E-text prepared by Geoffrey Cowling
by
Delivered at Cambridge, June 1895
FELLOW STUDENTS—I look back today to a time before the middle ofthe century, when I was reading at Edinburgh and ferventlywishing to come to this University. At three colleges I appliedfor admission, and, as things then were, I was refused by all.Here, from the first, I vainly fixed my hopes, and here, ina happier hour, after five-and-forty years, they are at lastfulfilled.
I desire, first, to speak to you of that which I may reasonablycall the Unity of Modern History, as an easy approach to questionsnecessary to be met on the threshold by any one occupying thisplace, which my predecessor has made so formidable to me by thereflected lustre of his name.
You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject towhich neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning,because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without avoid; because, in society as in nature, the structure iscontinuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, untilwe dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests ofGermany. No end, because, on the same principle, history madeand history making are scientifically inseparable and separatelyunmeaning.
"Politics," said Sir John Seeley, "are vulgar when they are notliberalised by history, and history fades into mere literaturewhen it loses sight of its relation to practical politics."Everybody perceives the sense in which this is true. For thescience of politics is the one science that is deposited by thestream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river;and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed byexperience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of actionand 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, thatthere is an appointed course of contemporary history, withappropriate text-books #2. That is a chair which, in the progressivedivision of labour by which both science and government prosper #3,may some day be founded in this country. Meantime, we do well toacknowledge the points at which the two epochs diverge. For thecontemporary differs from the modern in this, that many of itsfacts cannot by us be definitely ascertained. The living do notgive up their secrets with the candour of the dead; one key isalways excepted, and a generation passes before we can ensureaccuracy. Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of thereality, as the initiated know it. Even of a thing so memorableas the war of 1870, the true cause is still obscure; much that webelieved has been scattered to the winds in the last six months,and further revelations by important witnesses are about toappear. The use of history turns far more on certainty than onabundance of acquired information.
Beyond the question of certainty is the question of detachment.The process by which principles are discovered and appropriatedis other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; andour most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shapein the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and thetempest of active life #4. For a man is justly despised who has oneopinion in history and another in politics, one for abroad andanother at home, one for opposition and another for office.History compels us to fasten on abiding issues, and rescues usfrom the temporary and transient.