David Starr Jordan - "The Call of the Twentieth Century"

Lyda Farrington Krausé - "We Ten"

Various - "Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883"

Walter Lippmann - "A Preface to Politics"

Editorial
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Historical and Political Essays

W >> William Edward Hartpole Lecky >> Historical and Political Essays



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HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS

by

WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY







Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York, Bombay, and Calcutta
1908
All rights reserved




CONTENTS


PAGE
THOUGHTS ON HISTORY 1

THE POLITICAL VALUE OF HISTORY 21

THE EMPIRE: ITS VALUE AND ITS GROWTH 43

IRELAND IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY 68

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES 90

CARLYLE'S MESSAGE TO HIS AGE 104

ISRAEL AMONG THE NATIONS 116

MADAME DE STAEL 131

THE PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR ROBERT PEEL 151

THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF DERBY 200

MR. HENRY REEVE 242

DEAN MILMAN 249

QUEEN VICTORIA AS A MORAL FORCE 275

OLD-AGE PENSIONS 298

INDEX 319




The Essays 'Thoughts on History,' 'Formative Influences,'
'Madame de Stael,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age
Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the
_Forum_--the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing
History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in the _North
American Review_. Those on Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Henry Reeve,
and Dean Milman were written for the _Edinburgh Review_. The
Essay on 'Queen Victoria as a Moral Force' appeared first in
the _Pall Mall Magazine_; 'Carlyle's Message to His Age' in
the _Contemporary Review_. 'The Political Value of History'
was a presidential address delivered before the Birmingham and
Midland Institute; 'The Empire,' an inaugural address
delivered at the Imperial Institute; and the 'Memoir of the
Fifteenth Earl of Derby' was originally prefixed to the
volumes of his speeches and addresses.




HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS




THOUGHTS ON HISTORY


I do not propose in this paper to enter into any general inquiry about
the best method of writing history. Such inquiries appear to me to be
of no real value, for there are many different kinds of history which
should be written in many different ways. A diplomatic, a military, or
a parliamentary history, dealing with a short period or a particular
episode, must evidently be treated in a very different spirit from an
extended history where the object of the historian should be to
describe the various aspects of the national life, and to trace
through long periods of time the ultimate causes of national progress
and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social
and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their
different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that
has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for
the most important part of his task is to explain the long course of
events that prepared and produced the catastrophe; while a writer who
treats of more normal times will do well to plunge rapidly into his
theme.

Historians, too, differ widely in their special talents, and these
talents are never altogether combined. The power of vividly realising
and portraying men, or societies or modes of thought that have long
since passed away; the power of arranging and combining great
multitudes of various facts; the power of judging with discrimination,
accuracy, and impartiality conflicting arguments or evidence; the
power of tracing through the long course of events the true chain of
cause and effect, selecting the facts that are most valuable and
significant and explaining the relation between general causes and
particular effects, are all very different and belong to different
types of mind. It is idle to expect a writer with the gifts of a
Clarendon, a Kinglake, or a Froude to write history in the spirit of a
Hallam or a Grote. Writers who are eminently distinguished for wide,
patient, and accurate research have sometimes little power either of
describing or interpreting the facts which they collect. All that can
be said with any profit is that each writer will do best if he follows
the natural bent of his genius, and that he should select those kinds
or periods of history in which his special gifts have most scope and
the qualities in which he is deficient are least needed.

It is the fashion of a modern school of historical writers to deplore
what they call the intrusion of literature into history. History, in
their judgment, should be treated as science and not as literature,
and the kind of intellect they most value is not unlike that of a
skilful and well-trained attorney. To collect documents with industry;
to compare, classify, interpret and estimate them is the main work of
the historian. It is no doubt true that there are some fields of
history where the primary facts are so little known, so much contested
or so largely derived from recondite manuscript sources, that a
faithful historian will be obliged in justice to his readers to
sacrifice both proportion and artistic charm to the supreme importance
of analysing evidence, reproducing documents and accumulating proofs;
but in general the depreciation of the literary element in history
seems to me essentially wrong. It is only necessary to recall the
names of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Livy and Tacitus, of Gibbon and
Macaulay, and of the long line of great masters of style who have
related the annals of France. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted
that there is no subject in which rarer literary qualities are more
demanded than in the higher forms of history. The art of portraying
characters; of describing events; of compressing, arranging, and
selecting great masses of heterogeneous facts, of conducting many
different chains of narrative without confusion or obscurity; of
preserving in a vast and complicated subject the true proportion and
relief, will tax the highest literary skill, and no one who does not
possess some, at least, of these gifts in an unusual measure is likely
to attain a permanent place among the great masters of history. It is
a misfortune when some stirring and momentous period falls into the
hands of the mere compiler, for he occupies the ground and a really
great writer will hesitate to appropriate and plagiarise the materials
his predecessor has collected. There are books of great research and
erudition which one would have wished to have been all re-written by
some writer of real genius who could have given order, meaning and
vividness to a mere chaos of accurate and laboriously sifted learning.
The great prominence which it is now the fashion to ascribe to the
study of diplomatic documents, is very apt to destroy the true value
and perspective of history. It is always the temptation of those who
are dealing with manuscript materials to overrate the small personal
details which they bring to light, and to give them much more than
their due space in their narrative. This tendency the new school
powerfully encourages. It is quite right that the treasure-houses of
diplomatic correspondence which have of late years been thrown open
should be explored and sifted, but history written chiefly from these
materials, though it has its own importance, is not likely to be
distinguished either by artistic form or by philosophical value. Those
who are immersed in these studies are very apt to overrate their
importance and the part which diplomacy and statesmanship have borne
in the great movement of human affairs.

