APPENDIX A LXVII 



"les prétendues vérités historiques;" he thought the past could never be 

 read aright, and that if it could there was nothing to be gained from it. 

 This was also, practically, Jeremy Bentham's opinion. Not long ago a 

 leading London weekly, referring to the troubles in Ireland, expressed 

 the idea, in an article entitled ''The Curse of History," that it would be 

 a good thing if all history could be wiped out, so that the memory of old 

 feuds might be obliterated. Napoleon described history as a "mensonge 

 convenu". Prince Bismarck is stated to have been devoted to history. 

 "In the full maturity of his experience," says a writer in the Quarterly 

 Review, "he delivered himself of the opinion that a properly conducted 

 study of history must be the necessary foundation of knowledge for 

 every statesman; that by this means alone can he learn what is possible 

 to attain in the various transactions with different states ; and that the 

 whole of the diplomatic art lies in the capacity for recognising the limits 

 of the attainable." Carlyle speaks of history as "the true fountain of 

 knowledge, by whose light alone, whether consciously or unconsciously 

 employed, can the present or the future be interpreted or guessed at." 

 An able writer of our own time, John C. Crozier, a Canadian by birth, 

 but whose home has for years past been in London, England, agrees 

 that "the present is ever a mystery to us until it is irradiated by some 

 knowledge of the past"; he contends, at the same time, that while such 

 knowledge may account for the conditions existing to-day it does not 

 really explain those conditions, or point to the line of conduct which is 

 best to pursue under them. To read history, says another — I forget at 

 this moment who — is to travel through time, the knowledge thus ac- 

 quired being analogous to that acquired by travelling through space. 

 The observant traveller and the thoughtful reader will both be the better 

 and the wiser for their excursions. The historian Froude, thinks that 

 it is an abuse of history to try to make it teach any lessons whatever. 

 "If," he says, "Homer and Shakespeare are what they are from the ab- 

 sence of everything didactic about them, may we not thus learn some- 

 thing of what history should be, and in what sense it should aspire to 

 teach," It can teach, he holds, simply by bringing us into close and 

 living touch with persons and events. It is a drama, and should be 

 presented as such without hints as to how, in the opinion of the author, 

 it ought to be interpreted. 



The authors of a very comprehensive article on History in the Grande 

 Encyclopédie, the MM. Mortet, recognize three stages in its develop- 

 ment, the Rudimentary, the Literary, and the Scientific. In the Rudi- 

 mentary we have songs, epics, sagas, legendary tales, narratives which 

 more or less flatter the pride of princes or the ruling class, family annals, 

 inscriptions, &c. In the literary stage which followed, and which was 

 long predominant, history was regarded as a department of literature. 



