the mercy of the incapable, dethroning enlightened virtue for the
benefit of the average man. They hold that great and salutary
things are done for mankind by power concentrated, not by power
balanced and cancelled and dispersed, and that the whig theory,
sprung from decomposing sects, the theory that authority is
legitimate only by virtue of its checks, and that the sovereign
is dependent on the subject, is rebellion against the divine will
manifested all down the stream of time.

I state the objection not that we may plunge into the crucial
controversy of a science that is not identical with ours, but in order
to make my drift clear by the defining aid of express contradiction.
No political dogma is as serviceable to my purpose here as the
historian's maxim to do the best he can for the other side, and to
avoid pertinacity or emphasis on his own. Like the economic precept
laissez faire #38, which the eighteenth century derived from Colbert,
it has been an important, if not a final step in the making of method.
The strongest and most impressive personalities, it is true, like
Macaulay, Thiers, and the two greatest of living writers, Mommsen and
Treitschke, project their own broad shadow upon their pages. This is
a practice proper to great men, and a great man may be worth several
immaculate historians. Otherwise there is virtue in the saying that a
historian is seen at his best when he does not appear #39. Better for
us is the example of the Bishop of Oxford, who never lets us know what
he thinks of anything but the matter before him; and of his
illustrious French rival, Fustel de Coulanges, who said to an excited
audience: "Do not imagine you are listening to me; it is history
itself that speaks." #40 We can found no philosophy on the observation
of four hundred years, excluding three thousand. It would be an
imperfect and a fallacious induction. But I hope that even this