[,0O The Place of History in Education BY J. W. ALLEN FORMERLY BRAKENBURY EXHIBITIONER, BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD J HULSEAN PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY AT BEDFORD COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 2.34^5 NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1910 CONTENTS. PAGK I. THE FIRST QUESTION ..... 1 What do we mean by " History " ? — The subject- matter — History a form of thought — What is that form to be ? II. HISTORY AS A SCIENCE .... 6 Nature of scientific study — History of England from this point of view — A problem in causation — Can it be solved ? III. CERTAIN RADICAL OBJECTIONS . . . 15 Complexity of factors — Free-will — The individual and the mass — The action of masses — Great men, coincidence, weather and accident in general. IV. CERTAIN PRACTICAL INFERENCES . . . 41 Irrelevant aspects : the dramatic, picturesque, &c. — Moral judgments — Other dangerous tendencies — Political bias — The illusion of the present — Need of detachment. V. AN ILLUSTRATION ..... 64 The questions involved in the problem of the com- mencement of the Hundred Years' War. vi Contents. VI. HISTORY AS A PAGEANT .... 79 Personal points of view — The demand for history as a pageant — Its reasonableness — The two kinds of history. VII. OF RECONCILIATION ..... 98 An impossibility — A division of labour wanted — What kind of history are we to teach ? VIII. OF EDUCATION ...... 106 Why teach anything? — "Technical" and other education — Lack of system — To lay the founda- tions of sound thinking, the right aim of a schol- astic system — Training of the intelligence — Need- ful knowledge — Moral training. IX. OF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY .... 137 Need of a national system — The knowledge we want and don't want — " English " history — Eng- land and Europe — Essential things. X. OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY . 156 Value of history for thought — Bearing on social and political speculation — Value in intellectual training — The charge of dullness. XI. OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY MORAL ...... 170 What the teaching of history may possibly do for morals ; and what it must not do. XII. CONCERNING DIFFERENCE OF SEX . . 180 That women need not be educated, except " tech- nically," differently from men. XIII. THE INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL STUDY . 187 History in primary schools — Impossibility of teach- ing history to young children — "Historical" stories and fairy tales— An introduction needed — The sociological basis — Transition to history. Contents. vii XIV. A FINAL DIFFICULTY : THE POINT OF VIEW . 204 The subjective difficulty — History affected by" unhistorical opinion — Nature of the following illustrations. XV. ILLUSTRATION OF THE DIFFICULTY — THE REFORMATION (a) . . . . .210 THE REFORMATION (b) . . £22 THE REFORMATION (c) . . . . , £36 XVI. CONCLUSION The foregoing statements unhistorical— Measures of historical value — Historical progress. 247 XVII. POSTSCRIPT ...... 255 s. J el THE PLACE OF HISTOEY IN EDUCATION. I. THE FlftST QUESTION. 2 3 fo^^ Whether we set out to teach History or to consider its place in a system of educa- tion, it would seem prudent to arrive, first of all, at an understanding of what we mean by " History." There have been people who, in class-rooms or through the press, have taught history without ever having attempted to attain such under- standing. Perhaps they thought the question a simple one. It has not proved so. About the subject-matter of history there 2 Place of History in Education. is, at the present time, no serious dis- agreement. We are agreed that it is not the doings of kings and highly placed people ; that it does not consist, specifically, in wars and revolutions or in parliamentary proceedings or in law. We have known this for some little time. Montesquieu and Gibbon were aware of the fact, and Macaulay knew it. "No past event," declared the last-named great writer, "has any intrinsic importance." Thomas Arnold defined history as "the biography of a society," so that, according to this defin- ition, its subject-matter would be the life of a society. The definition is only spoiled by the presence of the article. The subject-matter of history is the life of all societies. In other words, it is the past life of humanity, because of any condition of humanity that was not social we have no evidence at all. So far we can all agree, because we all think now of the past life of all human societies as more or less connected. Assyrian, Baby- The First Question. 3 Ionian, Phoenician, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman society are all a nexus, and Rome connects with all that has come later in Europe. We do not doubt that if we knew more we should be able to spread the net wider, — wide enough, perhaps, at last, to include the whole human race. Within historic time, at all events, the connections become closer and more ex- tensive. Europe, Asia, and Africa act and react on each other; America and Australia tend to become outlying parts of Europe. We cannot well define the subject-matter of history otherwise than as the past life of humanity. But this is not history, any more than the stars in their courses are themselves astronomy. History is the result of a treatment of this subject-matter by the human mind. History is a form of thought. If I ask what a loaf of bread cost in the fourteenth century, or how safety matches came into being, I am making history in the proper sense. But when I go out for 4 Place of History in Education. a walk I am not making history, I am only adding, very minutely, to its subject- matter. We come, thus, to our question. The subject - matter of history being the past life of humanity, what is history to be? History itself will be the result of our study and thought concerning that past of man : what is to be the end and aim of that study and thought? What is that form or kind of history which will answer most fully to our needs and desires, and be, therefore, of most value to us? This question has been answered in various ways, and it is not possible that different types of mind should return the same answer to it. The answer true for one mind is not true for another. It is, for all of us, a question of what he or she values most. You may say, if you please, that it is a question of what he or she ought to value most. Unfortunately, to the question so put there is no answer. To know what is absolutely best for us The First Question. 5 we should have to know the meaning of the whole world, all the value and mean- ing of life and death. If we could know, in this absolute sense, what we want, we should know the end of our lives, if not of all life. Till we know this we can give no answer to our question that will be true for all of us. 6 II. HISTORY AS A SCIENCE. Let us look, first, at that view of history which presents it as what is called a science. And first of all it should be stated that this view — this answer to our main question — has for the last fifty years or so been becoming steadily more domi- nant in the world of historical research and historical writing. In England the year 1857 was marked by the commencement of the publication of Buckle's ' History of Civilisation in England,' and also of the two great series, the ' Rolls Series ' and the ' Calendars of State Papers.' In France and in Germany the systematic collection and publication of evidential documents of all kinds had begun long before. The 'Monu- History as a Science. 7 menta Germanise Historica' dates from 1826. The great mass of modern historical re- search is justified from the scientific point of view and hardly from any other. But there is this to be added. Though it is undeniable that historical research and his- torical writing have been steadily becoming more "scientific" in method and in aim, this fact is, of itself, no reason for pinning our faith to what may conceivably be a mere passing phase in the history of the relation of the human mind to the records of its past. We must not follow the fashion in this or in other things, but try to get to the root of the matter. When we say, as Professor Bury said in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1903, that " History is a science, no less and no more," what is it that we mean ? The essential characteristic of scientific study is that it aims at reaching objective truth. It seeks to establish the real relations of things. In aim, and therefore in method, it is wholly intellectual. It demands a 8 Place of History in Education. suppression of the merely personal. If I study a language for the sake of talking it, or in order to enjoy its literature, I am not studying it scientifically. If I study painting or literature for the aesthetic pleasure to be derived therefrom, my study is not scientific however much I may learn. If I study the past life of humanity for the sake of drama or the picturesque, or with a view to modern politics, my work is not scientific. Science is concerned with the questionings of the mere intellect. Now there are, it may be said, three funda- mental questions which the intellect asks of a thing. It asks, firstly, how the thing came to be what it is ; it asks, secondly, what are its actual and immediate relations to other things, which include all the modes of its activity ; it asks, in the third place, what are the consequences of these relations, and how the thing itself is being modified by action and reaction. Among these ques- tions there is no first or last : they are con- current. But, further, the intellect desires History as a Science. 9 to grasp and to express the quality of the thing, and it seeks to do this in terms of the thing's tendencies. This expression of the quality of the thing sums up the know- ledge we have gained of it, and, in regard to living things, will amount essentially to a statement of whether the thing is still growing or tending to decay and dis- solution. It is the effort to answer all these questions about things that produces science. And all these questions are con- cerned essentially with causation ; not, that is, with the idea of cause or with the nature of it, but with those connections and sequences which we take to be causal. Science might, perhaps, be defined as that which is concerned with the causation of things ; and the caus- ation of things is their past, their present, and their future, since nothing is, but all things are becoming. Let us now apply this conception to his- torical study. Our subject-matter is the life of humanity in the past, and we must begin with palaeolithic man, or further back io Place of History in Education. still if we can get further back. Our history is going to be, logically, the final develop- ment of biology. It is the latest phase of life on the planet that we have to deal with. Biology starts with a simple, single, living cell, tries to trace from it the de- velopment of the enormous diversity of forms of simply animal life, and has some- thing to say about the emergence of man. Then anthropology takes up the tale. But we can only distinguish anthropology from history through a comparative lack of evi- dence as to detail. Let us look at what is conventionally termed the history of England. From the point of view of science what does this become ? In the fifth century, Germanic barbarians begin to make settlements in what had been Roman Britain — barbarians of the Iron Age following the Bronze Age peoples, whose invasion had preceded that of the Romans. There follows a long process of conquest, of settlement, and of fusion. As a result we get a number of little bar- History as a Science. 1 1 baric kingdoms ; communities economically simple, structurally confused and indefinite, possessing little knowledge of the world they lived in and but rough arts and appliances. And the problem of English history becomes this, — out of those little barbaric communities to evolve by an in- telligible process the present British Empire. It is a problem in causation. Generation follows generation, and from moment to moment things change. Men learn a little and grow old and die and live again, with a difference, in their children. The little communities are kneaded by war and by the Church ; they are broken up and re-cast and forced into greater coherence and defini- tion by foreign invaders. From generation to generation everything grows — arts and tools, knowledge, law, wealth — and every- thing grows together. From generation to generation the point of view shifts, the ideals alter : no social habit lasts very long. The little communities become one ; the state becomes a national monarchy, increas- 1 2 Place of History in Education. ingly self-conscious. Centuries pass and the growing community begins to bud off, to throw out offspring, to establish colonies, to struggle with the other great European states for the control and exploitation of lands over sea. It is all the growth of one thing. It is all knitted together by the generations in the closest manner conceiv- able through so much time. And the prob- lem, the great problem of historical science, is just this : to represent the whole series of changes as connected and as, to our minds, inevitable. We have got to account, in the only sense in which we can account for any- thing, for every phase in all that great series of changes. It is a living thing, we must remember, that we are dealing with ; it is, really, a single living thing. Questions about the future of this thing answer themselves as we go along, up to a certain point. The fifteenth century is the future of the four- teenth. The point at which such questions do not answer themselves is what we call the History as a Science. 13 present. But we must not let that fact mis- lead us into imagining that the past merely leads up to and, as it were, culminates in the present. It no more does so than the four- teenth century culminates in the fifteenth. The movement we study still goes on from moment to moment ; and really there is no present, there is only past and future. The present is no more than the past was. We are not at any kind of end : w T e are in the middle or in the mere beginning of the pro- cess. There is an immeasurable future of changes ahead. And so our history of England will end, inevitably, by asking questions as to the future. When we have succeeded in presenting the whole series of changes from the fifth century onwards as a series of intelligible and inevit- able sequences, we shall have a satisfactory account of what we conventionally call the history of England. But it is worth observ- ing that, even then, we shall have no more than that. There is still the development of the Britons to be accounted for ; and in 14 Place of History in Education. that development the Roman occupation, however important, is only an incident. Further back are the peoples of the Bronze Age, and further back still those who made Stonehenge and Avebury. It is well to recognise at once that there is not the remotest chance of ever making our account complete. But if we could make it even approximately complete, beginning, let us say, with the Roman occupation, a great thing would have been done. How is it to be done, and can it, in the nature of things, be done at all ? i5 III. CERTAIN RADICAL OBJECTIONS. Evidently the task is a very difficult one. The movement of any society as a whole must be the sum of all the actions of all its individuals and of all such actions of other individuals as relate to it in any way. The complexity of the factors concerned in the birth of a world out of chaos must be slight as compared with the complexity of the psychological factors concerned in the evolution of a society. The origin of a species or of a group of species must needs be a simple matter in comparison. Looking at this extreme complexity of the factors involved, we might well despair of ever disentangling, even roughly, the causes of any social phenomenon. Just consider 1 6 Place of History in Education. the complexity of the process which issues in the commonest and most trivial human acts. You decide, doubtfully, to invite some acquaintance to dinner. Consider how much may go even to such a petty pro- ceeding. Your acquaintance, perhaps, is this or that that is objectionable. He is ap- proved of by Mr X ; but Mrs Y strongly disapproves of him. He may make himself useful ; but his manners are atrocious. Or he is of no earthly use, but has charming manners. It is a matter of slowly gener- ated habits and a slowly generated point of view. Little considerations of self-interest, resting unconsciously on a basis of judg- ment as to what is worth having in life, move you this way or that. Little notions of social propriety pull one way, little curi- osities, perhaps, the other. In the end a balance is struck, and you act — without even knowing why. Possibly your chief motive for action is something you are almost un- conscious of. So mixed, as we say, are motives that people rarely know why they Certain Radical Objections. 17 do a thing. Consider, also, how difficult it is to be certain of what any one will do under given circumstances. And consider the things that people do do ! — the absurd things, the futile things, the wholly un- expected things. But the movement of society is all compact of such complex and mysterious doings. One thing is certain, that in dealing scien- tifically with this maze of thought and action which is human history, we shall have to assume determinism as an expression of the truth. We shall have to assume that what- ever a man does he does as a necessary con- sequence of the interaction between his nature at the given moment and his surroundings at the given moment. We shall have to assume that of absolute free will there is none at all. That there may be no doubt as to the nature of the assumption to be made, let us take a simple illustration. I am sitting at home and feeling stuffy. I should like to go out into the clear air and get a look at 1 8 Place of History in Education. the sky. On the other hand I do not want to go out. It is slushy under foot outside, and raw, and, moreover, there are some notes I ought to make, only I don't want to make them. So I sit balancing. Now I am physically quite free to go out or stay in as I choose. If I make up my mind to go, there is nothing to prevent my going ; if I choose to stay, I can stay. But there ends my freedom. When I say " If I make up my mind," I am assuming that it does not make itself up. But that is just what it does. A highly intelligent onlooker — that is, one much more intelligent than any of us, and one who knew much more about myself than I know — might know exactly what is going to happen. It is certain, already, how my hesitations will end. The interaction between me and my surround- ings evolves motives, and what I call motives are just a part of the process by which my mind makes itself up. And so, equally, all my actions are a necessary consequence of the action of surrounding things upon me : Certain Radical Objections, 19 and I never could have done anything but what I did do. The determination of my action is just as complete and rigid — though vastly more complex than that — as the determination of the exact course of a stone that I throw. And so universally. Just as no stone could lie anywhere but where it lies, so no human action in the past could really have been other than it was, and all things are for ever as they must be. " With the first clay they did the last man knead ; And there, of the last harvest, sowed the seed : And the first morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Beckoning shall read." This is a very cheering view, because it makes a science of history possible. Nevertheless, there are people who revolt at this doctrine, as there are also people who misunderstand it. It is sometimes confused with what is called fatalism. In truth it is absolutely opposed to this. By fatalism is apparently meant a belief that whatever you do the result will be the 20 Place of History in Education. same. If it be ordained by fate that you are to be killed on a certain day, killed you will be, whether you fight bravely in the battle or whether you run away. But determinism asserts that the consequences of different things will always be different, and of similar things always the same : and these two assertions are one. But we must not be betrayed into any discussion of the idea of cause. There remains the fact that numbers of people who understand the doctrine of determinism revolt at it and assert a mysterious freedom of the will. Indeed very few people really believe that deter- minism expresses the truth. And there remains the more important fact that the theory of determinism cannot be demon- strated as truth. Now, just as far as it goes, the assertion of freedom of the will is an objection to or a denial of the pos- sibility of a science of history. Still, unless your objection on this score is very radical, Certain Radical Objections. 21 some compromise is perhaps possible. We have, perhaps, put the matter rather too absolutely. There is no logical necessity for the assumption of a quite absolute and unlimited determinism. If the great mass of human action is strictly determined, that will be sufficient for the purposes of scien- tific history. History must essentially deal with the action of masses — that is, with human action in its commonest forms ; and if we may take that as strictly determined, we can manage. If any one, for instance, thinks that when his " conscience " is aroused he becomes mysteriously free, that belief does not constitute an absolute denial of the possibility of historical science. If that be true, then our margin of error — the amount of error in all our generalisa- tions concerning cause — will merely be greater than it otherwise would be. O In this way we get over an initial diffi- culty. But we have doue no more than that. Our assumption of determinism does 22 Place of History in Education. not, of itself, help us to explain anything. We are practically no nearer the explana- tion of any individual action when we have assumed that it is strictly determined. History deals with masses, and so long as we are dealing with masses the nature of the difficulty is more or less obscured. We are disposed to treat masses as though they were not masses of individuals, and to talk glibly and dogmatically about the motives and feelings of masses with a sense of assurance we never feel in dealing with any single person. But the difficulty be- comes clear and is brought painfully home to us when we come to deal with "great men " ; and not only with men who may be called " great " for their own virtue, but with any individual who, by reason of his legal position or the way in which he is regarded, is able to exercise an apparently great influence over the lives of others, and through them over the future. " Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and Certain Radical Objections. 23 some have greatness thrust upon them." It matters not which it is : the same difficulty manifestly confronts us with each of them. However rigidly determined the conduct of individual men may be, it can only be explained, if at all, in the most crude and roughly approximate manner ; and in the record of the past we are met at every turn by men upon whose individual action much seems to depend. The action of these men — kings, soldiers, statesmen, prophets — baffles us. Whenever you come upon a man whose individual action appreciably affects the course of change, in whatever degree, there you have something which generalisation necessarily ignores more or less completely, and something which you can hardly hope satisfactorily to explain. Attempts have been made to show that the action of such men is really unimportant. Napoleon, it is said, creates a great commotion and causes 24 Place of History in Education. a couple of millions of premature deaths ; but all the fuss only results in hurrying a little the inevitable changes all over West Europe prepared by the eighteenth century. But such attempts are mere evasions of the main difficulty. Conceivably we might get over the difficulty in this manner if Napoleon and Peter the Great represented only a class of very rare and exceptional cases. But in truth the difficulty concerning great men is only part of a much larger and more fundamental difficulty, — the difficulty, that is, of explaining the action of any man at all. The truth is that Napoleon and Peter are exceptional cases only in degree. On every page of the historic record you meet men who in some degree appreciably affect the course of things. It would be simply absurd to say that things would have been just the same in the long-run had none of them ever lived. For, of course, the real fact is that every man, woman, and child who ever lived has, in some degree, traceable Certain Radical Objections. 