are
 
 24 
 
 set up from time to time, as one great crisis succeeds 
 another in the history of the world. Fanatical perse- 
 cution was the deadly offspring of the Crusades ; 
 terrorism of the frenzied reign of the Jacobins. Po- 
 litical virtues, though the same in essence, assume 
 a deeper character as history advances. The good 
 Trajan forbade PHny, as procurator of Bithynia, to per- 
 secute the Christians, because persecution was non 
 hujusce sceculi, it did not become that civilized age. 
 But how far removed is this cold and haughty toler- 
 ance, which implicitly views religion as a question of 
 police, from the deep doctrine of liberty of conscience, 
 the late gain of a world which, after ages of perse- 
 cution, martyrdom, and religious war, has found — at 
 least its higher and purer spirits have found — that 
 true religion there cannot be where there is not free 
 allegiance to the truth. 
 
 Two advantages the ancient historians have, or 
 seem to have, over the modern as instruments of 
 education. The first is that they are removed in 
 time from the party feelings of the present day. They 
 might be expected to be as far from our passions as 
 they are, considering the wide interval of ages, mar- 
 vellously near to our hearts. And, undoubtedly, they 
 are farther from our passions than the historians of 
 the present day. Yet even to those serene and lofty 
 peaks of the old world, political prejudice has found 
 its way. The last great history of Greece is at once a 
 most admirable history and a pamphlet which some 
 may think less admirable in favour of universal suf- 
 frage, vote by ballot, and mob courts of law. The 
 history of Rome, and of the Roman Empire especially, 
 has been so fixed on as a battle-ground, often with 
 much irrelevancy, by the two great parties of the pre-
 
 25 
 
 sent day, that in France it is becoming a question of 
 high police, and writers are liable to fall into the hands 
 of administrative justice for taking any but the C£Esa- 
 rean side. 
 
 The second advantage of the classical historians is 
 their style. Their style, the style at least of those 
 we read here, undoubtedly is a model of purity and 
 greatness ; and far be it from us to disregard style in 
 choosing books of education. To appreciate language 
 is partly to command it, and to command beautiful 
 and forcible language is to have a key, with which no 
 man who is to rule through opinion can dispense, to 
 the heart and mind of man. To be the master of that 
 talisman you need not be its slave. Nor will a man 
 be master of it without being master of better things. 
 Language is not a musical instrument into which, if a 
 fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones are evoked 
 only by the spirit of high or tender thought ; and 
 though truth is not always eloquent, real eloquence 
 is always the glow of truth. The language of the 
 ancients is of the time when a writer sought nothing 
 but simply to express his thought, and when thought 
 was fresh and young. The composition of the ancient 
 historians is a model of simple narrative, for the imita- 
 tion of all time. But if they told their tale so simply 
 it was partly because they had a simple tale to tell. 
 Such themes as Latin Christianity, European Civiliza- 
 tion, the History of the Reformation, the History of 
 Europe during the French Revolution, are not so 
 easily reduced to the proportions of artistic beauty, 
 nor are the passions they excite so easily calmed to 
 the serenity of Sophoclean art. My friend the Pro- 
 fessor of Poetry may be right in saying that our great 
 age of art, in history at least, is not yet fully come.
 
