moment. It is because, short of vision or revelation, history is our
only extension of human experience. It is true that a philosophy common
to all citizens is necessary for a State if it is to, live--but short
of that necessity the next most necessary factor is a knowledge of the
stuff of mankind: of how men act under certain conditions and impulses.
This knowledge may be acquired, and is in some measure, during the
experience of one wise lifetime, but it is indefinitely extended by the
accumulation of experience which history affords.

And what history so gives us is always of immediate and practical
moment.

For instance, men sometimes speak with indifference of the rival
theories as to the origin of European land tenure; they talk as though
it were a mere academic debate whether the conception of private
property in land arose comparatively late among Europeans or was native
and original in our race. But you have only to watch a big popular
discussion on that very great and at the present moment very living
issue, the moral right to the private ownership in land, to see how
heavily the historic argument weighs with every type of citizen. The
instinct that gives that argument weight is a sound one, and not less
sound in those who have least studied the matter than in those who have
most studied it; for if our race from its immemorial origins has desired
to own land as a private thing side by side with communal tenures, then
it is pretty certain that we shall not modify that intention, however
much we change our laws. If, on the other hand, it could be shown that
before the advent of a complex civilization Europeans had no conception
of private property in land, but treated land as a thing necessarily and
always communal, then you could ascribe modern Socialist theories with
regard to the land to that general movement of harking back to the