25 or not, affected the course of history by a personal action which defies satisfactory explanation. The mass is made up of individuals every whit as mysterious as Napoleon. How, then, can we hope to generalise successfully concerning the action of masses wheiD we cannot undertake to explain the action of even any one individual of those masses ? This is the fundamental difficulty to which consideration of the action of "great men " at once leads us ; and it seems at first sight to constitute a very serious ob- jection to the attempt to treat history as a science. It looks rather as though would- be scientific history must issue at last in a series of mere ingenious guesses. The historian will be driven to bring to bear on the unmanageable mass of his facts his own special ideas of how man's affairs are governed. He will appeal, perhaps, to a something not ourselves making for righteous- ness, or he will have some more definite 26 Place of History in Education. theory of progress, and he will systematise his facts in accordance with those ideas. But in this case, be he right or wrong, he will have demonstrated nothing, and the result will not be knowledge. Before going any further it is perhaps necessary to state a fact which assuredly it ought not to be necessary to state. The object of historical science is not exact truth. It is truth as exact as we can get it, but it is not exact truth, because exact truth is manifestly unattainable in this direction. That admission, of course, constitutes no objection to the scientific treatment of history. In very few sciences can any exact truth be attained, if even it can be said to be attained anywhere at all. What we loosely call " exact " science deals either with truths reached by a purely logical process that starts from fundamental facts of our own mental constitution or else with things that can be quantitatively measured. The only science that can in any sense be Certain Radical Objections. 2j said to be absolutely exact is the science of pure mathematics. When you come to things you incur at once an unavoidable inexactitude. We do not estimate the mean distance of the earth from the sun in frac- tions of an inch. In the simply physical sciences the amount of unavoidable inex- actitude is relatively small ; in the biological sciences it is relatively great. When you come to consider the question of the develop- ment in the past of a particular species of animal, and of how it comes to live at present where it does live, your answers to these questions may be very significant and in- teresting and even quite true so far as they go, but they make no pretence of being exact, and can never possibly become so. And there can be no doubt that in historical science we shall have to content ourselves with still rougher approximations to truth than can be attained in the higher branches of biology proper. A good deal of current objection to historical science is based on 28 Place of History in Education. nothing better than quite unreasonable de- mands, associated with an erroneous notion of the exactness of science in general. To return to the fundamental difficulty that has been stated. At the outset the would-be scientific historian is met by the assertion that all his generalisations as to cause will be wrong because they must needs concern the action of innumerable people, while he really does not know why any one of them acted. The assertion has a formidable appearance, and the question is not how far it is true but how far it is really relevant. For it is undeniably true. It is true that we ourselves constantly act without knowing why. It is true that we can only explain in a crude and unsatisfac- tory manner the action even of such persons as we know most familiarly. We find it easier to account to ourselves for the con- duct of a man of whom we know little than for that of a man we know well. It is true that we can never give such an account of Certain Radical Objections. 29 the action of our friends and acquaintance as Paul Bourget, for instance, gives of the conduct of his imaginary people. But it is also true that for the purposes of historical science we do not want any such account. Even though it be true that the subject- matter of history is entirely made up of the inexplicable actions of mysterious individual beings, it is also true that we do not re- quire explanations of the conduct of any one individual. However complex human motive and the cause of human action may be in any par- ticular case, we shall nevertheless find, when we come to classify motives, that they fall under comparatively few distinct classes. It is not the motive that varies infinitely, but the constitution of the individual mind. Though we cannot quantitatively estimate the value of any given motive in any par- ticular case, yet when we find a large number of people doing about the same thing under similar circumstances, we can 30 Place of History in Education. certainly infer something as to the quality and make-up of their minds, and something further as to the motive that is dominant in the mass of them. If in two cases, the circumstances being nearly the same, two people act in nearly the same way, the mere fact goes for nothing. They may not have a single motive in common. Even though they have at least one motive in common, the dominant motive may be different in the two cases. But if instead of two we have a thousand, then any motive they have in common is probably the dominant motive with the mass of them ; and if we have a million this probability is far higher still. In this way we may establish with tolerable certainty the fact of a dominant motive in a mass of people, even though we cannot be sure that it is dominant in any particular one of them. Really, of course, things are by no means so simple. Instead of one dominant motive there may well be several practically equally Certain Radical Objections. 31 effective. Moreover, what we call motives are in general not simple but rather very complex things. Again, the assertion of any motive not of the very simplest order in- volves an assertion about the nature of the mind it, as we say, acts upon. But all this does not affect the argument. What it is necessary to insist upon is simply this, that we can make positive and approxi- mately correct inferences as to the causes of the action of masses of people without being able to be sure about the action of any one of them. The fact may be re- garded as obvious. Obvious or not, it is just on this fact that the whole science of history, which deals and can only deal with masses, depends. Once we have found a way of dealing with the action of masses, objections to historical science founded on our inability to interpret individual action fall to the ground. It is of no use for the objecter to say that every individual in the mass is as mysterious as Napoleon. That 32 Place of History in Education. fact no longer concerns us. Any individual whom we can merge into the mass no longer concerns us as such. But we have still to find a way of deal- ing with those individuals who obstinately insist on being treated separately. The ob- jection recurs in the form in which we first stated it. We have still to deal with our technically " great " people. If it be possible to find dominant motives for the action of masses, this does not enable us to explain the action of any individual. And we have to consider the cases of individuals whose action as such has distinctly traceable re- sults, and who cannot, therefore, be wholly merged in the mass. The question is just this : how far can the great man, king, conqueror, discoverer, or what not, be merged in the mass? We have here a mind which, owing either to its native power or to its place in society, exer- cises some degree of control over the course things take. We cannot explain the action Certain Radical Objections. 33 of this mind otherwise than very crudely. How are we to merge it ideally with the masses on which it acts so that our general- isations concerning them will include its action ? It will certainly not help us much to talk vaguely of the great man as a product of his time. At best the phrase expresses a half-truth only. The great man is produced in the first place by his parents ; and they are products of their time rather than of his. The great man's great-grandfather may have been a very important factor in his making. At bottom the great man, like all the rest of us, is the product not of his own time but of all time. We are safer when we speak of the great man as conditioned by his time, though the phrase is dangerously near a truism. But it means at least this, that the notions and aims of the great man, being formed by the action of his surroundings on his mind, must needs be in some degree representative of the aims and notions of a c 34 Place of History in Education. number of his contemporaries and even in some degree of all people of his time and place. There is something helpful in this considera- tion, though not, perhaps, very much. For we have also to consider that the mind of the great man might be equally representative and yet very different from what it is. And, moreover, just where it is most original it is least representative. However, it is not only the mind of the great man, it is also his action that is circum- stantially conditioned. The effectiveness of his action will depend upon the degree of correspondence between his mind and the mind of the masses he acts upon. It is just the coincidence between his action and the desires, sentiments, habits, and dreams of the masses that give it its effectiveness. Technically absolute monarch though he be, there is nothing at all absolute about his power. He can only act on and through other minds. He can, perhaps, act on bodies also and hang people who differ ; but to do Certain Radical Objections. 35 so he must find hangmen. It remains true under all conditions that the great man can only act through other minds ; so that if we understand the mass we understand a good deal about the action of our great man. We know or may know what he cannot do, and we also know, at least in some degree, what he must do. Nor need we admit that of the personal idiosyncrasy of the great man we can under- stand nothing. If we cannot hope adequately to explain his psychology and his constitution and say what part his grand -parents and what part his digestive apparatus played in his policy, we can, perhaps, roughly approxi- mate to the truth even with regard to these matters. It is certainly not true that our great man is an absolutely incomprehensible being. He is, after all, very like ourselves. All this trouble about great men is really only part of a much larger trouble about what we can only call accident. In our personal lives we call anything accidental that happens 36 Place of History in Education. from causes altogether beyond our control. If I am climbing on a mountain and my foot slips, that is not accident but my own doing ; but if a stone comes down on me from above, that, from my point of view, is accident. In the same sense human history is full of accidents which produce more or less serious results. From the historian's point of view everything is accidental which, happening from causes lying outside his range of inves- tigation, yet produces results within that range. The results of the action of great men as such are of this nature. Just so far as results are due to the idiosyncrasy of some powerful person they are accidental. And what of the great man himself? How came he there at all ? He is a mere accident. What if Cromwell had been killed in his first fight? What if Napoleon had been picked up by an English frigate as he crossed from Acre in 1799 ? It would be ludicrously absurd to say that such things do not happen. There is no sort of reason why they should not happen, and therefore, in the long-run, Certain Radical Objections. 37 they do. The story of man's life must be full of unknown accidents. And anyhow, how came the great man to be there at all ? It is useless to try to evade the difficulty by saying that the crisis produces the man. A crisis no doubt tends to produce a man : it certainly does not produce the man. But the great man is only one of the instruments of the great goddess, Chance. Weather, as distinguished from climate, has played a not inconsiderable part in human affairs. How were the results of the Thirty Years' War affected by the interference of fog on the battlefield of Lutzen ? But the grandest instance known to us of the possible effects of weather is to be found in the great French Revolution. It cannot be doubted that the course of events in France would have been very different from what it was but for the terrible winter of 1788-89 which immediately produced the great famine of the latter year. It may fairly be argued that had that winter and spring been normal there would have been no Reign of Terror 38 Place of History in Education. and no chance for Napoleon. There would have been a revolution of some sort, no doubt : how different a revolution no one can say. Again there are many kinds of coincidence, and the arm of coincidence is very long. It would be easy to multiply instances. Consider what happened in France during the so-called wars of religion. Great part of Southern France seemed to be breaking away from the rest of the country. The Huguenot provinces were organising them- selves more and more completely into the form of an independent state. Already they were making treaties with the Crown as with a strange power. A declaration of independence seemed coming. It looked as though there would either be formed in South France a new kingdom under the King of Navarre or some such federal re- public as that of the Swiss. But a series of accidents, occurring just in time, made the King of Navarre himself heir of the crown of France. Yet Henry II. and Cath- Certain Radical Objections. 39 erine de Medicis had left four sons. Every one of them died childless : and if any one of them had had a son, or even a daughter, the history of France would have been changed, no one can say how much. So, in conclusion, do the best that we may with these fundamental objections to the attempt to make a science of history, we have, after all, to make certain serious admissions. There is a considerable element of accident in human history which defies generalisation and is a cause of inexactitude in all generalisations. The wider our general- isation is and the more centuries it covers, the less the amount of error from this cause will be. But we cannot hope to escape it altogether. All we can do is to state it where we can see it and allow discount for it everywhere. It remains true that so long as we can deal reasonably with the action of masses we have a good basis for a scientific treatment of history. For, after all, however large the amount of accident exactly may be, it is demonstrable that 40 Place of History in Education. accident accounts for only a small percentage of the total. But it must not be forgotten that the explanation of the action of masses by reference to dominant motives involves a margin of error there also. 4i IV. CERTAIN PRACTICAL INFERENCES. The implications of a thing are part of the thing. What we have now to do is to draw certain practically important inferences from our theory of scientific history. It is the scientific historian whom alone, for the present, we have to consider. He is concerned essentially and almost all the time with problems of causation. He must, of course, ascertain how things were superficially before he can even ask any question. But there are very many facts and aspects of fact with which he is not concerned at all. He needs facts only to explain other facts. What he is looking for is real relations, that is, causal relations. If he can find these he wants no more : if he 42 Place of History in Education. cannot find these he has found nothing. A fact is only important to him because of its bearing upon something else. An event is only important so far as it has results, and the results of an event are, to him, an absolute measure of its importance. Every- thing to him is result first and cause after- wards, and so far as it is not cause it is unimportant. If we were dealing, from the scientific point of view, with the battle of Blenheim, we should not want to know how the Duke of Marlborough felt about it. It is not a question of not being able to find this out : we do not need to find it out. It might or it might not interest us to know ; but we must not be misled into supposing that things which interest us are, as such, of any importance whatever. It is a common fail- ing among historians to run off after some point which happens to interest them, but which is quite irrelevant to the matter in hand. This is a form of egotism which should be suppressed. We want to explain Certain Practical Inferences. 43 why the battle of Blenheim went as it did, but we do not want to build up a picture of Marlborough's mind by an imaginative process, the results of which are both un- certain and irrelevant. The great man must be to us a factor and nothing more ; unless, indeed, we regard him as a nuisance, bring- ing an element of accident into otherwise intelligible sequences. We may have to seek to explain his acts, but we are not concerned with the quality of them. It does not matter to us whether he is what is called a hero or what is called a blackguard. Discussion on the point is as useless as re- search directed to finding out whether his eyes were blue or green. We shall ask no more questions about our great man than we are compelled to ask ; and it is a nuisance to have to ask any at all. The inference maj^ be put more broadly, in the form of two propositions, not quite strictly separable. In the first place, the scientific historian has no business with the dramatic or the picturesque or the tragic or 44 Place of History in Education. the comic or the pathetic. The life of man is full of these things, — so full that you can find one or other or perhaps all of them almost everywhere. At first sight it might seem a paradox to say that the historian is not to deal with them. But from the point of view of the scientific historian these things, or rather these aspects of things, are irrelevant, if they can be said to exist at all. It will not, indeed, do to say that they exist only to the mind that sees them. That would be to put the matter too broadly, and lay oneself open to the retort that we do not know that anything exists except to the perceiving mind. But we may put it thus. There are things and relations that exist to the intellect as such, to the intellect un- alloyed; and these are the things with which science deals. And there are other things and relations that do not exist at all to the mere intelligence, and with such things science cannot deal directly. The tragic and the picturesque and so on are among these. When we say that a thing Certain Practical Inferences. 45 is tragic or comic we express not only how we see it, but also how we feel it, and we are, therefore, expressing something irrele- vant to the purposes of a student of causa- tion. One may put it, perhaps, more simply. The tragic is an aspect of things, the comic is another ; but neither has any real relation except to the mind that sees it. They are not causal. The revulsion of feeling, the horror of his deed, the sense that he has already destroyed his best part of life, which make Othello stab himself, these are causal things ; but they are not the tragedy of Othello. It may well be difficult for the most scientific of historians to avoid laugh- ing or crying occasionally, but his laughter and his tears are alike irrelevant. And so with other such aspects of life. When the historian narrates for the sake of telling a good story, when he takes pains to bring out the picturesque character of one inci- dent, the ironic quality of another, it matters not how well he does these things, he is simply off the point. The blue pencil 46 Place of History in Education. of the scientific historian would be run right through almost all the purple passages of our histories. We come to our second proposition, perhaps more important, certainly more disputable ; for no one can dispute the irrelevance of the picturesque to scientific history. It is this : that any kind of moralising and every kind of moral judgment is also irrelevant. There are, roughly, two sorts of moralising that one commonly meets with in historical writings. There is discussion about the moral quality of a man and his acts, or, which is nearly the same thing, about the morality of the action of a mass, a party policy, or a law, and there is the pure gnomic element, consisting of statements of general moral consequence, inferred from or suggested by things under discussion. We must distinguish, to some extent, between these two. There are degrees of irrelevancy. When, at the end of one of Mrs Mark- ham's chapters, little Alice or little Henry asks his mother, "Was Henry II. a good Certain Practical Inferences. 47 man or a bad man, mamma?" we are in- clined to laugh. Laugh by all means ; but not only at Mrs Markham. Laugh, also, at all the much more pretentious people who solemnly engage in similar discussions. In the given case we laugh, perhaps, only at the implied assumption that Henry of Anjou can be classed definitely as good or bad. There is much more than that to laugh at. It is not a good question crudely put. Are we going to analyse the elements of goodness and badness in Henry, establish degrees and sum him up as not black or white but a kind of greenish -grey? A goodly task we have set ourselves, and a pretty tangle we are thrusting ourselves into to no purpose ! To no purpose : we might be content with that. In what way will our summing up of Henry's moral qualities affect our esti- mate of him as a factor in change ? It is a clear case of digression. But one is in- clined to carry the war a little way into the enemies' country. These moral judg- 48 Place of History in Education. ments raise all kinds of questions, and an historian who wishes to indulge in them should explain his system of ethics. How does he know that what 1 he calls bad his readers do not call good? What right has he to try Henry by his twentieth -century notions of good and bad, and impose those same notions on us ? We will move the previous question and ask what he means by good. Or is he an impressionist merely, frankly saying, "This strikes me as ugly and unpleasant, and that, on the contrary, as quite nice " ? Our answer may well be that we do not care at all how things strike him. But is he setting about to try Henry by Henry's own standards? Is he going to appeal against Henry or to justify him by Henry's own conscience ? A distinction must be made here. There is something to be said for a curious inquiry of this kind. If we could really get at the con- science of a twelfth -century man we might find it the key to a good many things. Certain Practical Inferences. 49 Henry of Anjou was a prominent person, and a good deal is known about him. The inquiry as to what his moral consciousness was like is worth making, if we see any hope of an answer, just -because and only because it might prove to be a key to other matters. Nevertheless, that further question — how far was Henry justified by his own moral consciousness ? — is entirely irrelevant. If we make an inquiry with a view to a judgment on that question, we are missing the point. Yet it may be better that the inquiry should be made in that way than not made at all. To questions concerning the morality of the acts of political parties or of nations the same considerations apply. The moral consciousness of a nation is a fact very important to define ; but we have no business with casuistry. But as to the gnomic element in historical writing, from the scientific point of view there is nothing at all to be said for it in any case. When an historian describes the fall of some great D 50 Place of History in Education. personage and then adds remarks about the instability of human grandeur, he is not merely delivering solemn truisms, he is also wasting his time. The fact that he sometimes does this sort of thing, as Carlyle did, in a brilliant and impressive manner, is neither here nor there. An average Englishman is still a moralis- ing animal, though, perhaps, not quite so much so as he was a few years back. When an English historian indulges in moral judgments or points a little moral lesson, he is enjoying himself, one might say, in a harmless fashion after all. More- over, if his moralising runs to any serious length, it can always be skipped. But this lenient view of the case is only partially just. This habit of moralising encourages a popular belief that it is the historian's business to moralise. Not long ago a lady asked the present writer whether he regarded Henry of Navarre as a hero. She evidently thought him professionally bound to have an opinion on this obscure Certain Practical Inferences. 