There is no historical school properly so-called in modern England; that
is, there is no organization framed with the sole object of extending
and co-ordinating historical knowledge and of choosing men for their
capacity to discover upon the one hand and to teach upon the other.
There is nothing approaching to it in the two ancient universities,
because the choice of teachers there depends upon a multitude of
considerations quite separate from those mentioned, and the capacity to
discover, to know, and to teach history, though it _may_ be present
in a tutor, will only be accidentally so present: while as for
co-ordination of knowledge, there is no attempt at it. Even where very
hard work is done, and, when it concerns local history, very useful
work, history as a general study is not grasped because the universities
have not grasped it.

History is to be had by the modern Englishman from his own reading only;
and I am here concerned with the question how he shall read history with
profit.

To read history with profit, history must be true, or at any rate the
reader must have a power of discerning what is true in the midst of much
that may be false. I will bargain, for instance, that in the summer of
1899 the great mass of men, and especially the great mass of men who had
passed through the universities, were under the impression that armies
had left England for the purpose of conquest in distant countries with
invariable success: that that success had been unique, unsupported and
always decisive, and that the wealth of the country after each success
had increased, not diminished. In other words, had history been studied
even by the tiny minority who have education today in England, Sir
William Butler would have counted more than the Joels, and the late Mr.
Barnato (as he called himself); the South African War would not have