18 



The Twenty-Eighth General Meeting. 



meeting. On the present occasion he was glad to be able to escape 

 from the turbid atmosphere of politics to the more peaceful realms 

 of archaeology. It was gratifying to anybody who had been engaged, 

 as he had, for so many months past, he would not say in assisting, 

 but in vainly attempting to prevent the constant waste of time for 

 which the house of Commons had now chiefly become distinguished, 

 to be able to come down and spend a quiet, and he thought more 

 useful day amongst Wiltshire Archaeologists. As a politician he would 

 venture to say that archaeology was not, as people sometimes seemed 

 to think, a science of the past. Archaeology was, as he ventured that 

 day to argue, only another name for history, and no man could be a 

 safe doctor for the State, unless he had not only got some knowledge 

 of the present of a country, but also of its past. Indeed, he 

 thought it could be shown that there had hardly been a person who 

 had occupied the first political position in the State who could not 

 be proved to have been in one kind or another a close observer of 

 the history and habits of his countrymen. He would say that of 

 the present Prime Minister, as well as of his great rival so recently 

 dead, and more especially of one whom it was his privilege to know 

 from his earliest youth, he alluded to Lord Russell, whose very mind 

 was saturated with the history of his country. That being so, it 

 seemed to him that archaeology was not a work from which the 

 politician should turn aside. Again, the archaeologist was sometimes 

 able to be of use in regard to questions of local administration. 

 His friend Mr. Merriman and himself had that afternoon, indeed, 

 been helped to an accurate decision about a question affecting some 

 of the roads of the county, by the opinion of Canon Jackson in 

 respect to a question as to whether a particular place was or was 

 not at a particular date a separate parish. Further, with regard to 

 such questions as those on which local administrators and writers 

 on local administration were so much divided, a great deal of useful 

 light could be thrown by a study of what was formerly done in this 

 country. For example, they heard a great deal now about the 

 necessity of having some unit of administration intermediate between 

 the county and parish. Well, as he had often argued elsewhere, what 

 on earth was that except going back to the habits of their Saxon 