 26 
 
 The subject of the decline of Feudalism and the Papacy 
 and the rise of Modern Society is not yet rounded off. 
 The picture of that long struggle may be painted by a 
 calm hand when the struggle itself is done. But not 
 all ancients are classics. The clumsiest and most 
 prolix of modern writers need not fear comparison 
 with Dionysius Halicarnassus, nor the dryest and 
 most lifeless with the Hellenics. Nor are all mo- 
 derns devoid of classical beauty. No narrative so 
 complicated was ever conducted with so much skill 
 and unity as that of Lord Macaulay. No historical 
 painting ever was so vivid as that which lures the 
 reader through all that is extravagant in Carlyle. 
 Gibbon's shallow and satirical view of the Church 
 and Churchmen has made him miss the grand action 
 and the grand actors on the stage. But turn to the 
 style and structure of his great work, its condensed 
 thought, its lofty and sustained diction, its luminous 
 grandeur and august proportions, reared as it is 
 out of a heap of materials the most confused and 
 mean ; and ask of what Greek or Roman edifice, 
 however classical, it is not the peer? In all those 
 sad pages of the history of Oxford there is none 
 sadder than the page which records the student-life 
 of Gibbon. The Oxford of that day is not the Oxford 
 of ours, and we need not fear once and again to speak 
 of it with freedom. But to Oxford are, at least, 
 partly due those foul words and images of evil which 
 will for ever meet the eye of the historical student, 
 passing, as the historical students of all time will 
 pass, over that stately and undecaying arch which 
 spans the chaos of the declining empire from the old 
 world to the new. 
 
 The intrinsic value of studies is a distinct thing
 
 27 
 
 from their educational value ; though, in the case of 
 manly education, the one, as I have ventured to sub- 
 mit, is deeply aifected by the other. It would appear 
 that to be available for the higher education a subject 
 must be traversed by principles and capable of method ; 
 it must be either a science or a philosophy, not a mere 
 mass of facts without principle or law. In my next 
 lecture I shall venture to offer some reasons fof be- 
 lieving, in despite of theories which seem in the as- 
 cendant, that history can never be a science. It is, 
 however, fast becoming a philosophy, having for its 
 basis the tendencies of our social nature, and for the 
 objects of its research the correlation of events, the 
 march of human progress in the race and in the sepa- 
 rate nations, and the effects, good or evil, of all the 
 various influences which from age to age have been 
 brought to bear on the character, mind, and condition 
 of man. This process is being now rapidly carried on 
 through the researches of various schools of specu- 
 lators on history, from the metaphysical school of 
 Hegel to the positivist school of Comte ; researches 
 which, though they may be often, though they may 
 hitherto always have been made under the perverse 
 guidance of theories more or less onesided, crude, or 
 fantastic, are yet finding a chemistry through their 
 alchemy, and bringing out with their heap of dross 
 grain after grain of sterling gold. Pending the com- 
 pletion of this process, or its approach to completion, 
 I venture to think the History School must draw 
 largely for its educational value on the two sciences 
 (they should rather be called philosophies) which are 
 associated with History in the School, Jurisprudence 
 and Political Economy. 
 
 The forms and practice of the law, the art of the
 
 28 
 
 advocate, cannot be studied at a University. Juris- 
 prudence may be and is studied in Universities. In 
 ours, where its shade still hovers, it once flourished 
 so high as to threaten less lucrative though more 
 spiritual studies with extinction, and pointed the 
 high road of ambition to medieval youth. The Viner 
 foundation seems to have been intended to restore its 
 energy by the life-giving virtue of practical utility. 
 But there is evidence that the Viner foundation, like 
 that of Modern History and Modern Languages, was 
 received with some jealousy as an intruder on the old 
 studies, and it failed of its eiFect. Otherwise Oxford, 
 perchance, might have had a greater part in that code 
 of the laws of free England which is now beginning to 
 be framed, and which will go forth, instinct with the 
 spirit of English justice, to contend for the alle- 
 giance of Europe with the Imperial code of France. 
 In international law we have had the great name of 
 Stowell, the genuine offspring, in some measure, of 
 studies pursued here. The great subject of inter- 
 national law was once connected with my Chair. It 
 is now, happily, in separate hands ; and in those hands 
 it is united with diplomacy ; an auspicious conjunc- 
 tion, if we may hope that a school of diplomatists will 
 hence arise to raise diplomacy for ever above that 
 system of chicanery and intrigue of which Talleyrand 
 was the evil deity, and make it the instrument of 
 international justice. Truly great men have always 
 been frank and honest negotiators, and frank and 
 honest negotiation alone becomes a truly great people. 
 " He had no foreign policy," says a French statesman 
 of a great English minister, " but peace, good- will, 
 and justice among nations." A really good and im- 
 partial manual of international law is a work still to
 
