and weighing, and comparing evidence, and to the moral exercise
of being placed in a high and responsible situation, invested
with one of God's own attributes, that of judgment, and having
to determine with authority between truth and falsehood, right
and wrong, is to furnish them with very high means of moral and
intellectual culture--in other words, it is providing them with
one of the highest kinds of education. And thus a judicial
constitution may secure a pure administration of justice, and
yet fail as an engine of national cultivation, where it is
vested in the hands of a small body of professional men, like
the old French parliament. While, on the other hand, it may
communicate the judicial office very widely, as by our system
of juries, and thus may educate, if I may so speak, a very
large portion of the nation, but yet may not succeed in
obtaining the greatest certainty of just legal decisions. I do
not mean that our jury system does not succeed, but it is
conceivable that it should not. So, in the same way, different
arrangements of the executive and legislative powers should be
always regarded in this twofold aspect--as effecting their
direct objects, good government and good legislation; and as
educating the nation more or less extensively, by affording to
a greater or less number of persons practical lessons in
governing and legislating."

History is an account of the common purpose pursued by some one of the
great families of the human race. It is the biography of a nation; as
the history of a particular sect, or a particular body of men, describes
the particular end which the sect or body was instituted to pursue, so
history, in its more comprehensive sense, describes the paramount object
which the first and sovereign society--the society to which all others