A true and comprehensive history should be the life of a nation. It
should describe it in its larger and more various aspects. It should
be a study of causes and effects, of distant as well as proximate
causes, and of the large, slow and permanent evolution of things. It
should include, as Buckle and Macaulay saw, the social, the
industrial, the intellectual life of the nation as well as mere
political changes, and it should be pre-eminently marked by a true
perspective dealing with subjects at a length proportioned to their
real importance. All this requires a powerful and original intellect
quite different from that of a mere compiler. It requires too, in a
high degree, the kind of imagination which enables a man to reproduce
not only the acts but the feelings, the ideals, the modes of thought
and life of a distant past, and pierce through the actions and
professions of men to their real characters. Insight into character is
one of the first requisites of a historian. It is therefore, much to
be desired that he should possess a wide knowledge of the world, the
knowledge of different types of character, foreign as well as English,
which travel and society and practical experience of business can
give, and it will also be of no small advantage to him if he has
passed through more than one intellectual or religious phase, widening
the area of his appreciation and realisations. He should also have
enough of the dramatic element to enable him to throw himself into
ways of reasoning or feeling very different from his own. One of the
most valuable of all forms of historical imagination is that which
enables a writer to place himself in the point of view of the best men
on different sides, and to bring out the full sense of opposing
arguments. All these gifts or qualities are never in a high degree
united, but they are all essential to a great historian, and a true
school of history should widen instead of narrowing our conception of
it.

The supreme virtue of the historian is truthfulness, and it may be
violated in many different degrees. The worst form is when a writer
deliberately falsifies facts or deliberately excludes from his picture
qualifying circumstances. But there are other and much more subtle
ways in which party spirit continually and often quite unconsciously
distorts history. All history is necessarily a selection of facts, and
a writer who is animated by a strong sympathy with one side of a
question or a strong desire to prove some special point will be much
tempted in his selection to give an undue prominence to those that
support his view, or, even where neither facts nor arguments are
suppressed, to give a party character to his work by an unfair
distribution of lights and shades. The strong and vivid epithets are
chiefly reserved for the good or bad deeds on one side, the vague,
general and comparatively colourless epithets for the corresponding
deeds on the other side; and in this way very similar facts are
brought before the reader with such different degrees of illumination
and relief that they make a wholly different impression on his mind.
In the history of Macaulay this defect may, I think, be especially
traced. The characteristic defect of that great and in most respects
admirable writer, both as historian and artist, was the singular
absence of graduation in his mind. The neutral tints which are
essential to the accurate shading of character seemed almost wanting,
and a love of strong contrasted lights and shades, coupled with his
supreme command of powerful epithets, continually misled him. But no
attentive reader can fail to observe how unequally those epithets are
distributed and how clearly this inequality discloses the strong bias
under which he wrote.

The truth of an historical picture lies mainly in its judicious and
accurate shading, and it is this art which the historian should
especially cultivate. He will scarcely do so with success unless it
becomes to him not merely a matter of duty, but also a pleasure and a
pride. The kind of interest which he takes in his narrative should be
much less that of a politician and an advocate than of a painter, who,
now darkening and now lightening the picture, seeks by many delicate
touches to catch with exact fidelity the tone and hue of the object he
represents.