 29 
 
 be produced. There is the same want of a good 
 manual of the principles of jurisprudence ; the princi- 
 ples of jurisprudence in the abstract, and the compara- 
 tive jurisprudence of different nations. For want of 
 this, we are driven to study some national system of 
 law, either that of the Romans or of our own country. 
 That of the Romans is somewhat remote, and some- 
 times veils its principles in forms difficult to pierce, 
 except to a student versed in Roman history. Our 
 own is, as yet, in form barbarous and undigested. But 
 except in so far as it is really, and not only in forms 
 and terms, a relic of feudahsm, it covers strong rules 
 of utility and justice, the work of the greatest and 
 most upright tribunals the world ever saw. It is 
 these rules, and not the technicalities or antiquities of 
 English law, that form the proper subject of that part 
 of our examinations ; especially as of those who pass 
 through the School, fewer probably will be destined 
 for the actual profession of the law, than to be 
 county magistrates, and administer plain justice to 
 the people. 
 
 Political Economy, though once accepted by the 
 University as one of the regular subjects of this 
 Chair, has but one foot, as it were, in the new 
 Examination Statute. The candidates are permitted 
 to include among their subjects the great work of 
 Adam Smith. Few will think that the bounds of safe 
 discretion are exceeded by the permission to know 
 something of Political Economy, thus accorded to 
 students destined, many of them from their birth, 
 more by their wealth or talent, to become the legis- 
 lators of a great commercial country ; and whose 
 errors in economy may bring dearth of bread into 
 every cottage, and with dearth the evils that arise
 
 30 
 
 when parent and child cannot both be fed. Political 
 Economy is still the object of antipathies, excusable 
 but unfounded. A hypothetical science, true in the 
 abstract, but not applicable in its rigour to facts, it 
 has been sometimes too rigorously applied ; and errors, 
 I believe they are now admitted to be errors, touching 
 the relative laws of population and food, though they 
 originated with minds animated by a sincere love of 
 man, seemed to accuse the providence and contradict 
 the designs of God. Political Economy is guilty of 
 seeking to put an end to the existence of a pauper 
 class. Such a class may in imagination be the kneel- 
 ing and grateful crowd in the picture, among whom 
 St. Martin divides his cloak ; imagination may even 
 endow them with finer moral perceptions than those 
 of other men ; but in the reality they are the Lazza- 
 roni who sacked and burned with Massaniello, and the 
 Sans- culottes who butchered with Robespierre. Poli- 
 tical Economy, again, is guilty, — not she alone is guilty, 
 — of pronouncing that man must eat his bread in the 
 sweat of his own brow : she is not guilty of denying 
 alms to the helpless and the destitute. "Dr. Adam 
 Smith's conduct in private life," says the author of 
 the sketch prefixed to his great work, " did not belie 
 the generous principles inculcated in his works. He 
 was in the habit of allotting a considerable part of his 
 income to offices of secret charity. Mr. Stewart men- 
 tions that he had been made acquainted with some 
 very affecting instances of his beneficence. They 
 were all, he observes, on a scale much beyond what 
 might have been expected from his fortune ; and were 
 accompanied with circumstances equally honorable to 
 the delicacy of his feelings and the liberality of his 
 heart." It is false sentiment to talk of a Political
 