51 point. It proved quite useless to tell her that he did not, in any sense, specialise in heroism. The distinction was not appre- hended. In truth there are radical objections to all this moralising. It involves assump- tions about ethics ; it often involves some degree of self-deception; and it sometimes involves cant. This last case arises when the historian poses as being very painfully shocked at very ordinary misconduct. It is astonishing to think what virtuous people historians must be, if you take them to mean all they imply. If I simply condemn, in some sense, Charles II. 's or William III.'s profligacy, or Elizabeth's lying, I am merely doing something quite superfluous, I am not making any claim to virtue. But if I profess to regard these things with any extreme horror, that certainly does seem to imply an uncommon degree of virtuous sensitiveness. And if I profess to be not merely disgusted but positively surprised at such iniquities, that implies an almost in- 52 Place of History in Education. credible innocence on my part. And there is only this to add : that such a degree of innocence is highly undesirable in an his- torian, whatever it may be in other people. So far as the conduct of a great man pro- duces moral reaction at the time — so far as people of his own time are disgusted or moved to admiration by the moral aspect of his proceedings — this moral aspect has, of course, to be considered as a factor. But conscience and all its attendant phenomena must be for the scientific historian a result simply and simply a cause. We have to examine people's moral ideas because these ideas more or less affect their conduct. We have to treat the moral consciousness of any particular time and place as a product and try to explain it. The tendency to sit in judgment from a point of view at once ethical and modern is only part of a much wider tendency to test the past by the touchstone of our feelings. The ethical judgment delivered from modern standpoints is so completely Certain Practical Inferences. 53 irrelevant to the purpose of scientific history that it does little or no direct harm. An historian may amuse himself in this way without distorting facts or confusing his ideas of what happened. He may be, as we say, impartial in his ethical deliverances ; and in that case they are no worse than useless digressions. But there are greater dangers. When a man sets out to travel in past time many pitfalls beset the way of his understanding. He is apt to attribute the ideas with which he is most familiar to the people he meets. He is apt to interpret their actions by reference to ideas which exist in his mind but never existed in theirs. He is apt to find his Bill of Rights or his Habeas Corpus Act in their Great Charter. He tends to set up his own stand- ard of values for the old states and the old races. When he meets with a movement which seems in some degree analogous to some present - day movement with which he sympathises, he is apt to think of it as a proper, progressive sort of thing, and of 54 Place of History in Education. its opponents as obstructionists in some large sense. He is apt to make of his own mind a touchstone of progress, to think of movement in the direction or along the line of his own opinions as to what is good, as advance, not merely in time. The human mind is the victim of a strong tendency to regard itself as infallible. It easily becomes the victim of many kinds of bias, — of class bias, or of patriotic bias, or of political bias. Perhaps the most virulent of all these poisons is the political bias. The historians are per- haps few who, instead of approaching modern politics through history, have approached history through modern politics. But their followers are many. It is not necessary to deal here with the crudest forms of this evil, though even these are common, if one judges by the utterances of professional politicians. But then professional politicians will say anything, and one never knows. . . . Any- how there is a strong tendency among those afflicted with the bias of party politics to take sides in the past as they do in the Certain Practical Inferences. 55 present, and to condemn proceedings which run counter to their notions and to applaud the contrary things. Such people are apt to see in the past a progressive development of their own principles of action. They set up their own ideas as standards of progress, and close their eyes firmly to the fact that these ideas have little or no real relation to the past at all. They mislead themselves with shadowy analogies and fail to see what is vital by looking for something else. The angry holding of decided party views about the politics of to-day is not, perhaps, an absolute disqualification for understanding history. But indubitably such views involve a very serious danger. The point of view of people of past centuries is always hard to realise. But it must be got at, and great pains and patience are commonly required. The one fatal procedure is procedure on an assumption that it was a point of view at all closely corresponding with any with which we are familiar. The attempt to find our party politics in 56 Place of History in Education. the past, or to read our conceptions into the mind of the thirteenth century, is so hopeless that it cannot coexist with any serious study of history at all. But apart from such crudities there is more subtle danger. The tendency to regard the past as though it led up to the present and then stopped is strong and prevalent and radically distort- ing. It leads people to think of such move- ments as directly point to the present state of things as "advances": and contrariwise. " Advances," of course, these in a sense are : advances in time past towards a condition existing in time to come. But the most " reactionary " movement is an advance in this sense. The people who labour under the illusion of which we speak mean more than this by " advance." They have some theory of progress for the nation or the race, and they measure advance in what they call progress by reference to present conditions. Curiously enough the tendency to think in this fashion seems to exist very strongly in people who do not regard the present state Certain Practical Inferences. 57 of things as at all satisfactory. We may hear the same man sweepingly condemn our present social and legal system, and a minute later refer to some past movement leading straight in our direction as an advance. There would appear to be some confusion in such cases. . . . That the past does not in any sense cul- minate in the present is one of those obvious facts that need to be continually re -stated. We can only see history in right perspective against the vast unknown of the future. As Professor Bury has finely said : " We must see our petty periods sub specie perennitatis." The one thing certain is change, and the present is a mere notion, a theoretical point. It will not do to assume any theory of pro- gress. If you have a theory of progress, try, by all means, to demonstrate it from the facts of the past. If you have no dis- tinct theory, it is better to put the word altogether out of mind. But if you have a theory, it is one which the scientific study of history will in time establish or 58 Place of History in Education. in time condemn. Adopt your theory as a working hypothesis and see how far it will carry you. Probably in a short time you will have forgotten it. In any case, if your theory is not mere nonsense it is an enormous historical generalisation. It may be more than that ; but it must be that. In any case, to try to make of our present conditions a test of progress in the past is merely silly. All progress in the past must relate to the future. We none of us have any knowledge of what that future is going to be. What we should like it to be is a totally irrelevant matter. It is very unlikely to be that. We none of us know that our European civilisation has not already entered on a process of secret decay. After all, there is one big fact that we know about all earlier civilisa- tions : they all perished. And there is one thing certain, that nothing lasts. Nothing at all lasts. Even the most fundamental things change, if only very slowly. Thus we arrive at a conception of the Certain Practical Inferences. 59 virtue supremely necessary to the scientific historian. We might call it impartiality ; but the word is too narrow and has some- what evil associations. As a rule, when people speak of impartiality in a historian they are thinking of his moral judgments. They mean that when he comes to weigh up a great personage, he makes the proper allowances, he is sympathetic, he feels no animus, he tries to judge the man by the man's own standards. All this is needless. If indeed the historian feels a strong an- imus against his great personage he will probably misunderstand his action, and this may lead him to misunderstand the con- ditions under which he acts, and in that way become a cause of serious error. But we don't want his moral judgments at all, and, partial or impartial, they are equally irrelevant. On the other hand, in relation to the mass movements of history we want something more than is expressed by the word impartiality. We want a complete intellectual detachment. A writer who feels 60 Place of History in Education. a strong bias for or against Catholicism or Protestantism or any other 'ism, or for or against democracy or aristocracy, is no scientific historian. Not only ought such bias to be impossible to the scientific histor- ian, we may fairly say that it is impossible. A man with such bias has not and cannot take the scientific point of view in relation to his subject. In the preface to his work on the French Revolution, Taine told us that he intended to contemplate the phenomena of that time as a man may contemplate the metamorphosis of an insect. It cannot be said that Taine succeeded in doing this ; but it must be said that he ought to have done so. To the scientific historian the dreams of humanity, its ideals, its struggles and triumphs, its failures and miseries, must be products and causes ; political parties, whether of the past or of the present, social wrongs and social questions, wars and revolutions, heroes and prophets, must be products and causes ; religion and conscience must be products and causes. Certain Practical Inferences. 61 What is needed is an intellectual de- tachment so complete that all the hopes of humanity fail to arouse a dominant emotion. Some one will perhaps ask, how, if the historian's detachment is so complete, he is to sympathise at all, and will perhaps say that if he does not sympathise with any- thing he will understand nothing. There is a certain difficulty here. We can only say that if he sympathises it must be with all classes, with all causes, with all ideals, with all sorts and conditions of men. His sympathy must be Shakespearian in breath and highly intellectualised. Assuredly he must never for a moment be governed by emotion. It may be objected, still, that we are demanding too much of our scientific historian, who, after all, is to be human. But it must be remembered that we do not expect any one man to do anything per- fectly. All that is absolutely needed is that a number of men should take the scientific point of view and work honestly 62 Place of History in Education. from it as far as they can go. The errors of each one will be corrected by the others. Very little history has yet been written strictly from this point of view. Certainly very little has been written in English. Our English historians seem generally to be unable to resist the temptation to be eloqueut or moral. It is not altogether their fault. It seems to be expected of them that they should digress in these ways. On the other hand, a good deal has been written more or less strictly from this point of view upon what are called consti- tutional and economic history. Those sub- jects do not readily lend themselves to dramatic or even to eloquent treatment. Moreover, a really great amount of research has been and is being done quite strictly from this point of view. This research has for its main purpose the helping of future generations to build up a science of history. One thing is certain in this connection. If history is regarded as a science, it must be regarded as a science yet in its beginning. Certain Practical Inferences. 63 Almost all our generalisations, almost all our theories, are at present tentative, experi- mental. It is doubtful if there be a single short period in the history of any nation our general notions of which will not be, more or less completely, transformed in time to come. We are making — perhaps we have made — the first rough approximations to historical truth. We are laying foundations, and even these will probably have to be altered. We suffer already from an indi- gestion of facts : and there are many more to come. We are only at the commence- ment of understanding. 6 4 AN ILLUSTRATION. It will be well at this point to deal with some definite historical problem, not so as to give a solution of it, but so as to make out in what sort of way the scientific historian will try to solve it, and what sort of solution may be hoped for. As an illustrative problem, in this sense, we may take the causes of the commencement of the Hundred Years' War. On a superficial view of the facts we are likely to be struck at once by Edward III.'s claim that the French crown belonged by right to him. AVith the moral, which in this case includes the legal, character of this claim we have, in this connection, nothing to do. It may concern us to know An Illustration. 65 how far Edward or his people or his allies believed in this asserted right : it cannot concern us to know how far they were, in some philosophical sense, right in so be- lieving. It is here no question of the character of the moral consciousness of the people of Edward IIL's time, but simply of the commencement of the war ; and we must further consider that the amount of belief in the claim is probably not a matter of primary importance. People in the mass and in the long-run believe what they find it most convenient to believe ; and analysis will always show a very close correspond- ence between the beliefs of a mass or of a class of people and what they conceive as their interests. If, then, Edward III. and his people believed in the justice of the claim, they probably had very practical and quite unphilosophical reasons for so be- lieving. Their belief would probably prove to be a mere product of the same causes that, on the English side, produce the war. The supposition that Edward III. made 66 Place of History in Education. war from a sense of duty to his own claim and in the interests of international justice is evidently one only to be entertained in the last resort. Before such a claim as his is ordinarily acted on, it must at least seem desirable to make it good in other interests than those of justice. Even if we are to regard the accident of the legal claim as a real cause of the war, we must still ask why it was acted upon. But, as a matter of fact, there are features in this case which point to the conclusion that the claim was an afterthought, and rather a pretext for and an act of war than a reason for de- claring it. If not by the homage done in 1329, at least by the convention of 1331 Edward had recognised Philip VI. as rightful King of France. His re -discovery of his own claim some years later is suspicious. Moreover, even after Crecy, Edward III. never did the only thing which could pos- sibly have won the crown of France for him even for a time : he never made any serious attempt on Paris, as did Henry V. An Illustration. 67 On the whole, therefore, we may set aside for the present this matter of the claim. We will glance superficially over the facts which appear to bear on the question. Ever since Edward I. had started on his attempt to conquer Scotland the French king had been giving more or less assistance to the Scots. Edward III.'s own efforts in the same direction had been frustrated largely by such interference. Now this French in- tervention in Scotland is manifestly con- nected with the English hold on Gascony, of which the French king desired possession. From the English point of view French in- terference in Scotland, besides being annoy- ingly obstructive in itself, amounted to a diversion under cover of which the French king might and did attack Gascony. Two serious attempts to conquer Gascony had been made by the French in Edward I.'s time, and under Edward II. the French had actually possessed themselves of large part of that district. The policy and aim of the French king in the matter were plain enough, 68 Place of History in Education. and in this policy he had already shown con- siderable persistence. Now the retention of Gascony was practically important to the English because of the importance of the Gascon wine trade. This trade, and also the trade between England and Flanders, was, moreover, a good deal disturbed by French piracy. For instance, in 1327 a certain Hugh Sampson states in a peti- tion to the king that a ship of his, sailing from Bordeaux to England, had been seized off the Norman coast by four French ships, and that the Frenchmen had slain his crew and carried off his ship with 140 tuns of wine. Such petitions from distracted mer- chants seem to have been common, and of redress there seems never to have been any. This kind of thing had certainly been going on for a long time, but no doubt it in- creased as trade grew, and perhaps it in- creased as a result of the wars over Gas- cony and Scotland in Edward I.'s time. From all these things we can make certain inferences. All this unredeemed wrong and An Illustration. 69 loss means resentment in the minds of a large number of the people concerned. The people concerned in the trade are, of course, not only the merchants, but also their customers, and also the producers on both sides of the sea, — for, of course, Eng- land was sending stuff to Gascony to pay for its Gascon wine. Further, these Scottish and Gascon affairs probably give rise to a similar resentment and sense of injury in the mind of the king, though we cannot be sure of that. And there is one thing more that needs mention. The French kins was endeavouring to get a hold on Flanders through its Count. The growing English trade in Flanders was imperilled. These facts are not all the facts bearing on our problem, but they are sufficient for our present purpose. We have not ac- counted yet for the commencement of the war, but we have some material with which to account for it. We cannot say simply that under these circumstances Edward III. determined upon war; determined to use 70 Place of History in Education. such sea power as he had, and to buy support abroad, and determined further to claim the French crown, partly as an excuse for going to war at all, partly to define his position in relation to Flanders, partly to raise hopes of larger spoil among his allies, partly, perhaps, in the hope of dividing the French, and partly as an appeal to the patriotic sentiment of the English. That statement would be true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It indicates probable causes, but does not definitely assign or dis- tinguish among them. It leaves many ques- tions open. Was Edward thinking chiefly of Scotland, chiefly of Gascony, or chiefly of Flanders ? Did he really wish to make conquests in France altogether apart from Gascony ? Did it seem to him that the only way of holding Gascony in the long- run lay in greatly reducing the power of the French king, and, in fact, in holding much more ? How far was Edward moved by vanity, and how far by resentment? How far was he influenced by the French An Illustration. 71 king's enemy, Robert of Artois ? How far was he thinking of making himself popu- lar? How far was he merely yielding to a popular demand that something should be done ? All these questions must be answered in some way before we can really know why the war was begun. It becomes apparent already that our knowledge can never be exact. Moreover, just so far as we are driven to seek the cause of war in the mind of Edward III. we are in great difficulties. We cannot get directly at that mind. Ques- tions quite intimately concerning Edward himself are all, more or less completely, unanswerable. Even if we could get directly at his mind it would not help us much. Just so far as the beginning of war was due to mere idiosyncrasies of Edward, it is of the nature of accident. How far can we, on the facts, escape an unwelcome conclusion of this kind? We must try to escape it, but we must also be prepared to accept it. We shall certainly 72 Place of History in Education. reason badly if we set out with a rigid re- solve to refuse any such conclusion. Let us try if it be possible to eliminate the king altogether. Can we say that the root of the whole matter is the political hold of the English on Gascony? This an- tagonises the French king; it leads to the French interference in Scotland, it sets up resentment and uneasiness, it leads to an aggravation of the prevailing friction on the coasts ; finally, it brings the English king to a merely inevitable conclusion that some- thing vigorous must be done to secure Gascony and put an end to the disturbance. If this be the right way of putting it, Gascony is the bone of contention, and the war is merely a renewal of that between Edward I. and Philip IV. But the assump- tion here is that the retention of Gascony was so important to the English that no English king could afford to abandon it rather than risk a war. The most practical reason the English had for desiring to re- tain Gascony was the existence of the wine An Illustration. 73 trade. Were, then, the English so anxious about their Gascon wine, or so careful of the traditional rights of the English crown in Gascon)^, that they practically forced the king into declaring war ? There is no evi- dence to support such a view. The great English barons drank a deal of Gascon wine ; they made something out of the royal rights in Gascony, and, as landowners, they must have been interested in the Gascon trade. But, apart from their own profits, they were certainly not very anxious to uphold royal rights, and, moreover, they do not seem to have moved in the matter. The Gascon barons were more fully interested in the question, for they were essentially wine pro- ducers. But they had little or no influence in England. The merchants and towns- people of England may have been ready to make sacrifices to keep their trade, but you can hardly say more. There is no likeli- hood or evidence of any serious pressure being put upon the king by his own sub- jects. The theory breaks down. We must 74 Place of History in Education. return to the king. Any attempt to solve political problems of the fourteenth century without reference to the king is sure to break down. One may be able to ignore modern Prime Ministers, but never medieval kings. We must look rather more closely at the king. We know that he used a very large amount of Gascon wine and that he only occasionally paid for some of it. Moreover, the more wine was imported the more the king made by way of custom. And he not only bought wine without paying for it and took barrels in prise, but he also sold wine himself. He had a very serious interest in the Gascon wine trade, an interest that can be measured by considerable amounts in money. In the year 1337 Edward III. owes £437 to one wine merchant and £221 to another. He orders 600 casks of wine in 1333 and 500 more in 1335. Nor is it only a question of wine to him. All the royal rights in Gascony are of the nature of more or less lucrative property, and mean income. Loss of Gascony would mean loss of income, An Illustration. 75 and no medieval king loses income if he can help it. And it is not only a question of Gascony. All disturbance of trade in the Channel affected the king's income, because the more trade flourished the more customs the king raised. As soon as we look at all closely at the business, we see that King Edward had solid, quite ordinary financial reasons for doing something. Further, we have to remember that conquest in Scotland or in France meant, of course, considerable outlay and risk, but meant increase of income, besides honour and glory, if only the thing were effectively done. On the one hand, then, danger of loss, on the other prospect of gain, as well as of the satisfaction of vanity by honour and glory : what more is wanted to explain the action of Edward III. or of any normal man ? But, if you do want more, there is resentment ; there is, possibly, a belief in his own right to the French throne ; and there is, finally, the certainty that the war will serve the interests and express the senti- ments of a large number of his subjects. 