SCIENCE OF HISTORY. 651 



sacred, their writings extirpated, their memory anathematized, and their 

 very names and existence left for seven or eight centuries in the obscuri- 

 ty of musty manuscripts — their history to be gathered, perhaps, only from 

 the sentences by which they were condemned. Yet the memory of these 

 men — men who resisted certain pretensions or certain dogmas of the 

 Church in the very age in which the unanimous assent of Christendom 

 was afterward claimed as having been given to them, and asserted as the 

 ground of their authority — broke the chain of tradition, established a se- 

 ries of precedents for resistance, inspired later Reformers with the cour- 

 age, and armed them with the weapons, which they needed when mankind 

 were better prepared to follow their impulse. To this example from men, 

 let us add another from governments. The comparatively enlightened 

 rule of which Spain had the benefit during a considerable part of the 

 eighteenth century, did not correct the fundamental defects of the Spanish 

 people; and in consequence, though it did great temporary good, so much 

 of that good perished with it, that it may plausibly be affirmed to have 

 had no permanent effect. The case has been cited as a proof how little 

 governments can do in opposition to the causes which have determined 

 the general character of the nation. It does show how much there is 

 which they can not do; but not that they can do nothing. Compare what 

 Spain was at the beginning of that half-century of liberal government, 

 with what she had become at its close. That period fairly let in the light 

 of European thought upon the more educated classes ; and it never after- 

 ward ceased to go on spreading. Previous to that time the change was 

 in an inverse diiection; culture, light, intellectual and even material activ- 

 ity, were becoming extinguished. Was it nothing to arrest this down- 

 ward and convert it into an upward coui-se ? How much that Charles the 

 Third and Aranda could not do, has been the ultimate consequence of 

 what they did ! To that half-century Spain owes that she has got rid of 

 the Inquisition,. that she has got rid of the monks, that she now has parlia- 

 ments and (save in exceptional intervals) a free press, and the feelings of 

 freedom and citizenship, and is acquiring railroads and all the otiier con- 

 stituents of material and economical pi-ogress. In the Spain which pre- 

 ceded that era, there was not a single element at work which could have 

 led to these results in any length of time, if the country had continued to 

 be governed as it was by the last princes of the Austrian dynasty, or if 

 the Bourbon rulei's had been from the first what, both in Spain and in Na- 

 ples, they afterward became. 



And if a government can do much, even when it seems to have done 

 little, in causing positive improvement, still greater are the issues depend 

 ent on it in the way of warding off evils, both internal and external, which 

 else would stop improvement altogether. A good or a bad counselor, in a 

 single city at a particular crisis, has affected the whole subsequent fate of 

 the world. It is as certain as any contingent judgment respecting histor- 

 ical events can be, that if there had been no Themistocles there would 

 have been no victory of Salarais ; and had there not, where would have 

 been all our civilization? How different, again, would have been the issue 

 if Epaminondas, or Timoleon, or even Iphicrates, instead of Chares and Ly- 

 sicles, had commanded at Chaeroneia. As is well said in the second of two 

 Essays on the Study of History,* in my judgment the soundest and most 

 philosophical productions which the recent controversies on this subject 



* In the Cornhill Magazine for June and July, 1861. 