 31 
 
 Economist as though he were a religious teacher, but 
 through no sermons does the spirit of true. humanity 
 breathe stronger tlian through the writings of Adam 
 Smith ; nor has any man in his way more effectually 
 preached peace and good-will on earth. Neither his 
 voice nor that of any teacher can put mercy into the 
 heart of fanaticism or ambition ; but his spirit always 
 wrestles, and wrestles hard and long, with those spirits 
 of cruelty to save the world from war. Again, no 
 rich man need fear that he will learn from Political 
 Economy the moral sophism that luxury may be 
 laudably indulged in because it is good for trade. 
 On the contrary, he will learn to distinguish between 
 productive and unproductive labour, and the results 
 of each to the community ; and he will have it 
 brought home to his mind more effectually perhaps 
 than by any rhetoric, that if he does live in luxury 
 and indolence, he is a burden to the earth. The 
 words, " I give alms best by spending largely," have 
 indeed been uttered, and they came from a hard, 
 gross heart. But it was the heart not of a Political 
 Economist, but of a Most Christian King. Those 
 words were the answer of Louis XIV. to Madame de 
 Maintenon, when she asked him for aims to relieve 
 the misery of the people ; that people whom the am- 
 bition and fanaticism of their monarch had burdened 
 with a colossal debt, brought to the verge, and beyond 
 the verge, of famine, and forced to pour out their 
 blood like water on a hundred fields that heresy and 
 democracy might be extirpated, and that the one true 
 religion and the divine pattern of government might 
 be preached to all nations with fire and sword. Once 
 more, it is supposed that Political Economy sanctions 
 hard dealings between class and class, and between
 
 32 
 
 man and man ; that it encourages the capitalist to 
 use men as " hands," without fellow-feeUng and 
 without mercy ; and these charges are found side 
 by side with the sentimental praise of that atrocious 
 system of vagrancy laws and statutes of labourers by 
 which expiring feudalism strove to bind again its 
 fetters on the half-emancipated serf. The poetry of 
 the whip, the branding-iron and the gibbet, to be 
 applied to the labourer wandering to a better market, 
 certainly finds as little response in the dry mind of 
 Political Economy as the poetry of bloody perse- 
 cutions and judicial murder. But those who wish to 
 find a condemnation of the inhumanity as well as the 
 folly of overworking and underfeeding the labourer, 
 will not have far to seek it in the pages of Adam 
 Smith. Adam Smith, indeed, condemns in the mea- 
 sured language of sober justice ; and he takes no dis- 
 tinction, such as we find always tacitly taken in 
 novels and poems by the troubadours of the landed 
 interest, between the grinding manufacturer and the 
 grinding landlord. But, perhaps, his sentence will not 
 on either account have less weight with reasonable 
 men. The laws of the production and distribution of 
 wealth are not the laws of duty or affection. But 
 they are the most beautiful and wonderful of the 
 natural laws of God, and through their beauty and 
 their wonderful wisdom they, like the other laws 
 of nature which science explores, are not without 
 a poetry of their own. Silently, surely, without any 
 man's taking thought, if human folly will only re- 
 frain from hindering them, they gather, store, dis- 
 pense, husband, if need be, against scarcity, the 
 wealth of the great community of nations. They 
 take from the consumer in England the wages of the
 
 33 
 
 producer in China, his just wages ; and they dis- 
 tribute those wages among the thousand or hundred 
 thousand Chinese workmen, who have contributed to 
 the production, justly, to "the estimation of a hair," 
 to the estimation of a fineness far passing human 
 thought. They call on each nation with silent bid- 
 ding to supply of its abundance that which the other 
 wants, and make all nations fellow-labourers for the 
 common store ; and in them lies perhaps the strong- 
 est natural proof that the earth was made for the 
 sociable being, man. To buy in the cheapest and 
 sell in the dearest market, the supposed concentration 
 of economical selfishness, is simply to fulfil the com- 
 mand of the Creator, who provides for all the wants of 
 His creatures through each other's help ; to take from 
 those who have abundance, and to carry to those who 
 have need. It would be an exaggeration to erect 
 trade into a moral agency ; but it does unwittingly 
 serve agencies higher than itself, and make one heart 
 as well as one harvest for the world. 
 