76 Place of History in Education. Are we now attributing too much to the king? If the loss of Gascony would have fallen wholly upon him, if the possible gains of war would have fallen entirely to him, then, indeed, we might argue that it would have been impossible for Edward III. if not to make war, at least to sustain it. But this is not the case. The English people as a whole had quite a practical interest in clearing the narrow seas of French pirates and in salving the Gascon and Flemish trade, and they, too, were moved by sense of injury and by belief that they had rights in France. The king, after all, does but represent his subjects in the matter. His interests in it are theirs. Nor can we suppose that Edward III. ignored the attitude of his subjects. He had, as we say, much power, but he was no despot, even in theory. The constitutional position of the king has its bearing on the causation of the war. If we are right so far, then the commence- ment of the war was not due, to any seriously troublesome extent, to the personality of An Illustration. 77 Edward III. It is not his unique personal character, as such, but his position as king that is mainly concerned. It is his financial position, the nature of his royal rights, and, indirectly, his constitutional position : and almost any man in his position we should expect to act as he did. His claim to the crown of France is another matter. But we have indicated, at least, that he had good and obvious reasons for making the claim, and we have shown some cause to believe that the claim was rather a matter of the conduct of the war than a cause of its beginning. Historical truth is so many-sided a thing that it is only by viewing it from many distinct points that one may hope to seize the whole. There is another way in which the whole matter may be put and which will express part of the truth. If the French were resolved to seize Gascony and the English to retain it, then war was inevitable, and if Edward had not begun it the French would have done so. This consideration does 78 Place of History in Education. nothing to explain why the English wanted to keep Gascony or the French to get it ; it does nothing to explain why the war came when it did and in the form in which it did come : it does not, in fact, bear on the actual commencement of the war at all. But it does relieve us of some of the trouble attaching to any absolute choice on Edward III.'s part. War was certain to arise over Gascony unless he chose to abandon it. He chose, rather, to begin it himself. Our statement of the facts and our analysis of them have alike been incomplete ; but they are sufficient for our present purposes. It is on such lines that this and all similar problems have to be solved. 79 VI. HISTORY AS A PAGEANT. Such objections to the theory of history as a science as have so far been dealt with have been assertions of the extreme diffi- culty or even impossibility of arriving at real knowledge of the causes of social and political phenomena. We have now to consider what is not logically an objection to, but is rather a traversing of, the whole contention implied in that theory. We have to consider an alternative view of the best way of approaching and dealing with the past life of humanity. However enthusi- astic any one may be over the conception of scientific history, it would be very foolish not to admit that to a large number of minds it does not appeal at all. Indeed, to the 80 Place of History in Education. greater number of minds no form of science appeals at all strongly. People are unintelli- gently glad of the practical results secured by the applications of science to common needs ; but for science itself they commonly care little or nothing. They even estimate the value of it in terms of money to be made by its application to business. But it seems tolerably certain that nobody will ever make much money out of historical science. Again, • there are sciences the results of which, even when not what is called practical, are impress- ive to the meanest imagination. The sensa- tional quality of certain astronomical and of certain biological conclusions escapes only the dullest. But whatever admirable results in the way of a destruction of superstitions, an increased rationalism in politics, an in- creased sense of the future, and so on, we may expect to arise from historical science, we can expect no results of immediate and inevitable impressiveness any more than of " practical " value. And so we shall have to become far more intelligent than we are History as a Pageant. 81 before many of us cease to declare that scientific history is dull, and to ask the use of it. It may be thought that mere assertions of the dulness or uselessness of historical science are not worth traversing otherwise than indirectly. But there are points of view from which such assertions may, in a certain sense, be made unanswerably. It is not a matter of a single point of view or of a single theory alternative to that of history as a science. It is a matter of quite multitudinous points of view, all equally non- scientific, but the common quality of which is a little hard to define. One may distinguish them, perhaps somewhat crudely, but sufficiently for our present purpose, as those points of view which are essentially personal. The scientific point of view may fairly be called impersonal. It is not a natural point of view in the present state of humanity. A natural, that is, a really personal point of view, is an expression of the whole man. It is that point from which F 82 Place of History in Education. a man looks at things with the whole of him- self. It is not reached by any mere process of reasoning, even if it be reached by reason- ing in any degree at all. It is not deliberately taken up. At any one moment the man is there. It comprehends all a man's sense of values of every kind, and it includes all his prejudices and his habitual tone of feel- ing. It is, at bottom, the man himself. But the scientific point of view is one deliberate- ly reached and taken, and has reference to values of only one kind. It is more natural to one man than to another, and it may, to a great extent, become habitual ; but it is never simply natural. Nobody looks at his friends and neighbours from a scientific point of view. There may be other points of view equally impersonal, but we are not called upon to consider them here. We have now to deal with people who insist on approaching the subject - matter of history from personal points of view ; and because they are many, there is difficulty in stating their case. Let us suppose a mind which objects to the History as a Pageant. 83 scientific theory of history as inadequate at best, and which sympathises with all other objectors in the same sense, what- ever exactly their views may be. Let us suppose further that this mind desires to state the common case of all such objectors. It is, perhaps, impossible that he should do this at all adequately, but we may con- ceive that he might express himself some- what as follows : — "I do not care," he might say, "or I care very little, for all this worry about causation. You admit that your account of the evolution of society will always be very incomplete, in that there are great tracts of time about which you have little information or none at all. You admit that your historic periods cover only a small space of the history of humanity. You admit that, what with great men and other accidents, your best generalisations will only be approximations to the truth, even where your evidence is most complete. You ad- mit that your explanations of the action of 84 Place of History in Education. masses by dominant motives involve some decree of error in every case. You admit, moreover, that this double process of analysis and of synthesis by means of which you are to reach your conclusions is a very delicate and difficult process, and necessarily very slow. You confess that most modern research is valuable rather for a somewhat distant future — of which, again, you admit that you know nothing — than for anything that by any stretch we can call the present ; and yet you ask me to admit that this endless groping is the most profitable mode of dealing with the human past. I deny it altogether. The very most I can admit is that it is not an altogether irrational procedure. I admit that by long striving and patience some large view of the human past, some new light on the human present, may eventually be attained. Let those who work in this hope continue to work if this hope be sufficient for them ; but I must assert that your utmost possible at- tainment in this direction, could it even be History as a Pageant. 85 realised at once, would not be of such value to us as what can certainly be had by treat- ing the past in a quite different manner and spirit. As to the people of the far future, like you, I know nothing. It is possible that these people may care more for attenuated but approximately correct generalisations than for flesh and blood, for the strivings and sufferings and tri- umphs and strange adventures of individual men and women. It is possible ; and, again, it is possible that they will care for none of these things. In any case, our present efforts cannot be directed by their hypo- thetical tastes. For my part I believe that there is only one thing perennially valu- able to humanity, and that is the human creature, the unique creature, the individual soul. The proper study of mankind is not generalised masses of people, not man, but men. We do not greatly care — this is the essence of it — for anything that appeals to the mere intellect. Human beings cannot in the long-run be satisfied except by an 86 Place of History in Education. appeal to their total humanity. The intel- lect is a mere instrument of the desires that rule the world. The desire of humanity is for the human. You ask us to look at human life as a series of changes going on from genera- tion to generation, changes of social and legal structure, economic changes, moral changes, political changes ; and you ask us to con- fine ourselves to trying to establish causation throughout the series. You condemn as irrelevant to this precious business any attention to the individual as such or to any of those aspects of life which are most attractive to humanity. You talk of the tragic and of the comic as mere aspects of things without real relations. But you admit that your causal relations are also only aspects of things, and, moreover, that they appeal, in the main, only to the intel- lect. Causation may, of course, be inter- esting. One may like to know something of processes — of how the English came to be in India, of how the House of Lords comes to be where it is. Such odd things History as a Pageant. 87 it is pleasing to know about. It is good to know such things, and to be able to see modern institutions and laws and customs in the light of their origin. But we certainly don't want only this sort of thing. What we want in history is not so much the causation of change in human life as the human life itself. We want the warm breath- ing things, the men and women in their habits as they lived, with all their irrele- vant passions about them. These are the things we love for their own sake — that is, for their correspondence with us. The study of them enlarges and enriches our personal life as no study of mere causation ever can. We do not care very much why Mary Stuart failed. We want to realise her in imagination ; we want her point of view rather than any analysis of the factors which ruined her and which she herself did not understand. To most people of time past and present, at least, history is a pageant, no less and no more. It is a vast procession of human lives, fascinating 88 Place of History in Education. to us because of the likeness underlying all the differences and because of the differ- ences through which we see the likeness. We want, to use an image of Macaulay's, to travel in past time, as we want to travel in strange countries. We want to see life. We want to see it under conditions which we can only reach through the good offices of the historian ; to see strange customs and costumes and strivings over ideals that are strange. And we wish for an historian to be our guide, philosopher, and friend, our courier, our Baedeker to the past. History is full of glorious stories, matter for terror and pity, and matter for laughter and rejoic- ing. The historian we desire is he who will force us to realise all this. If he be an artist we shall value him not only for what he shows us but for his way of showing it, for his suggestiveness and for his passion and even for his moralisings and specula- tions. We shall value him for what he is. We shall delight, for the time, in loving what he loves and in hating what he hates, History as a Pageant. 89 and never ask whether he be impartial or no. And if you say that such tastes are childish, we reply that, in the same sense, the whole human race is very childish, and that it will be long indeed ere it ceases to be so, if it ever ceases to be so at all. And if you ask what good we expect to derive from this kind of history, we say it is the same kind of good that one gets from novels and from plays and poems, along with an element of some importance, an element of absolute fact and of true human memories that is not in them. We say, moreover, that pity is always good and laughter is always good, and that any uplifting or enlarging emotion is always good. We do not live by ideas alone ; we live also and in still deeper measure by emotions : and certainly we do not live by ideas of causation. In truth we live by the imagination, and to enrich that and to stimulate it healthily and at the same time to keep it in touch with the realities of life, this is the true function of history." 90 Place of History in Education. It is not necessary to analyse at all minutely this farrago of statements. Certain main facts concerning it seem to stand out quite clearly. To begin with, there are certain exaggerations involved in the foregoing statement of the adverse case. They might have been avoided ; they are no essential part of the case itself; but it was as well that they should be included, for they are such as one frequently hears. It is a gross as well as a pertinent exagger- ation to say, or to imply, that the scientific historian of the present day cannot hope to attain for himself or bis generation any real understanding of the past, or light on the present. We have admitted nothing of the sort. If it be true that the results of much modern research are for the future historian to use rather than for ourselves, and if it be true that even all our con- clusions may subsequently have to be modi- fied, this by no means involves that we can at present reach no conclusions of value. We would rather say that we are already History as a Pageant. 91 in a position to reach many conclusions of value, and even that we have reached some. It may well be, indeed, that we are hindered from reaching others and from putting those already within our reach more distinctly than we do, because historians are not agreed about values and persist in trying to extract too many kinds of value from the past and so dissipate their energies and confuse their results. Again, to say that the theory of scientific history asks people to look upon the past life of humanity as a mere series of con- nected changes is not so much an exag- gerated as a false statement ; for you cannot look at the past at all without seeing more than that, and you cannot deal at all with the changes of things without thinking of the things themselves. You cannot write of the building up of an empire without studying much that is, in one sense, merely incidental to the process and in another is part of it. But when we have said this much, we 92 Place of History in Education. must admit not only that there is truth in the view which has been presented, but even that, in a sense, it is altogether true. So far as it expresses a genuine point of view it is incontrovertible. We come down to the unassailable personal feeling. It is useless and absurd to tell any one that he ought to like this rather than the other, unless by your "ought" you mean some- thing specifically reasonable. You are quite right to tell a man that he will be a fool to throw himself over a cliff, unless he wants to be killed ; but if he does want to be killed, your proposition goes to the ground with him. There are a large number of people who are not especially interested in causation, but who are more or less in love with life and like to see as much as they can of it on many sides. The demand of these people for a kind of history adapted to their desires will certainly be met, partly because the demand is so large that it will more or less pay to answer it, and partly because such people will themselves History as a Pageant. 93 write history as they like it to be written. You have, in fact, demands for, roughly speaking, two different kinds of history ; and the historian, perhaps not quite know- ing what he wants himself, or sympathising with both demands, or wishing to please as many people as possible, is led to write now as a scientific student, now as a moral- ist, now as an artist in the dramatic or the picturesque, now as a guide to a museum of curiosities, — with the nonde- script sort of results that we get. We may be led, at this point, to ask how far this demand for pictures of human life, for imaginative or simply realistic treat- ment of the past as a pageant of miscel- laneous attractiveness, is justified in reason ; but there is, surely, no question. To assert that this demand is unreasonable would be absurd ; and perhaps you could hardly do the cause of scientific history more harm than by making such an assertion. To assert, for instance, that Carlyle's great pictorial and humorous sermon on the 94 Place of History in Education. French Revolution is of little or no value, because the sermon is not analytic and gives only the vaguest and most inade- quate idea of the causes of the great catas- trophe, because it emphasises a few features and utterly neglects others to the destruction of all right proportion, this would be mon- strously wrong. The value of a sermon does not lie in its text. Even though the text be finer than anything in the sermon, yet the discourse is the thing. To say that a great artist, or a great humourist, or a prophet, cannot use historical material to any fine purpose would be to talk down- right nonsense. We want all of such work that we can get. And if any one says that this is the very finest way of using his- torical material, and that, as has been said, the finest of English historians are Shake- speare and Scott, that may be undeniably true from his point of view. But the difference between this kind of history and the other kind must be clearly History as a Pageant. 95 understood. What Shakespeare gives us is not, from the scientific point of view, his- tory at all. It is pure pageantry, and not even realistic pageantry considered histori- cally. It deals with individuals and their fortunes, and the fact that some of these individuals happen to be kings is nothing to the purpose. It creates an atmosphere regardless of any correspondence between that atmosphere and that of the real historic personages it includes. Its back- ground is arbitrary or vague, and its back- ground includes almost everything with which the scientific historian has to deal. It has nothing whatever to say to social development. It is capable of writing a history of the reign of King John without even mentioning the Great Charter ; because, when you come to look at it, the Great Charter is not dramatic. Yet if any one says that he finds more profit in Shakespeare's Henry IV. than in any con- ceivable analysis of that monarch's actual 96 Place of History in Education. position and relations, what more is there to be said ? There is this to be said. At the risk of being taken to be as stupid as the mathematician who, after reading Paradise Lost, inquired what it proved, we must point out that Shakespeare proves nothing. True, he has not tried to prove anything ; but that is just the point — that he has not tried. It is probably impossible to frame any tolerable definition of history, except from the scientific point of view. All other kinds of history are written from a point of view which is that of the natural man and which varies with each writer. But we reach here to a fundamental differ- ence. The scientific historian must always be trying to prove something : the other kinds of historians are not. The value of the scientific historian's analysis of Henry IV. 's position depends upon the degree in which it helps to explain other things. It will help, let us say, towards an explanation of the Wars of the Roses. In any case it is only as an explanation that it has any History as a Pageant. 97 value at all. But Shakespeare's treatment of the matter, however diversely suggestive, establishes nothing, explains nothing, and is intended to meet a demand totally distinct from the demand for explanations. 9 8 VII. OF RECONCILIATION. The attempt to reconcile the logically in- compatible has always at once entertained, and to some extent practically profited, humanity. The inconsistent desires of man- kind require such a procedure. When two theories are hopelessly opposed, it may well be that, by working on both, we may obtain desirable results impossible to con- sistency. How far is any reconciliation possible between the two views of history which have been presented ? It seems fairly obvious that ideally they cannot be reconciled at all. Either you desire to prove something or you do not ; either you are bent on Of Reconciliation. 99 studying causation for the sake of under- standing actual development or you are not. Moreover, you cannot really be doing this and something else at the same time, how- ever much you may wish to do so. You can analyse your phenomena with a view to explanation on one page and treat the same phenomena as picturesque or dramatic or what not on the next. But the one page is unnecessary to the other; one or the other, or both, if you please, are of the nature of digressions. It must be observed, too, that while the tragic and the comic and the ethical are closely interlinked with each other in the nature of the human sou], they are not essentially interlinked with causation. You may write with a double or treble purpose, but they remain distinct. They are in no sense reconciled by merely co- existing. And from their co-existence all your purposes, all your effects, are likely to suffer. Shakespeare does not make the mistake of bothering us with a discussion of Henry IV. 's financial position or of the ioo Place of History in Education. resources of the Percies on the eve of the battle of Shrewsbury. If the subject-matter of history be treated as a miscellaneous pageant, history becomes something far more nearly allied to the novel than to any scientific study. It is impressionistic art or it is antiquarianism and deals in curios, or it is simply biography in a complicated form. Its value will then be as miscellaneous as that of all museums, picture-galleries, plays, poems, and novels taken together. It is hard to see what can be gained by attempting to unite this kind of history with the other. It is impossible really to unite them, and what is gained by sandwiching your scientific discussions with bits of impressionism is not manifest. The task of the scientific historian as such is quite big enough for any one. It seems as though he must inevitably lose threads and confuse himself and even fail to hold his main purpose clearly before himself if he attempts not only to analyse and state causal relations but tries also to Of Reconciliation. 101 act as an exponent of the human comedy generally. We ought not to expect the one mind to do the two things. In the first chapter of his ' History of Civilisation in England,' Buckle remarked that the higher kind of scientific mind had never taken up history. It might be said that the higher kind of poetic mind has only rarely touched it. How far these assertions are true it is, happily, needless to inquire ; but any truth there may be in them is probably partly due to the fact that, at least till recently, the historian has been expected to combine the incompatible. What we still want is a much more distinct division of labour. We want the artist for the sake of his artistry and the expert guide because all intelligent people are more or less col- lectors of curiosities. It might, indeed, be said that we want the poet and the prophet to supplement the work of the scientific historian. The scientific historian himself will want history written from other points of view and with other objects than his 102 Place of History in Education, own ; because such history will frequently be suggestive and helpful to him. But what, above all, we want is to see the two things as distinct, and to conceive of scientific history as a thing logically complete in itself. It once the distinction be fully and generally realised, the further division of labour will come. It is useless to say that the scientific historian should never on any account drop into poetry or moralising. But if he realise what his main purpose is and pursue it honestly, then he will always know that in dropping into poetry he is yielding to temptation, and he will yield only rarely unless he be alto- gether of the wicked. On the other hand, those who write history from some personal point of view should feel themselves far more free and do their business much better for realising that they are not expected to give explanations as such or to deal with things merely because they are important from a scientific point of view. It must be of advantage to an artist to know that he may write about King John without reference Of Reconciliation. 