The degree of certainty that it is possible to attain in history
varies greatly in different departments. The growth of institutions
and laws, military events, changes in manners and in creeds, can be
described with much confidence, and although it is more difficult to
depict the inner moral life of nations, the influences that form their
characters and prepare them for greatness or decay, yet when the
materials for our induction are sufficiently large this field of
history may be studied with great profit. Diplomatic history and the
more secret springs of political history can only be fully disclosed
when the archives relating to them have been explored and when the
confidential correspondence of the chief actors in them has been
published. The biographical element in history is always the most
uncertain. Even among contemporaries the judgment of character and
motives depends largely on indications so slight and subtle that they
rarely pass into books and are only fully felt by direct personal
contact, and the smallest knowledge of life shows how quickly
anecdotes and sayings are distorted, coloured, and misplaced when they
pass from lip to lip. Most of the 'good sayings' of history are
invention, and most of them have been attributed to different persons.
A history which is plainly written under the influence of party bias
has the value of an advocate's speech giving one side of the question.
When our only materials for the knowledge of a period are derived from
such histories, the saying of Voltaire should be remembered--that we
can confidently believe only the evil which a party writer tells of
his own side and the good which he recognises in his opponents. In
judging the historian we must consider his nearness to the events he
relates, his probable means of information and the internal evidence
in his narrative of accuracy, honesty, and judgment, and we must also
consider the standard of proof and the methods of historical writing
prevailing in his time. A modern writer who placed in the mouths of
his personages speeches which he himself invented would be justly
discredited, but in antiquity it was a recognised custom for a
historian to embody in fictitious speeches the reflections suggested
by his narrative and the motives which he believed to have actuated
his heroes.

Different ages differ enormously in the severity of proof which they
exact, in the degree of accuracy which they attain. The credibility of
a statement also depends not only on the amount of its evidence, but
also on its own inherent probability. Everyone will feel that an
amount of testimony that would be quite sufficient to persuade him
that a butcher's boy had been seen driving along a highway is wholly
different from that which would be required to persuade him that a
ghost had been met there. The same rule applies to the history of the
past, and it is complicated by the great difference in different ages
of the measure of probability, or, in other words, by the strong
predisposition in certain stages of knowledge to accept statements or
explanations of facts which in later stages we know to be incredible
or in a high degree improbable. Few subjects in history are more
difficult than the laws of evidence in dealing with the supernatural
and the extent to which the authority of historians in relating
credible and probable facts is invalidated by the presence of a
mythical element in their narratives.

Connected with this subject is also the question how far it is
possible by merely internal evidence to decompose an ancient document,
resolving it into its separate elements, distinguishing its different
dates and its different degrees of credibility. The reader is no doubt
aware with what a rare skill this method of inquiry has been pursued
in the present century, chiefly by great German and Dutch scholars, in
dealing with the early Jewish writings. At the same time, without
disputing the value of their work or the importance of many of the
results at which they have arrived, I may be pardoned for expressing
my belief that this kind of investigation is often pursued with an
exaggerated confidence. Plausible conjecture is too frequently
mistaken for positive proof. Undue significance is attached to what
may be mere casual coincidences, and a minuteness of accuracy is
professed in discriminating between the different elements in a
narrative which cannot be attained by mere internal evidence. In all
writings, but especially in the writings of an age when criticism was
unknown, there will be repetitions, contradictions, inconsistencies
and diversities of style which do not necessarily indicate different
authorship or dates.

I have spoken of the uncertainty of the biographical element in
history. It must, however, be said that when a historian is dealing
with men who have played a very prominent part on the stage of life,
the general acceptance of his judgment is a strong corroboration of
its truth. It may be added that the later judgment of men is not
unfrequently more true than the contemporary judgment. The wisdom of a
teaching or of a policy is shown by its results, and these results are
in most cases very gradually disclosed. Great men are like great
mountains which are surrounded by lower peaks that often obscure their
grandeur and seem to a near observer to equal or even to overtop them.
It is only when seen from far off that their true dimensions are fully
realised and they soar to heaven above all rivals. In the page of
history men are judged mainly by the net result of their lives, by the
broad lines of their characters and achievements. Many injudicious
words, many minor weaknesses of conduct, are forgotten. Faults of
manner, deficiencies of tact, awkwardnesses of appearance, which tell
so largely upon the judgments of contemporaries, are no longer seen.
The conversational nimbleness and versatility of intellect, the charm
or assurance or magnetism of manner, the weight of social position,
all of which tend to secure to an inferior man a pre-eminence in the
circle in which he moves, are equally evanescent, and the shy, rugged,
and tactless recluse often emerges on the strength of his genuine and
abiding performances to a position in the eyes of the world which he
never attained during his lifetime.