 But though the philosophy of this School may, for 
 the present, be drawn mainly from its Jurisprudence 
 and Political Economy, and these will be its most 
 substantial studies, there is another element, which 
 must be supplied by simple narrative history, written 
 picturesquely and to the heart. That element is the 
 ethical element, the training of right sympathies and 
 pure affections, without which no system of education 
 can be perfect, and for want of which mere mathe- 
 matical or scientific training appears essentially defec- 
 tive. The most highly developed power of the pure 
 intellect, the driest light, to use Bacon's phrase, of 
 the understanding, will make a great thinker, but 
 it will not make a man. Statesmen formed by such 
 
 D
 
 34 
 
 education would be utterly wanting in emotion and in 
 the power of kindling or guiding it in others. They 
 would be wanting in the aspirations which nerve men 
 to do great things. History in this new School has to 
 supply the place both of the ancient historians and 
 the poets in the Classical School ; and to a great ex- 
 tent it may do so. And perhaps it may be truly said 
 that Oxford has some great advantages, if she has 
 some disadvantages, for the appreciation of historical 
 character and the ethical treatment of history, not 
 merely as a subject of education, but as a literary pur- 
 suit ; and that she may on this ground well aspire to 
 become a great school of history. We cannot have in 
 this seat of learning the knowledge of the world and 
 of action which produces such histories as those of 
 Thucydides or Tacitus, or even as that of Lord 
 Macaulay, any more than we can have the knowledge 
 of war which produces such a history as that of 
 Napier. But we have in a singular degree the key to 
 moral and spiritual character in all its varieties and in 
 all its aspects. Oxford gives us this key partly as she is 
 a great school of moral philosophy, partly from events 
 otherwise most injurious to her usefulness. Large 
 spiritual experience, deep insight into character, ample 
 sympathies, — these at least the University has gained 
 by that great storm of religious controversy through 
 which she has just passed, and which has cast the 
 wrecks of her most gifted intellects on every shore. 
 Such gifts go far to qualify their possessor for writing 
 the history of many very important periods, provided 
 only that they are combined with the love of justice 
 and controlled by common sense. 
 
 I have mentioned that the Modern Languages were 
 once united with Modern History in this foundation.
 
 35 
 
 They have now separate foundations, but the two 
 studies cannot be divorced. A thorough knowledge 
 of history, even of the history of our own country, is 
 impossible without the power of reading foreign writers. 
 Each nation, in the main, writes its own history best ; 
 it best knows its own land, its own institutions, the 
 relative importance of its own events, the characters 
 of its own great men. But each nation has its pecu- 
 liarities of view, its prejudices, its self-love, which re- 
 quire to be corrected by the impartial or even hostile 
 views of others. We are indignant or we smile at 
 the religion of French aggrandisement which displays 
 itself in every page of most French historians, and at 
 the constantly recurring conviction that the progress 
 of civilization, and even of morality in the world, 
 depends on the perpetual acquisition of fresh territory 
 and fresh diplomatic influence by France. Perhaps 
 there are some things at which a Frenchman might 
 reasonably be indignant or reasonably smile in the 
 native historians of a country of whose greatness we 
 may be justly, and of whose beneficent action in 
 Europe we may be more justly, proud. Besides, in 
 regard to our early history much depends upon anti- 
 quarian research, and antiquarian research is not the 
 special excellence of our practical nation. So strongly 
 do I feel that the original arrangement by which 
 Modern History and Modern Languages were united 
 was the right one, that I cannot refrain from express- 
 ing a hope that the expediency of restoring that ar- 
 rangement may soon come under the consideration 
 of the Council ; and that one of the most flourishing 
 and most practically useful of our departments may 
 be completely incorporated into our system by becom- 
 ing a portion of the Modern History School.
 