103 to the Great Charter. It is probable that Carlyle would have done still better than he did had he clearly known that he was writing a sermon. The artist who deals in history cannot, of course, be quite free. He cannot have the freedom of a novelist. He is not bound to explain more than his artistic purpose requires him to explain ; he is not bound to be exhaustive ; he is not bound — he may even be bound not — to argue : but he is bound not deliberately to mislead. The more closely he stands by fact the better. In some ways, perhaps, he will be even more meticulously accurate than the scientific historian, from whose point of view so many things are of no account. But the artist is not bound even to refer to anything which is of no account to him. He must be all the more scrupu- lous. If he desires to invent, let him become a novelist. There is clearly no excuse for him if he perverts knowledge and yet calls himself an historian in any sense. If he be half-historian, half-novelist, he can gain little, 104 Place of History in Education. if anything, from his historical basis. He will, rather, destroy it. Yet while he re- nounces the freedom of the novelist his work will gain a certain charm and a certain point which the novelist can never obtain. The records of the past are a practically inexhaustible storehouse of every kind of interest. Just as scientific history has suffered by pursuit of what is irrelevant to its purpose, so also has artistic history. We may look forward to far more splendid historical romance than we have ever yet had, except from Shakespeare. It is needless to expatiate on this point. We have now to some extent cleared the ground, and can face the question of the teaching of history as part of the education of the more or less young mind. What kind of history is it that we are to teach ? Are we to teach history as a science, or are we to teach it, primarily, from some personal point of view ? Or are we to try to combine the two things ? Even though we admit that history cannot satisfactorily Of Reconciliation. 105 be written from the scientific point of view and from some other at the same time, it does not follow that a teacher of young people should be strictly scientific or strictly unscientific. The teacher may prefer to give glimpses of both ways of regarding and treating the past. The answers we give to these questions necessarily depend on our ideal of what education should effect. io6 VIII. OF EDUCATION. Befoke one can get to grips with the ques- tions, What sort of history are we to teach and how are we to teach it? certain pre- vious questions must receive some sort of answer. Why do we want to teach history at all ? is the first of such questions to confront us ; and this runs up into a larger question, Why do we want to teach anything ? Now in answer to this it might at once be said, " We want to teach certain things because they are practically useful." It is worth while to consider this answer in order clearly to establish, at the outset, a necessary distinction. " Education," broadly speaking, is of two kinds. There is, necessarily, a Of Education. 107 deal of teaching which is based on the desire of people to have themselves or their children taught things which, they suppose, will be practically useful to them. There has always been teaching of this kind among men, and was before men were human, as there is now among the animals. But we have to ask what "practical useful- ness " means. If a man wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or a chemist or attache to an embassy, and cannot become one without passing an examination, he must have teach- ing to enable him to pass, and such teaching, it will be generally admitted, is "practically useful" to him. Again, to teach a child to read and write is admittedly to impart "practically useful" arts. But what con- stitutes the practical usefulness in these cases ? Why does one say that the learning of carpentry is practically useful and the learning of Greek of no practical use? It might be hastily answered that carpentry and reading and writing are of assistance in 108 Place of History in Education. earning one's living, whereas Greek . . . But the matter is not so simple as that. People, for instance, talk of acquiring the French language as a practically useful thing to do. Yet in most cases ability to speak French does not help towards earning a living. It will help one to travel comfort- ably in certain parts of Europe : it may, perhaps, help one to understand the menu card of an hotel. These things also are conceived of as practical uses,. It becomes clear that the common quality of all this " practical usefulness " consists in ability to do some definite thing which it is assumed that we shall, or at least may, want to do. Now this is also the distinguishing char- acter of what is called "technical" educa- tion. We reach the conclusion that the teaching of French as a language to use in travel or for social purposes is just as much technical education as the teaching of carpentry or cookery. In putting the matter thus we are giving an extension to the term technical education as it is ordinarily Of Education. 109 used. But it appears to be quite a logical extension. Evidently there is a radical difference between this kind of education and the education which is simply a training of the mind in power and in knowledge. This radical difference may, perhaps, be stated thus. "Technical" teaching is that which helps the individual as such to do something he will presumably wish to do ; and it looks no further. But teaching of the higher, or at least of the other, kind looks beyond the individual, and aims not so much at fitting him to do things for himself as at fitting him to do things that concern every one, and that concern the future of humanity. It is, one might say, a distinction between education from the private and personal point of view and education from the point of view of society or of the race. Now it is only with education in this latter and larger sense that the historical teacher can seriously be concerned. For the amount nf " pra-p-tina l usefulness " _to be got no Place of History in Education. out of the teaching of history is really minute. No doubt it may enable you to understand a certain number of references in books, newspapers, and conversation that otherwise would be quite dark. It may possibly enable you to understand why a certain class of people engaged in our edu- cational controversies are called " Crom- wellians." It may throw a humorous gleam on some picture in the Royal Academy. It should certainly help you to appreciate the value of political references to "feudalism" and of much current talk about the " lessons of history." Possibly these, in their small way, are practical values. Any real know- ledge of history will certainly help you to take a rational view of current politics and of social and economic questions of the moment. But is this of " practical " value ? If you are to be a professional politician it may be doubted whether a knowledge of history will not be a positive hindrance to your career. Your references, your argu- ments drawn from history, will be much Of Education. 1 1 1 more sharply pointed if you know next to nothing about it than they can be if you have any true appreciation of the elusive, complex reality. And if you have attained to the scientific point of view in matters historical, you will certainly never fit in nicely with any political party. So that, on the whole, we may conclude that the teaching of history can never to any serious extent become a part of technical education. Our questions, Why do we want to teach history ? and Why do we want to teach anything? must be considered without any reference at all to that kind of education. We do not want to t_ ejich_Jiistory in order to enable people to understand journalistic allu sions . When we consider the amount that is talked and written about education nowa- days, and the mass of literature that has developed about the subject in the last hundred years, it might seem that this question, Why do we want to teach any- thing ? should be easy to answer. But 1 1 2 Place of History in Education. though we have made considerable improve- ments in the art of teaching this and that, there is still no approach to a general agreement as to what we should teach or what the object of academic training should be. We are, perhaps, agreed that it is good, as far as it goes, to teach " practically useful " things. Thereabouts our agreement ceases. Even about that we do not really agree at all. The claims of the practically useful conflict, more or less, with the claims of education of the other sort ; and there can be no real agreement till these claims are adjusted. But with " technical educa- tion" we are not now concerned at all. As soon as we pass beyond its sphere of influence we enter chaos, — or, at least, if that be exaggeration, we enter a region in which disagreement is far more positive than agreement. When we disagree concerning the ideals of education in the larger sense we disagree definitely and irreconcilably : when we agree we become vague. In fact this question, Why do we want to teach Of Education. 1 1 3 anything ? involving, as it does, this other, What do we want to teach ? is really of very great difficulty. Perhaps, after all, we shall find that no answer is possible. Yet we must try to reach some kind of answer, and to that end we had best begin by narrowing the question. We must be careful not to make it too narrow or we shall find we have not room enough to stand. But, bearing in mind that our main object at present is to find an answer to the question, Why do we want to teach history ? and that the teaching of history must needs be scholastic, w r e need not be thinking of education in the largest sense : we may confine our view, so far as that is possible, to scholastic education. [ Scholastic education resolves itself into the teaching of a number of different subjects by persons supposed to be more or less specially qualified to teach them. What- ever be the aim of the teaching as a whole, it takes the form of instruction given in different subjects. One of the h 1 1 4 Place of History in Education. subjects so taught is something or other called "History." Obviously, before we can decide how best to deal with this particu- lar subject, we must have a clear notion of the ideal connection of all the subjects that are taught. If there be no such con- nection, if there be no definable aim of all this instruction as a whole, then, indeed, our question has no answer. In that case we are teaching history, as we are teaching all other subjects, because it is the custom to do so, or because some persons, some- where, in authority, for some mysterious and necessarily insufficient reason, think that it ought to be done. In that case it does not matter what meaning we give to the word " history " or how we treat the subject, so long as these authorities are satisfied. That is to say that it does not matter except to ourselves ; and that is to say that it does not matter at all. Already we are in danger of ambiguity. We have been speaking of the " higher " Of Education. 1 1 5 education as though it were a simple thing, and even as though it were concerned only with the intellect. But we cannot narrow down our question as much as that. Edu- cation must needs be moral as well as in- tellectual, if only because it cannot possibly avoid being both. But, however close may be the connection in reality of moral and intellectual training, they are ideally separable, and for the sake of clearness it will be best to separate them. For the present we will confine our attention to the question of the education of the intel- ligence merely. If we had a definite system of education established here in England, if we had even a definite theory, however unsystematised our scholastic apparatus might be, there would be a way of escape from our diffi- culties. We could take the established theory as a basis and refuse to question it. Our procedure would not be at all philosophic ; but it would be immediately practical. As things are we are in no u6 Place of History in Education. danger; for, in fact, we have neither system nor theory. Our scholastic apparatus is an unco-ordinated jumble of institutions new and old, working, apparently, on different theories as to the end in view. And this unsystematised system is rendered the more chaotic by the interference of different ex- amining boards existing for different sorts of purposes, and by the interference of local authorities and even of religious sects, with purposes only partially educational or not educational at all. It is clear that we can find no practicable foothold in this welter. The thirteenth century may be said to have had a theory of education, and the seven- teenth century may be said to have had a theory. We have fragments of conflicting systems. The old systems have broken down and the new one is not yet made : we are trying to make it. Much thought and energy is being given to the work, though, unfortunately, a good deal of the energy is supplied by people with quite uneduca- tional ends to serve. We are going through Of Education. 1 17 the throes of a birth, perhaps, but the conditions are not entirely healthy. No one knows that the result may not be a thing still-born, or a thing monstrous, or a thing diseased. We are all convinced of the value of the higher education, and not one of us knows what this higher education should do. But this statement is false ; we are not all con- vinced. Thousands of us, I should rather say millions of us, are not convinced that education other than "technical" has any value at all. And there is no hope of these millions ever being convinced until we who are so agree about the main things. Each one of us who is interested in the matter must think the thing out for him- self. There is no tradition, there is no authority, on which we can shuffle off our responsibility. We agree, one may suppose, to regard scholastic education as having for its end the training of the mind and the imparting of knowledge. Training is intellectual, or u8 Place of History in Education. it is moral, or it is aesthetic. For the sake of simplification we put aside for the present the two latter kinds of training. What do we want our schooling to do for us intellectually ? What is our idea of an intellectually thoroughly educated young person? Must the outlines of that young person remain for ever dim ? It is, first of all, a question of essentials. It is mere matter of necessity that we should start with the assertion of some far- reaching principle. What do we want our schools to do for us intellectually ? The question is surely put too narrowly. The question rather is, What do we want our schools to do not for us but for humanity and for the future ? And to the question put thus there seems to be a sort of answer. \We want our schools to lay for the next generation the foundations of sound thinking. Possibly no one is more painfully aware than the present writer how monstrously large are the assumptions implied in this assertion. To his mind, at least, it implies Of Education. 1 19 that sound thinking is a thing absolutely necessary for the final salvation of human society. It implies that man does not yet know the things that belong to his peace. It implies that a right educational system will be concerned somewhat less with the actual children in its schools than with their children and their grandchildren. All these propositions are disputable, and it is im- possible to discuss them here. These things must be assumed for the moment if we are to make any further headway, and, it is to be feared, others also. Even to state clearly all the assumptions involved in our proposition as to the end of scholastic edu- cation on its intellectual side would involve a long process. On the other hand, if we are to assume nothing it is certain that we shall never move at all. The assumption that sound thinking is the right end of the educational process on its intellectual side has a fair and reasonable appearance. It may be disputed or even disproved, but it seems to throw the burden of disproof on 1 20 Place of History in Education. the other side. It is at least possible that modern Europe may come in time to accept it, and, practically, it seems as though it might provide a basis for an educational system. At least we may make the as- sumption as a working hypothesis, and see where it will take us. It is clearly a question of training, first of all, rather than of knowledge. How do we want the intelligence to be trained with a view to sound thinking? Put in this way the question does not seem a very difficult one to answer. We cannot make the intellect a master, but we want to make it as efficient a servant as it can be for all purposes, and especially for the purpose of thinking its way through the difficulties of humanity. To enable it to become this efficient servant we must, first of all, secure for it fair play. Far from being an easy thing to do, this is a thing that, under present conditions, cannot possibly be com- pletely done. It means that we have to try to free the intelligence from presump- Of Education. 121 tions and prejudices, however generated, and from all conventional modes of thought, as such. We have to help it to distinguish quite clearly between what it knows and what it does not know, between what can be in some sense or degree demonstrated for it and what it has merely been told to believe. We have to help it to free itself from the complex entanglements of circum- stance — to free itself from the hypnotism of surrounding opinion. We have to lift it out of its habitual plane. Every one starts in a peculiar mental atmosphere of his own, more or less stuffy and unhealthy, and the elements of that atmosphere are the opinions or mental habits of the people immediately surrounding him. These close him in as barriers. In that atmos- phere his opinions tend to form automati- cally and sub - consciously. We have to break down those barriers and let in fresh air. It will be hard work. Orthodoxies of all sorts, class interests and instincts, social conventions, parents and guardians, fight on 122 Place of History in Education. the other side. Only let us know what we have to do. But this is not all. Freedom of the in- tellect involves more than mere emancipa- tion from habit and early associations. It involves honesty. This is not to say that a person intellectual^ emancipated must needs be morally honest. There is, perhaps, not any reason why he should be ; but in- tellectual honesty he must have. Not only must he never wilfully shut his eyes — that is downright lying — but he must keep them very wide open. He must never gloss over difficulties, or allow himself the anarchic licence of a special pleader. He must never tell himself that he knows what he does not know. It is not a question of what he tells other people. A conscious lie told to other people, so long as it is fully conscious, will not touch the freedom of his intelligence unless, at least, it be very often repeated. But he must never lie to himself, nor must he tell himself half-truths. He will have to keep a sharp watch on himself to see that Of Education. 1 23 he does not, for the brain of man is deceitful and desperately wicked. Yet more is required. The intelligence must be freed, as far as possible, from emotional disturbance. Emotional disturb- ance arises when a man feels his whole being concerned in the question he is considering. He does not look at the thing with his in- telligence only; he looks at it as though he were part of it and becomes excited. It may, indeed, be that he is part of it. Nevertheless we want to detach the reason- ing powers from the emotions, and from all that is simply personal. We want to train the mind to approach all questions as though they had for it no personal bearing, and that whether they have such bearing or no. This emancipation of the intelligence should, it seems, be the primary aim of intellectual training. Other things will follow and go along with that. We want to develop the power, and equally the habit, of thinking in averages, in maxima and 124 Place of History in Education. minima, in masses and in centuries. We want to develop a sense of the interde- pendence of all branches of knowledge. We want a sense of the complexity of every question needing serious consideration. We want to develop a power of suspending judgment. l We want to make it easy and even habitual to suspend judgment. )/' We want to make it absolutely impossible to hold opinions based on grossly insufficient knowledge of the facts. We want a habit of thinking of conclusions as more or less probable rather than as true or untrue. We want to develop a realistic imagination of the number of different views that may be held on almost any really complex question. We want a logical habit and we want an analytic habit. All this seems to some of us mere matter of course. It is, perhaps, of some special importance to note that we want, further, a training in the medium and means of thought — that is, in language. We have to train our young minds in the use and Of Education. 125 in the sense of words. '. Accurate thinking and the accurate use of words must needs go together. But there is no such thing as perfectly accurate use of words, because the great mass of words have not perfectly exact meanings. "Words which represent things are like things in this, that they are vague at their edges. It is not a matter of their being frayed by use, though of course this happens also. In truth they have no absolute outline. They shade off into each other as things do. Because of this and because of the weight of associa- tion every word carries, words mean, at best, slightly different things to different minds. We want, therefore, to fill our young minds with the sense of this elusive quality of words, because we must recognise the inexactness of our own thought before we can get it as exact as it may be. The study of language will help us greatly in this as well as in other respects. One language supplements another, not so much by providing wholly untranslatable words 126 Place of History in Education. as by bringing out the non- equivalence of roughly equivalent words. When we consider how far from perfect in intellectual freedom and honesty even the best of us is, we may be inclined to declare that these demands are preposterous. But we can demand no less ; for nothing less will in the long - run serve. To set the feet of our children on the way of intel- lectual freedom, that is the best we can hope to do, but we must try to do that. We are an ignorant, untrained, undisciplined generation. But we are not all of us so untrained and so ignorant as not to see where we fail, as not to see something at least of what it is our children require to make them more competent than we are. The future lies folded in them, and for us they are the future. All our political questions, all our social questions, relate to them and are for them to answer. We cannot see our way through the tangle. All we can hope to do is to set our children on the right road. We Of Erfuca Hon . 127 cannot even do that, but we may make a beginning. The difficulty of these first steps is indeed enormous. It is not so much with the children as with the teachers. We ourselves are the difficulty. The teach- ing profession has to become a priesthood, and we are none of us worthy, no, not one. We are neither honest enough nor pure enough for this work. But if only we can recognise what we have to do, that recogni- tion will itself be the first step. We have said the least that can be said concerning what is required for intellectual training, and we come now to the question of knowledge. What is that knowledge which we are to regard as part of the equipment every man and woman now needs as a foundation for sound thinking ? The human race has now been living on this planet for a considerable time, and there are a number of things important to us as intellectual beings about which we have acquired some positive knowledge. Let us put the matter quite broadly. May we 1 28 Place of History in Education. not say that we want our youth to start by knowing where they are? We want them to start with at least a clear notion of how much knowledge of vital things we possess. We want them to start equipped with the main conclusions that have been reached about these things, and with the main implications and bearings of these conclusions clearly in mind. But at this point some one will ask, " What are the vital things?" The question has an ugly look, but some sort of answer must be given. There are people who will say, " This and that are the only vitally im- portant things, and about them we know all we need know." And there are others, perhaps, who will say, " Yes, these are the really vital things, and about them we know nothing whatever." Need we concern ourselves with these people? We certainly will not concern ourselves with them in this place if we can help it. Yet perhaps we may make a qualified admis- sion to the effect that this also we have Of Education. 