That fine saying of Cardan, 'Tempus mea possessio, tempus ager meus,'
might be the motto of the historian. Time is the field which he
cultivates, and a true sense of space and distance should be one of
the chief characteristics of his work. Few things are more difficult
to attain than a just perspective in history. The most dramatic
incidents are not the most important, and in weighing the joys and
sorrows of the past our measures of judgment are almost hopelessly
false. The most humane man cannot emancipate himself from the law of
his nature, according to which he is more affected by some tragic
circumstance which has taken place in his own house or in his own
street than by a catastrophe which has carried anguish and desolation
over enormous areas in a distant continent. In history, too, there are
vast tracts which are almost necessarily unrealised. We judge a period
mainly by its great men, by its brilliant or salient incidents, by the
fortunes of a small class; and the great mass of obscure, suffering,
inarticulate humanity, whose happiness is often so profoundly affected
by political and military events, almost escapes our notice. It should
be the object of history to bring before us past events in their true
proportion and significance, and one of the greatest improvements in
modern history is the increased attention which is paid to the
social, industrial, and moral history of the poor. The paucity of our
information and the difficulty of realising the conditions of obscure
multitudes will always make this branch of history very imperfect, but
it is one of the most essential to the just judgment of the past.

Another task which lies before the historian is that of distinguishing
proximate from ultimate causes. Our first natural impulse is to
attribute a great change to the men who effected it and to the period
in which it took place, and to neglect or underrate the long train of
causes which had been, often through many generations, preparing its
advent. A faithful historian must especially guard against this error.
He must study the slow process of growth as well as the moment of
efflorescence, the long progress of decay as well as the final
catastrophe. He will probably find that the part played by statesmen
and legislatures is less than he had imagined, and that the causes of
the movements he relates must be sought over a wider area and through
a longer period.

Moral, intellectual, or economical movements very slightly connected
with political life are often those which have most largely
contributed to the good or evil fortunes of a nation; and even in the
sphere of politics it is not the events which attract the most vivid
contemporary interest that have the most enduring influence. Few
things contribute so much to the formation of the social type as the
laws regulating the succession of property and especially the
agglomeration or division of landed property. The growth of militarism
in a nation, besides its direct and obvious consequences, forms a type
of character which will sooner or later show itself in almost every
department of legislation, and the tendency of politics to enlarge or
narrow the sphere of individual liberty or of government control, will
affect most deeply the habits of the people. Laws regulating private
enterprises, substituting State control or initiative for individual
action, encouraging or discouraging thrift, and above all interfering
with free contracts, have much more than an immediate influence, for
they become the prolific parents of many further extensions. In the
words of an excellent observer, it will be found 'that our legislative
interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions,
every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects
of the preceding.' It is by studying such tendencies through long
periods of time that their good or evil influences may be best
discovered, and this should be one of the great tasks of the
historian.

But, however large a part may be given to the impersonal influences in
history, he will still be largely concerned with the record of
individual achievements, and the great men of the past will form the
most conspicuous landmarks of his narrative. I have often thought,
however, that nations are judged too much by the great men they have
produced and not sufficiently by the way in which they have
discriminated among them and appreciated them. Genius is like the wind
that bloweth where it listeth, and it often appears in strangely
uncongenial quarters. The true nobility of a nation is shown by the
men they choose, by the men they follow, by the men they admire, by
the ideals of character and conduct they place before them. Tried by
such tests, there is often much that is profoundly saddening in the
history of countries that have been far from poor in the number of
their great men.

In the judgment of historical characters there are two cautions on
which it may not be useless to dwell. There is a large class of public
men who show little capacity in dealing with or directing the present
conditions of their time, but who see clearly the bourne to which
existing forces or tendencies are moving and who, judged by their
distant forecasts, will appear much wiser than their contemporaries.
It is the natural bias of the historian to place them perhaps higher
than they deserve. This power of just speculative foresight is no very
rare gift, and in public affairs it is often as much a hindrance as a
help. Forms of government and other great religious or political
institutions, like the products of nature, have their times of
immaturity, of growth, of ripeness and of decay, and it by no means
follows because they at last become indefensible, that they have not
during many generations discharged useful functions and that those who
first assailed and condemned them are deserving of praise. Not
unfrequently, indeed, a public man must take his choice whether by
fully identifying himself with the existing conditions around him and
employing them to the best advantages he will lead a useful and
practical life, or whether as an advanced thinker he will associate
himself with the cause that is one day to conquer, place himself in
the van of progress and at the sacrifice of much present influence
deserve the credit of foresight.

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