 36 
 
 Of the importance of physical science to the stu- 
 dent of Modern History it scarcely becomes me to 
 speak. All I can say is, that I have reason to lament 
 my own ignorance of it at every turn. It is my con- 
 viction that man is not the slave, but the lord, of the 
 material world ; that the spirit moulds, and is not 
 moulded by, the clay. I believe that nations, like 
 men, shape their own destiny, let nature rough-hew it 
 as she will. But nature does rough-hew the destiny 
 of nations, and the knowledge of her workings and 
 influences as they bear on man is a most essential 
 part of history. The next generation of historical 
 students in Oxford will reach, by the aid of this 
 knowledge, what those of my generation can never 
 attain. The words of Roger Bacon to his pupil, 
 Tu meliores radices egeris, ' You will strike root deeper 
 and bear fruit higher than your teacher,' may be 
 repeated by each generation of intellect to that which 
 is at once its pupil and its heir. 
 
 The range of the student's historical reading here 
 must necessarily be limited, and we naturally take as 
 the staple of it the history of our own country. It 
 fortunately happens that the history of our own 
 country is, in one important respect, the best of all 
 historical studies. To say nothing of greatness, no 
 nation has ever equalled ours in the long unbroken 
 continuity of its national life. The institutions of 
 France before the Revolution are of little practical 
 importance or interest to the Frenchman of the pre- 
 sent day : there is almost as great a chasm of po- 
 litical organization and political sentiment between 
 feudal France and the France of Louis XIV. The 
 French Canadian, the surviving relic of France under 
 the old monarchy, is, in everything but race and Ian-
 
 37 
 
 guage, a widely different man from the Frenchman of 
 Paris. But we hear of questions in our youngest 
 colonies being settled by reference to the institutions 
 of Edward the Confessor. The same habits of local 
 self-government which are so much at the root of our 
 political character now, held together English society 
 in the county, the hundred, the parish, the borough, 
 when the central government was dissolved by the civil 
 wars of Henry III., the wars of the Roses, and the 
 Great RebeUion. It fortunately happens, also, that the 
 main interest of our history lies in the development of 
 our political constitution. England has always been a 
 religious country, both under the old and under the 
 reformed faith. But she has not been the parent of 
 great religious movements, excepting Wycliffism, which 
 proved abortive. She has received her spiritual im- 
 pulses mainly from without. That to which the mind 
 of the nation has been turned from its birth, and 
 with unparalleled steadiness, is the working out of a 
 political constitution, combining Roman order with 
 Northern liberty, and harmonizing the freest develop- 
 ment of individual mind and character with intense 
 national unity and unfailing reverence for the law. 
 The present age seems Hkely to decide whether this 
 work, so full of the highest effort, moral as well as 
 intellectual, has been wrought by England for herself 
 alone or for the world. Political greatness is not the 
 end of man, nor is it in political events and insti- 
 tutions that the highest interest of history lies. But 
 when we arrive at the region of the highest interest, 
 we arrive also at the region of the deepest divisions of 
 opinion and of feehng. The English constitution is 
 accepted by all Englishmen, and its development may 
 be traced in this Chair without treading on forbidden 
 ground. Even with regard to this study, indeed, it is
 
 38 
 
 necessary for a Professor of History to warn his pupils 
 tliat they come to him for knowledge, not for opinions ; 
 and that it will be his highest praise if they leave him, 
 with increased materials for judgment, to judge with 
 an open and independent mind. And, happily, in 
 studying the constitutional history of England, modern 
 or medieval, both professor and pupil have before 
 them the noblest model of judicial calmness and inex- 
 orable regard for truth, in that great historian of our 
 constitution whom Oxford produced, and who has 
 lately been taken from the place of honour which he 
 long held among our living literary worthies, to be 
 numbered with the illustrious dead. 
 