1 29 to learn precisely, what the vital things are. One thing is certain : that we cannot begin, as we might logically wish to begin, with the very groundwork of thought. There is just this objection to a demand that we should go straight to the heart of things and begin by considering pure being, that it cannot actually be done. About ultimate things we have reached no con- clusion unless it be a conclusion that we can know nothing. Will any one say that therefore we have no real knowledge at all? In a sense that proposition is true. It is a truth that concerns us as intellectual beings, but it is not a truth that concerns directly the mass of the activities of life or of thought. It is to this mass of our vital activities that education has to be adjusted. We should not desire, even if it were possible to do so, to educate the intellect into a condition of pure intellectu- ality. 1 We desire, above all, to educate the intellect as an instrument of thought in 130 Place of History in Education. our vital relations. We have to teach it to seek and to apprehend such truth as it can apprehend. NWe have to free it and to purge it of passion and of superstition. We have to widen its view and strengthen its grip as much as possible, because such advance as man can make will depend, in the long-run, mainly on its strength and its lucidity. Such advance is in no way dependent on our capacity to appre- hend the ultimate. It is not, of course, a question of what any particular person may happen to want to know. It is not a question of any developed and individual preference. It is a question of what man as an intellectual and as a social being requires to know. The human mind is engaged in the ex- ploration of the universe. It is seeking to understand its own relation to what it calls the universe. It has reached certain con- clusions about its own place in nature, and certain notions of what this world is, what stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, and so Of Education. 131 on. We want scholastically to teach these things to our young people. We must not teach what we do not know, but we must teach the most far-reaching, the most eman- cipating things that we do know. Our young people want, therefore, some at least of the main conclusions and implica- tions of physics and chemistry, geology, and astronomy, and evolutionary biology. They want a clear notion of the surface of this planet, and of the working of wind and rain and tide. They want language and mathematics, mainly, perhaps, for the sake of training in thought. How much in each case they will require of these things is a question that only experience can answer. But they want also, I think, history, and in connection with history, Political and Social Philosophy. When we have equipped our youth with a realisation of what all this signifies, with a definite notion not only of conclusions but of the manner in which they have been reached, and when we have trained their intelligence 132 Place of History in Education. into freedom and right method, then, and not till then, shall we be able fairly to say that we are an intellectually educated people. We shall have laid the necessary foundations for sound thinking. A few words must be added concerning the question of what moral training a rightly organised educational system would give. The question cannot be ignored by any teacher. Moral training is inseparable from intellectual training, and, at least in many subjects, moral teaching is inseparable from instruction. Every human deed has a moral value, and in every little reference to such deeds lurks a moral valuation. The teacher of history must continually be dealing directly, however impersonally, with the moral judgments of others. Yet it is only indirectly that the teacher of history as such is concerned with the business of moral training, and we are not therefore bound, in this place, to consider the question fully. Many persons appear to imagine that while grave doubt may exist as to the Of Education. 133 right subjects of scholastic instruction, there can be no serious doubt as to what is re- quired morally. But such agreement as actually exists on this question appears to be merely superficial. We are really agreed only on the truism that it is a useful thing to inculcate useful habits. The general ques- tion is, in fact, monstrously difficult, and any theory on the subject involves a philosophy of life. We know, or think we know, within narrow limits, how we desire the intelligence to be trained and what is the knowledge most vital for thought. We do not know with equal accuracy what moral training is wanted. Logical process is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. The facts of nature alter not at all, or so slowly that the human mind only with effort becomes conscious of their increasing change. But the moral standards and values of that mind change far more rapidly. And not only do they change with the genera- tions, but they vary from one person to another. Humanity is not at present ade- 134 Place of History in Education. quate to any coherent system of moral training. We do not know exactly what we want, still less do we know exactly what the future requires of us. In the present state of the world, at least, there is not one best moral type but many types that are fine, and many more than we, perhaps, are inclined to recognise. Yet we are not in utter darkness, and we must work by such light as we have. We know what we do not want better, perhaps, than what we want ; but at least we know something of both. We can see that it is mainly a question of training the imagin- ation, — a very delicate business, and requiring a great honesty. We can see that some mental habits are healthy and others un- healthy. |'We believe that everything that makes for" co-operation, for sympathy, for self-respect, and for respect for all living things, for largeness of purpose and steadi- ness in pursuit, is good. We are sure that everything that makes for personal greed, for sensuality and sloth, for pettiness of Of Education. 135 purpose, is bad. How much a scholastic system may do to develop the good and eliminate the evil we do not know, for we have not yet tried. For the rest we can, of course, inculcate useful and discourage detrimental habits. This appears to be what most people are thinking of when they speak of moral train- ing. But this is merely moral training on its "technical" side. It is, strictly, a depart- ment of technical education. It is a training which will tend to enable a boy or a girl to " get on " in life, and just so far as this getting on is represented as the sufficient purpose of the habit inculcated, the training is immoral rather than positively " moral." The habit of punctuality is, no doubt, an excellent business habit ; but its inculcation as such is certainly no part of the higher educative process. To have written this much about the intellectual and moral aspects of education with hardly a reference to aesthetics is, per- haps, characteristically English. There are 136 Place of History in Education. those who would say that training of the intellect and the moral sense are relatively unimportant, and important chiefly as they subserve aesthetic training. It is probably true that a people trained and educated intellectually, and rich in useful moral habits and lucid moral notions, but lacking in a sense of aesthetic values, would be in every sense a dull people and in all the highest things a sterile people. There is a certain danger here, and every teacher in every subject should have it in mind. But in this place only two things need be said. To begin with, it is certainly better not to follow the example of the Emperor Joseph II. in trying to take the second step before we have taken the first. And finally, the ques- tion how far the teacher of history is specifi- cally concerned either with ethics or aesthetics is a question to be considered later. i37 IX. OF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY. We are now, at last, in a position to con- sider the exact place of history in our scheme of education. What amount and what kind of historical knowledge is de- manded for the young mind as part of the basis of sound thinking which our educa- tional agencies as a whole should combine to supply ? Evidently, in speaking thus of the " young mind," we are speaking not of the child of fifteen but rather of the 3 7 oung person of full legal age or thereabout. Quite obviously a child of fifteen cannot have acquired more than the beginnings of a foundation for the superstructure of thought, even though, if the educative process stop at that age, the foundations 138 Place of History in Education. laid may be sound and will be valuable in proportion to the goodness of their material. Evidently, too, we are not thinking merely of our present national schools. It will take all the time of all our scholastic apparatus, up to and including the universi- ties, adequately to lay our required founda- tions. At present this apparatus does not in any true sense constitute a system. It will have to be made into one before any large proportion of our population has a chance of being educated. The question how the teacher of history should commence his share of the work with very young students we will consider later. The larger question must be answered first. In this, as in all practical matters, we must begin by thinking not of the beginning but of the end. For the begin- ning is determined by the end, if it is a beginning of anything. However great, in this or that respect, the value of history treated as pageant may be, it seems evident that it is a Of Educational History. 139 scientific view of history that is needed for intellectual development. This conclusion can hardly be escaped. The value of history as pageant must needs be mainly moral or mainly aesthetic. The instructional teaching of history cannot be mainly either. It is, therefore, with history as a science that our schooling must be primarily concerned. What sort of knowledge, then, of the science of history is needed, and how much ? But, clearly, the main question is not of how much detail we should give, here, there, or anywhere. Detail, as such, is not needed at all. It is a question of main facts. We want such detail as will help the student to see how conclusions are reached and what they mean. We want details as an aid to imagination. We have to force the student to realise that at every point he is dealing with real life and to realise how much is involved in every generalisation. We shall need, in fact, a deal of detail. But to cram into the young mind a mass of min- ute knowledge concerning any one matter 140 Place of History in Education. or period can be no part of the general educative process. And we certainly do not want a lot of little facts and dates conven- tionally assumed to possess some mysterious importance. We have no time for irrelevant detail. Nor do we need little facts with a merely picturesque quality. Everywhere and always we need things of value for thought. The study of history is capable of stimu- lating, of widening and assisting thought in many ways, but it has, it may be sup- posed, a particularly direct bearing on such thinking as is devoted to matters social and political. We must not, indeed, teach history primarily with a view to throw- ing light on such matters. That is one of the things we have most carefully to avoid doing. We must keep close to the actual facts and the actual factors of the great historic process. We must, in actual teach- ing, think of the process itself, first and last. Nevertheless, in arranging our ideal historical curriculum it is only reasonable to keep in Of Educational History. 141 mind the fact that knowledge of the historic process bears upon social and political questions more directly than upon anything else. For this reason, and also because of our relative ignorance in other departments, it will be reasonable to take the history of our European civilisations as in the main our subject for teaching. Yet certainly no young person should be allowed to grow up in total ignorance of the Stone Age or of the great civilisations that grew and decayed before Rome was. The young mind should acquire a notion of these things as a back- ground for his studies of the later European history. They should, at least, loom up for him, a little shadowy and indistinct but quite real, at the far end of his vista. European history it must needs be if only in the main outlines ; we cannot possibly do with less. It is only because of a confusion of technical training, with mental training in the larger sense, that any one ever imagined that it was enough for an English- man to know something of the history of 142 Place of History in Education. England. But did any one ever actually imagine this to be true? The old notion, which still remains as a curious survival, seems to have been that an Englishman should know something of the history of England and something of that of ancient Greece and Eome. It would have been hard to say why he should study things in this discontinuous fashion. But the history of Greece and of Rome seems to have been regarded as a sort of adjunct to the study of the classical languages and literatures. Actually, of course, the study of languages and literatures is a specialised branch of history. This antiquated view of the use of history as an educational instrument seems, in fact, to involve an assertion that history, as we now understand it, is not a proper subject for teaching at all. Yet it would perhaps be better to keep to the older system rather than to teach English history and that only. "A man," people vaguely say, "ought to know something of the history of his own Of Educational History. 143 country." This proposition we do not deny, but we doubt whether he will ever know anything worth knowing about it if he knows nothing of European development as a whole. For the real fact is that no country has a history of its own at all, and there is no more such a thing as English history than there is such a thing as the Atlantic Ocean. Or are we to teach " English history" with the object of inculcating patri- otism ? On this it may be remarked that whether the scientific study of English his- tory will tend to develop patriotism is very dubious. The teaching of English history definitely from a patriotic point of view is, of course, a thing not to be tolerated. No procedure could be less scientific, and per- haps no point of view is more distorting. There has been, in the past, a great deal of this kind of thing. The struggle between England and Napoleon, for instance, has been fairly consistently represented as a struggle between good and evil, — Castle- reagh and Wellington representing the good 144 Place of History in Education. principle and Napoleon the powers of dark- ness. Nonsense of that kind is likely to be the result of looking at the historic pro- cess from a patriotic point of view ; and it is worse than nonsense, because falsehood never ends with itself. You will, if you are not very careful, find yourself engaged in the cultivation of a whole scrub of rank illusions. But if you are really very care- ful, then you will find that, perhaps insensibly, you abandon the patriotic point of view altogether. It may further be pointed out that the inculcation of patriotism is a department of moral training, not of intellectual train- ing. Indeed, if it be educative at all, it should perhaps be considered as a depart- ment of technical education. Patriotism, it is to be supposed, counts as a practically useful virtue from a social, or rather from a national, point of view. If the nation needs to teach it as such it will probably do so, but it is not the business of the teacher of history. Of Educational History. 1 45 For all this it does seem that, practically, we must teach more about the history of the English — that is, of ourselves — than about the history of other peoples. To take European history simply as our subject, and pay equal attention to all the greater European movements and peoples, would perhaps be to demand more of our teachers than we can reasonably expect ever to get. A possibly more serious objection is that if we adopt this course we shall be in danger of not getting close enough to the facts anywhere. We should have to spread our detail thinly over a very wide surface. We should be in danger of teaching a series of wide generalisations, accompanied by no such amount of detail anywhere as would suffice to vivify them to the young imagina- tion. Unless we give our pupils an imagina- tively realistic grasp of the matter taught, we shall achieve little or nothing of value. Therefore, while we try to give an idea of the main features of European development we must give a considerably more detailed K 146 Place of History in Education. account of the features of specifically English development. We may be sure that the greater detail given in this connection will help to make real for the imagination our generalisations concerning the rest of Europe. It is possible, indeed, that the time is not far off when we shall refuse to be content with anything less than a study of the main European movements, and shall refuse to dwell especially upon anything save in pro- portion to its importance for Europe at large. It may be that the present writer's sense of difficulty in dealing adequately for educa- tional purposes with European history as a whole is determined or exaggerated by some secret bias. It is so natural to find that the historjr of ourselves is more significant than the history of other people. Yet it can hardly be denied that, in a sense, it actually is so. Up to a certain point, and especially for beginners, it is more significant because it is more easily intelligible and more easily led up to. On the whole, then, reckoning details, most Of Educational History. 1 47 of the history we shall teach as part of the ordinary pass curriculum, as it were, will have to be English in some sense or degree. But we must teach our pupils to see the whole development of English life in relation to the life of Western Europe generally. All our laws, all our institutions are but specialised forms of the laws and institutions which arose in Europe on the union of the German bar- barians with the wreck of the Roman Empire. The significance and the proportions of any English development can only be seen when it is compared with analogous developments elsewhere. To look at our modern parlia- mentary system does not really help us to understand the parliamentary system of Edward I.'s time ; but we shall be helped by looking at the States General of contem- porary France. The essential thing is that the young mind should be trained to think of European, or at least of West European, history as of a single great complex growth or process, and to think of English history as a special case, 148 Place of History in Education. only ideally separable from the rest. The English people itself it must learn to think of as a thing partly but never for a moment perfectly detached, even at its period of greatest isolation. For England was and remains a detached portion of the Roman Empire. It would be quite useless to endeavour, in this place, to make out an ideal course of historical study in any detail. To do that must be the work of experience. But we can make our statement of what has to be taught rather more precise than it is so far. Chron- ologically speaking, we shall have to begin if not with Greece, then with Rome. Cer- tainly our young people ought not to grow up in total ignorance of that Athenian civil- isation which, if not definitely superior to, strikes one as having been so much more mature than our own. But while we West Europeans are only collateral heirs of Athens, we are the direct heirs of Rome. So of Rome we must know more. We do not want legends or details, but we want a notion of Of Educational History. 149 the transformations of the Roman Republic, a notion, precise and general, of the exten- sion of Roman dominion and of what it signified, some notion, at least, of what was involved in the great struggle with Carthage, and a notion of how the Roman Republic developed into the Empire. All this we want in outline only, but in vivid outline. Roman history, as it was taught, and as unhappily it still is taught, was apt to stop at the death of Julius Csesar. But for the general purposes of education not only must it not stop there, but it should, probably, become rather more detailed from that point onward. We need a fairly distinct notion of the structure and composition of the Empire, of its theory and of the nature and main principles of its law. We want a distinct notion of the radical differences between its civilisation and our own. We want, at least, some definite ideas as to the causes of its decline and the overwhelming disaster of its dissolution. We need, also, distinct notions of the development within 150 Place of History in Education. it of the Christian Church, of its ideas and tendencies, and of its position in the last days of the officially Christian Empire. In the chaotic welter that follows we must not lose sight of the code of Justinian and his destruction of the East Gothic kingdom in Italy, which, perhaps, practically saved for us the Koman law. But of the barbaric welter itself we need only the barest out- lines, and are indeed hardly in a position to give more. Yet we need a distinct notion of the great racial drifts and settle- ments of which the British conquests of Saxons and Angles is but a small item. And we want a notion of the growth of the readjusted Church, and of barbaric monarchy, and of feudalism. We must watch the young nations forming, aggre- gating, and drifting apart. It would be useless to continue in this chronological fashion. At every stage of the process we need a realistic idea of the great formative movements. We must fix our minds on economic conditions, on the Of Educational History. 1 5 1 distribution of wealth and its results upon class divisions and upon government, on the growth of trade and of towns. We must watch the evolution of law and of govern- mental agencies. We must think of such institutions and of forms of government in relation to their economic and social bases and in relation to the ideas that dominate them or that they express. We must note the growing self-consciousness of states, and of the struggle between them and the economic or other grounds of that conflict. We need to know, at least roughly, how it was that at the end of the Middle Ages England and France and Spain had strong and growing national monarchies, while Ger- many and Italy were still helplessly divided. We must trace the struggle for dominion and exploitation of the world beyond Europe that began with the first realisation of that world and is going on at this moment. In dealing with specifically English his- tory we can only proceed on the same lines, 152 Place of History in Education. being careful to establish connections at every possible point with our account of Europe in general. It is a question of the essence of the matter ; of the really big things. What are these ? Take any dif- ferentiated state you please — take the king- dom of England at any one moment — what are the most essential features of its being, and those, therefore, which it is the main business of history to trace ? An attempt to state them in a logical order would be vain, for not only do they co-exist, but they are only ideally separable. We would put first of all the economic condition of the state. We must consider the nature of the state's wealth, how it is getting its living, and who are its customers, if it has any. We must study the distribution of that wealth within the state, and very carefully. In no very long run this will be found to involve the class divisions which exist within it. In this connection, also, the system of land- ownership is often of the greatest import- ance, and this brings us to the law of real Of Educational History. 