reflected lustre of his name.

You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject to
which neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning,
because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a
void; because, in society as in nature, the structure is
continuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, until
we dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests of
Germany. No end, because, on the same principle, history made
and history making are scientifically inseparable and separately
unmeaning.

"Politics," said Sir John Seeley, "are vulgar when they are not
liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature
when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics."
Everybody perceives the sense in which this is true. For the
science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the
stream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river;
and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by
experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action
and a power that goes to the making of the future #1. In France,
such is the weight attached to the study of our own time, that
there is an appointed course of contemporary history, with
appropriate text-books #2. That is a chair which, in the progressive
division of labour by which both science and government prosper #3,
may some day be founded in this country. Meantime, we do well to
acknowledge the points at which the two epochs diverge. For the
contemporary differs from the modern in this, that many of its
facts cannot by us be definitely ascertained. The living do not
give up their secrets with the candour of the dead; one key is