 In my next lecture I propose to speak of the 
 method of studying history. In this I have ventured 
 to plead for support and encouragement, and, what is 
 perhaps most needed of all, proper guidance for our 
 Modern History School^. I rest my plea on the 
 fact that there is a class of students destined to per- 
 form the most important duties to society in after life, 
 peculiarly needing education to dispose and enable 
 them to perform those duties, and whose education 
 as a class has hitherto failed ; a fact to which I point 
 with less hesitation because I am persuaded that the 
 sense of it led in great measure to the institution of 
 the Modern History School. I do not rest my plea 
 on any particular theory of education, liberal or utili- 
 tarian, special or universal, because no theory of edu- 
 
 ^ I confess I have been induced to publish this lecture, some- 
 what late and contrai-y to my original intention, by the hope that I 
 may draw the attention of the University to the state of the School 
 of Law and Modern History, left as it is without that superintend- 
 ence which in its infancy it must require, and little encouraged by 
 the Colleges, — even All Souls having apparently set aside the Par- 
 liamentary ordinance by which its fellowships are devoted to the 
 encouragement of the subjects recognised in this School.
 
 39 
 
 cation rationally based on the results of our experience, 
 and embracing the subject in all its aspects, as to the 
 intrinsic value of different studies, their relative effect 
 on the powers of the mind and on the character, and 
 the motives to industry which can be relied on in the 
 case of each, has yet been laid before the world. Let 
 us look the fact in the face. We in this place differ 
 widely in our opinions respecting education ; and our 
 difference of opinions respecting education is intimately 
 connected with our difference of opinions respecting 
 deeper things. In this, Oxford is only the reflection 
 of a world torn by controversies the greatest perhaps 
 which have ever agitated mankind. But we are all 
 agreed in the desire to send out, if we can, good land- 
 lords, just magistrates, upright and enlightened rulers 
 and legislators for the English people. We are all 
 agreed in desiring that the ricli men who are educated 
 at Oxford should be distinguished above other rich 
 men by their efforts to tread what to every rich man 
 is the steep path of social duty. And if we did not 
 all vote for the foundation of a School of Law and 
 Modern History with a view to the better education 
 of the gentry, we are all bound to acknowledge and 
 support it now that it is founded. It is hard to adapt 
 medieval and clerical colleges to the purposes of 
 modern and lay "education. It is hard, too, to break 
 through the separate unity of the college, a strong 
 bond as it has been, not only of affectionate asso- 
 ciation, but of duty. Yet I cannot abandon the hope 
 that wdiatever steps may prove necessary to provide 
 regular and competent instruction in Modern History 
 and the cognate subjects, will be taken by the Univer- 
 sity in fulfilment of its promise to the nation. I feel 
 still more confident that the co-operation of the 
 Colleges with the staff of the University for this pur-
 
 40 
 
 pose will not be impeded by jealousies between dif- 
 ferent orders, which were never very rational, and 
 which may now surely be numbered with the past. 
 We have all one work. The Professor is henceforth 
 the colleague of the Tutor in the duties of University 
 education. What he was in the Middle Ages is an 
 antiquarian question. It is clear that since that time 
 his position and duties have greatly changed. The 
 modern Press is the medieval Professor, and it is ab- 
 surd to think that in these days of universal mental 
 activity and universal publication men can be elected 
 or appointed by Convocation or by the Crown to head 
 the march of thought and give the world new truth. 
 Oxford herself is no longer what a University was in 
 the Middle Ages. No more, as in that most romantic 
 epoch of the history of intellect, will the wayworn 
 student, who had perhaps begged his way from the 
 cold shade of feudalism to this solitary point of intel- 
 lectual light look down upon the city of Ockham and 
 Roger Bacon, as the single emporium of all know- 
 ledge, the single gate to all the paths of ambition, 
 with the passionate reverence of the pilgrim, with the 
 joy of the miner who has found his gold. The func- 
 tions and duties of Oxford are humbler, though still 
 great. And so are those of all who are engaged in 
 her service, and partake the responsibilities of her 
 still noble trust. To discharge faithfully my portion of 
 those duties, with the aid and kind indulgence of those 
 on whose aid and kind indulgence I must always lean, 
 will be my highest ambition while I hold this Chair. 
 
 rniNTED EY MESSES. PAEKER, CORNMAEKKT, OXFOEP.
 
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