153 property. Secondly, we would point to the governmental arrangements of the state, which, we shall find, are more or less closely connected with the distribution of wealth within it. In this connection we must be careful not to be deceived by formalists or by lawyers who, mayhap, will tell us many things that are only true in a technical sense. We must distinguish between the real and the technical constitution. Very important, also, is it that we should under- stand the state's theory of itself, the political philosophy that dominates it or is expressed in its constitution. Further, in the closest connection with the governmental constitu- tion we have to consider the whole legal system of the state, and, in the largest sense, its police system. Then come the means of the state for defence and for aggression, resting mainly on the mass of its population and wealth. We must study its military system, and its relation to foreign states, and this will probably again bring us to economic conditions. Finally, 154 Place of History in Education. there falls to be considered the intellectual and moral standpoint and condition of the people, and this will include its religion. We are speaking of our imaginary state as though it were homogeneous ; but if racial lines of division exist within it, or if one part of the country have a different law from the rest, or special governmental ar- rangements, this is likely to be a very im- portant feature in the constitution of the state. Our summary does not pretend to be ex- haustive in any sense, but it is these things above all upon which we must fix attention in dealing with the history of England, or of any other country. In dealing with events there should seldom be much doubt as to what is of the first importance. A mechanical invention may be so ; the life- history of a king can hardly be. The im- portant is that which endures, or that of which the traceable effects endure from generation to generation — that is, for some considerable time. The important event is Of Educational History. 1 55 that which appears to affect the course of change in some definite direction. How much detail we can give either in connection with English or with European history is mainly a question of time. Other things being equal, the more the better. But before we can answer this question of quantity we must know how much language, how much physics, how much biology, and so on, have to be taught. It will require much experiment, and, measured by any individual life, it will take a long time to give a satisfactory answer to the question. 15^ X. OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. To the question, what kind and amount of historical knowledge is required for educative purposes, a rough and generalised answer has been given. We must now consider more definitely than we have yet done how such a course of study as has been roughly sketched would assist in the laying of foundations for sound thinking. Throughout such a course of study we should be dealing incessantly with the action of masses, whether as states or as classes or as political "parties." We ought to obtain approximately accurate notions of the nature of their action. Roughly speaking, the action of masses is determined partly by Educational Value of History. 157 motives of what is called self-interest — that is, by personal desires of various kinds, and partly by various forms of idealism, con- structive or destructive or simply conserva- tive in tendency, as the case may be. We ought to obtain a tolerably clear and accurate notion of the relation between these two sets of factors and of their relative values. In this way, too, we should obtain a fairly accurate notion of the nature of inter -state conflicts and of the causes of war. Further, we should be forced in some degree to realise the complex ways in which law and institutions grow and change, the complex ways in which religions are trans- formed and moral standards altered. We should reach a distinct sense of the inter- connection of all social phenomena, — of the bearing, for instance, of economic facts upon standards of morality and the claims of the churches. On all these matters the science of history, as it advances, will attain more and more accurate notions ; but already the study of history should at least give one 1 58 Place of History in Education. conclusions approximately correct. If history be treated from a scientific point of view the attainment of approximately correct notions on these matters is certain, and no system of history - teaching that did not look to such results would be worth any- thing. It is not a matter of European history only. The more fundamental of our generalisations concerning European history will apply, more or less accurately, to those great tracts of historic evolution of which we know little or nothing directly. Our notion of man's social evolution as a whole cannot fail to be enriched and made more precise by knowledge of the history of Europe. From our study of European history there should also finally emerge a very profound sense at once of the unity of human life through all generations and of the abso- lute continuity of change. The essentially gradual character of that continuous change will also, it may be added, become more and more apparent. We need and we shall Educational Value of History. 1 59 get the sense of a vast growth continuing, of a connected mass of being, continuously, inevitably, gradually changing from moment to moment. A too exclusive study of history might possibly result in an exaggerated sense of the instability of things human. The student, it might be, would seem to him- self to be living in a world where nothing is at all, a world where what he calls his thoughts are but a phase of the thought of some other being, where his personal action has no significance save for some future which is not his. In this mood he would remember with a shock that that future, when it comes, will be equally so transitory as to be unreal. Yet to such a mood as this history itself supplies a cor- rective, since it tells of continuity as well as of change. But there will certainly emerge and remain a profound sense of the instability of all the most apparently estab- lished things. This sense is of high value for thought. It saves one from bein^ 160 Place of History in Education. hypnotised by the crude self-assertion of the dominant. To remember, to know al- ways that all the solid -looking, triumphant, awe-inspiring things — Church and State and nationality, thrones, dominions, and princi- palities — are but passing phases of a process, is to have grasped an emancipating fact. If our conception of man's evolution as a whole becomes more accurate and more justly proportioned through the study of history, this cannot fail to have an im- portant effect on all the larger speculations in which we may indulge. The study of history is or may be one of the avenues of approach to that synthetic philosophy of the universe as it touches man's under- standing, which is the final goal of the intellect. There are many such avenues, and this is one of them. It does not go the whole way, and it is not a short cut. None of them go the whole way, and there are no short cuts. Putting the larger speculation aside, it is quite clear that any r eal knowledge of hist ory Educational Value of History. 161 should help us with all those speculations and inquiries which tur n upon matt ers social and political. Such knowledge should enable us finally to rid ourselves of many supersti- tions, — of modern superstitions concerning authorities and majorities as well as of antique, surviving superstitions concerning nobility and claims of right. It will help us to reckon progress from the Stone Age instead of from the day before yesterday. It will help us to separate the idea of progress from the idea of mechanical achievement and from any particular forms of progress which happen to be immediately familiar to us. It will assist in altogether destroying the ludicrous superstition of our own immense superiority as compared with those who have gone before. It should assist us in dealing with the churches and their various claims. It should help us in dealing with all ethical questions. It will show us institutions in the light of their origin. It will take us, to some extent, behind the scenes of current politics. I do not mean that it L 1 62 Place of History in Education. will let us into the futile secrets and intrigues of politicians beyond the reach of the press. These are not worth the knowing. But it will teach us to look for, and will he lp us' to see clas s interests and party interests behind all the talk about rights and wrongs^ It will set all claims of right before us in the light of all the old claims that are dead and all but forgotten. It should help us to see all social facts in a due proportion ; to see parliamentary pro- ceedings in their real relation to the great continuous movement that goes on apart from politics. It should help us to see government as a power of interference rather than as a creative power. And through the mental training obtained from the study of history on right lines we ought to be able to approach all political and social questions with at least some degree of intellectual detachment. Our training should at least help us to think of such questions without petty and irrele- vant passion. Our knowledge should give Educational Value of History. 163 us a sense of the insignificance of our own particular interests, and help us to see in these questions a reference to something larger than our own lives and larger than the lives of all our contemporaries of a moment. Our training and our knowledge should make impossible for us the ludicrous assumption that, of two parties in the stat e, one is actuated by the highest motives, by lofty public spirit and care for the oppressed, and the other by motives merely greedy and mean and self-regard- ing. The frequency with which such an assumption as this is met with in our present political conflicts is one of the surest signs of our general lack of a decent education. When we have reached intel- lectual freedom and honesty, and know what we do not know, and refuse to deceive our- selves with half-truths, and when we have realised the difficulty of all these questions, then only shall we be able to adopt a sane point of view in regard to them. It may, indeed, be said with assurance 164 Place of History in Education. that, altogether apart from the acquisition of knowledge, history affords excellent training - ground for the mind. There is no menta l discipline more libe rating than the being forced to realise a multiplicity of points of view, and to realise, further, how largely opinion is determined by circumstance. These things history forces us incessantly to do. Mathematics takes us into a world of pure reason, and it is good to be there ; but that world is so far removed from the human world that we may spend much time in it and never bring back intellectual freedom. History keeps us in the human world and yet takes us altogether away from our circumstantial surroundings. It tends, thus, to break down the barriers which these surroundings build against our progress. Again, any serious effort to reach or to apprehend historical truth imposes on us intellectual honesty for the time being, forces us to think in masses, in averages, and centuries, forces on us a sense of the extreme Educational Value of History. 165 complexity of every social phenomenon, forces on us a habit of weighing evidence and of suspending judgment, compels us to analyse and to be logical, and constantly to endeavour to draw a sharp line between what we know and what we do not know. We are brought up by the idea of a possible objection. "Would our course of history prove dull to the taught? To the dull all things are dull ; but that is not the question. Would it be dull to the average mind in the long-run ? Are we assuming, as a basis for our teaching, an intellectuality that does not exist? There is drudgery and drag in all learning : but it is not a question of any occasional or local dulness. Again, it may be pointed out that at present the human mind is inclined to rebel against any training or instruction which does not seem of direct practical usefulness. The charge of dulness is likely to be brought against any subject the end of the teaching of which is not 1 66 Place of History in Education. immediately obvious. It is likely to be brought not so much by scholars as by uneducated parents. The demand for merely technical education is enormously strong. But this is simply a thing that we have to fight. The intellect is there : our business is to educate it into intellectuality. Rebellion against intellectual training is a thing to which no quarter must be given. There is a notion abroad that education should be a pleasant process. So, indeed, it should, and it is for us to make it so. But it must not be made so by any concessions to the adversary. There exists a certain tendency towards the development of a school in which work has become play and play work, in which learning is cultivated in a gentle- manly manner, so far as cricket allows, in which the boys are provided with hot- house fruit and billiard tables, in which there is no real insistence on any but the lowest possible standard of learning and no insistence whatever on the life of the intellect. If any such school actually exists Educational Value of History. 167 its speedy destruction is a thing worth working for. But when all this has been said we still have not answered the question, would our course of history be dull ? It must be admitted without reservation that a subject incapable of arousing interest in any but a few minds is absolutely worthless as an instrument of general education. The mind gains little or nothing from mere drudgery, and what little may be gained is gained at enormous expense. There is always time wasted in doing what one does not wish to do. Nor will the mind ever really under- stand a subject in which it feels no interest. But is history, of the quality I have tried to indicate, such a subject ? There are, perhaps, minds to whom human life is un- interesting. They are certainly not average minds ; nor are they the minds of children. History of any kind deals essentially with human life. It is not as though we were to deal in mere generalisations. To do so would be to fail utterly of any purpose. It 1 68 Place of History in Education. is the evolution in the real life of the past of the real life of the present that history deals with. In every possible way the teacher must drive home the actuality of his subject. He must read human nature into every legal technicality. It is always there. If in one sense our sketch of European history be a mere sketch, and though it be drawn by science and not by art, will it not, nevertheless, work out to a fine piece of pageantry ? The wreck of an empire, the fusion of races, the struggle for order, the wars of classes, the conflict among the nations for wealth and expansion, the broadening of the stream of life, the advance of knowledge, the conflict of idealisms, the movement towards wider and wider co-operation, it makes, surely, no mean a piece. It is the very essence of the pageant that we wish to present. Even though we leave to others the moral commentary and present the thing from no sesthetic standpoint, it must surely appeal to the dullest imagination. What has sometimes made history a dull subject Educational Value of History, 1 69 is the cramping of its teaching by unintelli- gent restrictions and stupid demands, — the restriction, for instance, to English history and the demand for unrelated and insignifi- cant facts. Properly taught it could hardly be dull except to the very dull, It will help to satisfy every kind of intellectual curiosity concerning the things of the social order in which we live. It will not only give new meaning to our institutions and to our law, it will give interest and significance to every one of our old villages that are written in Domesday, and to almost every road and field in England. 170 XI. OF THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY— MORAL. What can be done with history as an instru- ment of moral training ? What will actually be done in any particular case depends on the teacher; but what is it that should be done? The inculcation of useful habits, it has been pointed out, is a branch of techni- cal education. Be punctual — you will find it pay: tell the truth — it generally pays: be considerate of the claims of other people — it pays in the long-run. The teaching of history as such has nothing to do with this sort of thing. Nor can history have much say in the matter, even indirectly. " History," said Henry St John, " is philosophy teaching by examples how to conduct ourselves in all Value of History — Moral. 1 7 1 the situations of private and public life." There are, truly, examples of every kind of conduct, attended by many very different kinds of results, to be found in history. What philosophy has to say to it all is not so clear. You might, no doubt, instance Frederick the Great as an admir- able example of punctual attention to busi- ness : you can hardly call him as a witness to the practical utility of truthfulness. The question is whether history, as a scholastic or academic " subject," can and should be made an instrument of a moral training not merely technical. Such train- ing or teaching must have reference to something beyond the mere needs of the student. It must refer to society and to the future. Not only so, but if it has reference only to immediate social needs as interpreted or conceived by government, it is probable that no honest history -teaching will b e_consistent~witK it. 5s an illustration of what is meant, an order issued by the German Emperor to the government schools 172 Place of History in Education. of Germany in the year 1889 may be quoted. After laying down that the school teaching of history should "show that the power of the State alone can protect the individual's family, freedom, and rights," it continues as follows: "It must also bring the youth to recognise how Prussia's kings have exerted themselves to better the conditions of the working classes in a continuous development, from the legal reforms of Frederick the Great and from the abolition of serfdom to the present day. Moreover, the school must show by means of statistics how considerably and how constantly in this century the wages and the condition of the working classes have improved under mon- archical protection." It is quite needless to criticise this pro- nouncement specifically. It is quoted merely to illustrate the danger that state teachers may be required to uphold the interests of some governing class, to maintain some particular form of government or some par- ticular system of political thought. This is Value of History — Moral. 173 a danger inherent in all systems of state education. It may exist equally under a democratic as under an autocratic govern- ment. Quite clearly it does not matter whether an order of the kind quoted he issued by an Emperor or by a County Council. In either case it is equally an offence to intellectual honesty and to the cause of truth. It is hardly necessary to deal with vague current talk of the elevating influence of hero - worship or of enthusiasm about this cause or that. There are weightier pronounce- ments. Lord Acton laid it down that the main end of the study of history is the development of the moral judgment and the deepening of the sense of moral law. Bishop Stubbs says that one, at least, of the most important results to be obtained through the study of history is the attain- ment of a "perception of the workings of the Almighty Ruler of the world," a recog- nition of " a hand of justice and mercy, a hand of progress and order, a kind and wise 1 74 Place of History in Education. disposition, ever leading the world on to the better but never forcing, and out of the evil of man's working, bringing continually that which is good." It is not necessary here to analyse these views or to go into the difference be- tween them. They are extremely interesting views, and they may be correct ; but we do not know that they are. They appear to involve propositions we are not in a position to prove, and certainly must not assume. We might, indeed, adopt Lord Acton's view in the pious hope that our course of historical study would, indeed, deepen the sense of moral law in the minds of our students. But if we adopted that of Bishop Stubbs, or if we deliberately tried through the teaching of history to deepen the sense of any particular moral law, we should be putting a strain on our present knowledge greater than it will bear. We should lose our intellectual honesty, and with that all hope of arriving at truth. We are confronted again with this trouble- Value of History — Moral. 175 some question of what sort of moral training is wanted. The deplorable fact is that we really do not know. Personally, you may be inclined to think that you do know ; but when you analyse your opinion it will probably resolve itself partly into personal likes and dislikes of which you can give no account, and partly into ethical theories which are disputable. The actual " morals," as distinct from the ethics, of a people at any one time may be regarded as made up partly of qualities, partly of habits, partly of theories of duty, partly of fear of other people or their opinions, and partly of notions as to what is worth having in life. Moreover, both the theoretic and the actual " morality " of a people are involved with all manner of arrangements that can only be regarded as temporary, — laws of property, for instance, and laws of marriage. How is it proposed to affect all this through the teaching of history ? What sort of a moral- ity is it that you want taught? Is it an ethical theory ? Is it a standard of con- 176 Place of History in Education. duct? What history will show is that e thical theories and stan dards of conduct a like change and pa ss away. Desire is king, and is self-centred. It is a question, finally, of the quality of desire and the direction of the will. If we can do something to make the will intelligent, we shall probably do for morality in the larger sense all that we can hope or reason- ably wish to do. If a man's desires are mean, so will his conduct be. But mean desires are to some extent dependent upon a lack of the sense of proportion, and upon an unintelligent estimate of values. In this direction j jie study of history should do something for us. It should, at least, help us to get rid of any overweening estimate of our own importance. It should help to make the simply selfish life seem both petty and ridiculous. By pointing always to large issues and large results, by insist- ing on human life as a complex whole, it should counteract the tendency to bury our lives in the merely personal. It should Value of History — Moral. 177 crucify pitilessly against an enormous back- ground the meanness of all mean things. It should widen our sympathies along with _our understanding. There is one other thing that may be done or aimed at. Analysis ought to show us, in time, what are the moral qualities that make for national success. At every turn we are forced to consider this question in one case or another. We are forced to consider the moral element in a victory in war or in a struggle between two states, lasting, perhaps, for centuries, or in the decline of an empire. So far as we can arrive at positive conclusions of general ap- plication as to the qualities that make for success among peoples and at the historical meaning of moral degeneration, we shall arrive at conclusions of some ethical value. There can be no doubt that we ought to insist on such conclusions when we have arrived at them : only it behoves us to be extremely cautious how we conclude. There are pitfalls on every side along this narrow M 1 78 Place of History in Education. path. We must be on guard against all current and conventional assumptions, and equally against our personal likes and dis- likes. We must-~deal very faithfully. We must be quite prepared to accept con- clusions that shock our moral sense, — the conclusion, for instance, that victory in a given case was largely due to the ferocious egotism of the victors and the brutality of their disregard of other people's claims. If we set up a moral law and then look for its working in history, we shall reach conclu- sions of no value whatever. Connected with this search for the moral factors in national success is a certain danger. National success may be measured by survival limit, by secur- ity, by wealth, by the realisation of national ideals, by achievement in art or in science. If any of these be used as a measure of individual success, what becomes of moral- ity? We cannot teach that being good in any accepted sense always pays, or that what pays is good. The clanger is, of course, greatest in dealing with children. Value of History — Moral. 1 79 We can hardly do worse for our children, morally, than to teach them to measure goodness by success in any ordinary sense, or in any sense that the word can bear in history. If we dare to do so we shall, no doubt, be giving, in the strict sense, moral instruction. In the restricted sense such instruction will be immoral. i8o XII. CONCERNING DIFFERENCE OF SEX. So far we have assumed throughout that, technical teaching apart, the education of women should proceed on the same lines as that of men. What right have we to make this assumption ? It is argued that the mind of woman differs profoundly from that of man ; that her natural interests are different from those of a man, and that it will prove impossible to arouse in her efficient interest in the courses of study which effici- ently interest men. It is argued further that as woman's social functions differ radically from man's, so not merely her technical education but her education in the fuller sense should be conducted differently. Society, not only now but in the future, Concerning Difference of Sex. 181 demands from women work different from that it demands from men, and hence must demand a different training for its women. In respect of the teaching of history, a dis- tinction is already made in the government schools of Germany. In the German high schools or secondary schools for girls, what we roughly call political history is either not taught at all or is taught very sketchily. Girls, it appears, are not expected to acquire any knowledge of international relations or even of constitutional history. Political history, it appears, is only to be "touched upon in broad lines, as ... it conduces to the awakening of a warm and personal interest in great and active peoples and nations, their fate and their works." What precisely this means is not very clear ; but it seems that girls are supposed to be concerned with the history of literature and of art, with religious and moral ideas, and with "national and domestic customs," whatever that may exactly include. The distinctions involved seem superficial and indeed arbitrary. It 1 82 Place of History in Education. is needless to criticise them in detail, but they do not seem to be distinctly related to any real difference between the minds of men and of women. I may be allowed to say that, in my experience, so far as women show special aptitude for any special de- partment of history it is for the economic and constitutional aspects of the subject. Eoughly, the German idea seems to be that women are concerned to know something about the social life of peoples, but are not concerned to know anything about their political life. This appears to involve the assertion that they are not to study evolu- tion at all, and do not need any precise notion of development even in social life. For otherwise it is quite impossible to maintain the distinction. In any case, however, the important thing is that the distinction is made at all. The question is a quite serious one, and if we in England have not yet taken it quite seriously, that does not mean that we may not be doing so before long. Possibly Concerning Difference of Sex. 1 83 it only means that we have not really as yet paid much serious attention to the question of a national educational system. It is impossible here to argue the question at length, but it may be worth while to adduce a few considerations in connection with it. In the first place it may be pointed out that much of the objection to the edu- cation of men and women on the same lines seems to arise from a confusion between "technical education" and the truly educa- tive process. In regard to the former there is obviously a strong case or rather an imperative need for some differential treat- ment of girls and boys. But when the distinction between the two kinds of edu- cation is clearly realised it will probably be seen that, unless all education is to be essentially " technical," the assertion that women should be educated, in the larger sense, on different lines from men is an assertion that cannot rationally be maintained. Only one does not feel quite sure that 1 84 Place of History in Education. things are really moving in this direction. We do not seem to have made up our minds as to what we want women to be and to do in our coming civilisation. If men were to make up their minds on this point in one way and women in another, there would, of course, be a struggle. Such a struggle, however limited, would be dis- astrous, if only because the victors would not gain what they wanted but something different. What does the assertion of . difference between man's mind and woman's mean ? It is quite incredible that the difference is radical. After all, a man has a mother and a woman a father. Such differences as exist on an average look like differences of detail and of degree. As to the total difference between the sexes it is surely quite great enough in the nature of things. There is no need to emphasise and develop it artificially, even if we do not rather desire to minimise it. Again, what is the meaning of the argument based on difference of social function ? No one denies Concerning Difference of Sex. 185 the difference, but how does it bear on the educative process ? If the right end of that process is provision of a basis for sound thinking, are we going to say that we do not want women to think at all ? We want them, in that case, just to fit themselves into the system provided by men's thinking. Then the conclusion is clear. The education of women must be "technical" only, and the more empirical in character the better. But who in the world wants this ? Can it be conceived that this is what the coming civilisation will want? All this talk about difference of function necessitating a radical difference of education seems to rest finally on a conception of men and women as things hopelessly divided ; whereas, in truth, we are all parts of each other. We may return, provisionally, to our original assumption. The education that is good enough for women will be just good enough for men. If men had any really radical objection to the intellectual education of women, that would be practically a very serious matter. 1 86 Place of History in Education. But those who think they have are probably under an illusion. It was reported not long ago in the newspapers that at an Oxford Union debate some one declared that if women were given the parliamentary fran- chise women would be utterly destroyed. Presumably the speaker attached some pe- culiar meaning to the word woman, which seems an odd thing to do. But one has heard a good deal of the prospect of this or that destroying the attractiveness of women from men's point of view. But on this point we may put our trust in nature, — that attrac- tiveness has its roots far deeper than any of our modes of thought or any of our social arrangements. i8 7 XIII. THE INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL STUDY. The course of historical study which we have very roughly sketched is to include the history of Europe, is to have very special reference to England, but is not to ignore ancient Athens or even the Stone Age. It is to be scientific in character. It should, ideally, begin in the primary schools and end in the university. We have now to consider the question how such a course should be started. Is history to form part of the curriculum in primary schools, and if so in what form ? If not, is there to be any sort of preliminary teaching leading up to the teaching of history proper? In most of its aspects the course as a 1 88 Place of History in Education. whole will be non-moral. Its ethical value will, perhaps, mainly consist in helping to establish proportions and values. The student will learn to look at things in the mass and to refer action to its remoter consequences. He will be gently assisted to realise his own insignificance socially, and at the same time to realise how com- pletely all his action merges in a result. He will see progress in the making. He will perhaps indirectly be brought to form new ideas as to what matters and what does not matter, as what is worth having and what is not. But all this clearly belongs to a relatively late stage of the course. We can- not begin by using history as a vehicle for the moral instruction of the child. Beginnings are generally difficult. It seems clear that if we start teaching any sort of formal history to a child under four- teen, we shall be teaching what will be to the child unintelligible rubbish. We shall be assuming the existence in the child's mind of what either is not there at all or exists Introduction to Historical Study. 189 too vaguely to be brought iuto connection with our narrative. If we try to tell the history of England to a child as a story, it will be a dull story and almost meaningless. It will be a story about nothing in particular. Moreover, we shall find it very difficult to make any statement relevant to our main purpose and at once true and intelligible. Suppose we are talking about what used to be called the Heptarchy. We cannot tell the child that a number of little kingdoms existed in England without explaining what we mean by a "kingdom." What notion will the child form of the king? Will he think of the king as a man sitting on a throne with a crown on his head, occasion- ally giving orders about nothing in particular and surrounded by persons in reverential attitudes? Clearly this will not do. But how are we to explain the king ? We shall, perhaps, find ourselves telling stories about particular kings, who will just be grown-up people, their kingship being a mysterious and ornamental something, linking them 190 Place of History in Education. vaguely with King Edward VII. But the important thing about a king is, as a rule, not his personality but — if one may use the word in an unusual sense — his kingliness. The important thing about him is the things he is legally entitled to do, the things he is expected to do, the things he takes to be his rights or duties, the ideas other people have about his claims, his property, and the nature of the hold he has on his subjects. All this makes up his " kingliness," and if we do not explain this, the word " king " is nonsensical. And how are we to explain this to any young child ? Are we going to start by telling the child stories ? It is, no doubt, possible to interest children by telling them more or less true stories about personages absurdly called "historical"; and in doing so you may succeed in conveying to the child mind the notion of real people who lived a long time ago. But except so far as by telling such stories you can help the child to a sense of time and of change, it is not clear Introduction to Historical Study. 191 what you hope to effect in the way of preparation for an understanding of history. You are in some danger, too, of planting in the child's mind the notion that history is essentially concerned with individual struggles and exploits. You will not even have the satisfaction of telling good stories. Histori- cal stories are not, as a rule, good stories for children. They imply too much and convey too little. They are either too thin or they are incomprehensible. Fairy stories are much better and probably less misleading. If it were only a question of how to stim- ulate the child's imagination you might, indeed, do as certain teachers are actually now doing and tell stories now about histori- cal heroes, and now from Spenser's Faerie Queene. But it is a question of how to arouse the imagination in a particular direc- tion, and of how to prepare the child's mind to deal with those aspects of human life with which history deals. Your stories of historical heroes will only have a remote bearing upon historical questions, and your 192 Place of History in Education. stories from the Faerie Queene will have none at all. It is, nevertheless, possible that very young children should make acquaintance with history through such stories and only through such stories ; and it is possible that, in some slight degree and very indirectly, these may help to prepare their minds for the history that is to come later. But it seems clear that they ought not to be allowed to associate such stories with any- thing called "history." They should asso- ciate them rather with the Faerie Queene. Whatever value such " historical " stories may have for them it cannot consist mainly in their being in any sense preparatory to a history course. If it be of little use to tell the child more or less true stories and of no use at all to start with any sort of narrative account of English history, are we to wait till the child is fourteen or so and then take the plunge into a regular history course ? Something like this is what, in very many cases, we actually do. Introduction to Historical Study. 193 Children are put into technical history with- out any sort of formal preparation, and they " learn " it for some years without even finding out what it is all about. No one who has acted as a history examiner in the matriculation examinations of London University can have much doubt of our need of some course of teaching introductory to and preparatory for our history course. We ought to make a start by giving the child some notion of the subject-matter of history. In the largest sense this is simply the whole past life of humanity considered as an evolution. Therefore, in the logical order, we need first of all to develop the sense of past time, and then of great changes in that past. But we should be doing this along with something else. If nothing less than the past life of humanity forms the subject- matter of history, yet what history has most specifically to deal with is the life of societies as such, the life of states, the life of institutions and of law, the life of N 194 Place of History in Education. classes, the life of trade and of knowledge. To all this the child needs an introduction. We have to present to the child an aspect of human life, and we cannot do so all at once. What we first of all have to do is to make real for the child the elements of the historical course, the elements, that is, of social and political life. It sounds as though it might be very difficult to do this, and perhaps it is. The question is not whether it be difficult, but whether it be possible. It is worth while •to point out that in the national schools of Belgium they are actually trying the ex- periment of beginning just in this way. You take a class of little boys or girls. " What is your father ? " the teacher will ask one of them, and with some trouble the fact is elicited that the father is a blacksmith. Then follow questions as to what that means, and important facts are sot at. The child's father shoes horses and so on for other people, and takes money for what he gives, and with money Introduction to Historical Study. 195 buys food and other things necessary to keep the family going. In a very short time we have got to the economic basis of our social structure without using any of these formidable words; and we are getting at that ancient unit of social structure, the family. There follow questions as to the mother's position in the family business. There will probably have to be a good deal of experiment before we can determine the precisely right method of working on these lines. But in the opinion of the present writer the Belgians are on the right track, and the sooner we begin ex- perimenting the better. Take an English village child of any class you please as a simple case. The first thing that ought to be doue by way of preparation for a real teaching of history is to give that child an idea of the village as a community or society in little. It is a business of estab- lishing essential facts and connections. We need not look too closely. There are many things we cannot explain, and if we do 196 Place of History in Education. our teaching well there will be many ques- tions asked that we cannot answer intel- ligibly. As soon, for instance, as we reach the family we get things impossible to ex- plain ; and yet a notion even of marriage, as a partnership the conditions of which are to some extent settled by law, can be given. Through the everyday life, some- thing of which the child sees, we get to money and work and wages and rent. We define the notion of property. We must be careful at first to avoid intricacy, and we may even be obliged to suggest what is not true, though, of course, doing so as little as possible. All the first steps will be slow ; but the fundamental facts are not really difficult of apprehension. We shall come in time to the government of the village. In a certain English village a class of little girls was once asked the question, "Who governs the country?" The answer unanimously given was, " The king." " But," insisted the teacher, " who governs under the king ? " This question puzzled some of Introduction to Historical Study. 1 97 the children, but from others the answer came pat : " The policeman." It was quite a good answer, and we too when we come to government should begin with the village policeman. All the buildings, roads, institutions, and personages of the village are object-lessons. We shall come to the church and the parson, the post-office and the village coun- cil. Even the squire will be useful in ex- plaining the nature of property and rent. Very soon we shall, by means of the roads, be establishing connection with the nearest market-town. There, if not earlier, we shall meet the railway. All our roads, mental and physical, will finally lead us to London, and London we shall exhibit as the distant centre where post-office, roads, railways, and policemen all meet. We shall reach the idea of a large community that includes the village, and the idea of a central direct- ing power. From the policeman we can reach the king by way of justices of the peace and the assize town. It might, in- 198 Place of History in Education. deed, be very difficult to teach on these lines but that we should have under our eyes all the things which we begin to teach about. Along with all this we should try to work in the idea of the past and of change. We should not, in the early stages, make any attempt to go far back. We, in the year 1909, are in some respects very favourably situated for bringing home the idea of change to the minds of our children. Only some eighty years ago, in the lifetime of the child's grandfather, there were no rail- ways. That simple fact alone should help us a good deal. We ought to be able easily to lead the child's mind from that to other connected changes in those eighty years. So, gradually, we can feel our way towards a remoter past and vaster differ- ences. In doing this, also, we shall find things in or near the village to help us. Even if our village church be a new one there will be old churches, old houses, within walking distance. Iutrodtictiou to Historical Study. 199 Once we have implanted the idea of a very long past and of change upon change, century after century, we can begin telling stories that will mean something. If, at the same time, the child is being grounded in Iaii2;ua2;e and in the bare elements of physics, and from his science teacher has been getting at the notion of a very remote past in which even the animals and plants were different, and has been learning some- thing of really elementary geography, we shall have laid, finally, a good foundation for strictly historical and, indeed, for all other kinds of teaching. At about the age of fourteen, if not earlier, we ought to be able to begin teaching our children history proper — that is, the history of all those social arrangements about which they have been learning all this time. In the case of the children of our great cities this sociological preparatory course is not, perhaps, quite so simple a matter. These great cities are so complex and pre- suppose so much. Yet the difficulty is only 200 Place of History in Education. one of degree. And in London, at all events, the teacher will have advantages denied to every teacher elsewhere. For here he has, under the eyes of his children, the outward and visible signs of all the central things — Houses of Parliament, Gov- ernment offices, the Bank of England, as well as magnificent monuments of the past from Westminster Abbey downwards. It may further be remarked that, even if we occupied all the time up to the age of fourteen with this sort of instruction, and then stopped and so never got to formal history -teaching at all, this would be in- finitely better than the attempt to teach history without any sort of introduction. For we should have given the child some- thing worth having in itself, and infinitely more educative than a knowledge of the names of a number of kings and other distinguished persons, with their "dates," and some excessively vague notion of their doings. When we do begin to teach history we Introduction to Historical Study. 201 shall be able to start on right lines, already implied in our preparatory course. The child will really know what it is all about. He will realise that he is being taught about the way real people lived and managed their common affairs in his own country a long time ago. He will see it first of all as the story of his own community in the past. The idea of causation should be introduced as early as possible, but there must be no premature insistence on it. The first sketch given of English history should be a sketch of the main course of change with regard to sequence in time but with little insistence on causation. It is essentially, of course, all a matter of causal connections, but we must first give a roughly accurate outline of what has to be explained. It is possible that the ideally best first course in English history for a village child would concern itself mainly with the history of the village, and for a town child with that of the town. In any case, and without doubt, it should at every step 202 Place of History in Education. try to make the child realise what the central government and its revolutions meant to the village. We certainly should not begin by concentrating attention on those far - away beings, the central authorities. We want the child to know, as far as possible, what the West Saxon king meant to the West Saxon village. We do not in the least want him to know whether a particular king obtained his position by murdering his brother or otherwise. We want him to have some clear notion of the distribution of property in the settlements of the Saxons and of their modes of justice. We do not need to make much use of legends about Hengest and Horsa. We want the child to have an idea of what the establishment of the Christian Church involved, and to learn something of the bishop and his monasterium, and of how things altered and of how the village church came at last to be built. But just as it is the kingliness of the king that we want and not the king himself, so also we want not Introduction to Historical Study. 203 the bishop but his episcopacy. We do not need chatter about Augustine or Paulinus. We do not need to refer to these people at all except as aids to the imagination. We must fix the minds of the children not on a few people here and there but on the common life and the great changes of it. At every step we should make all possible use not only of illustrative tales, which may be very useful, but of such monuments of the past as lie scattered over our yet un- spoiled country. We can only at this stage get a bare outline ; but we want a good large comprehensive outline first of all. Later we shall have to go over it all again with more detail and more explanations. That filling in should commence after we have begun to deal with European history as a whole. 204 XIV. A FINAL DIFFICULY: THE POINT OF VIEW. History has this special disadvantage as a subject for teaching, that the personal phil- osophy of the teacher and his social, political, or religious opinions bear upon the subject taught. The teacher, say, of geometry, faces no such difficulty. Whatever his religious opinions may be they have no relation to the properties of a circle. But our ideas of good and evil, our ideas of what is supremely important for individuals or for societies, determine our ideas of progress and so to a considerable extent the view we take of the past life of man. We cannot get away from ourselves, and if we have a philosophy or a religion we must needs see A Final Difficulty. 205 the human past in the light of it. It may fairly be argued that by making an effort to divest ourselves of our real beliefs in dealing with history we shall merely be making an absurd pretence, and shall end either by telling our pupils what we believe to be untrue or by telling them nothing at all. It is mere nonsense to say that we should simply describe things as they were, for this is the very question : how were they ? Clearly we cannot answer this question by any array of figures and names. This subjective difficulty is evidently a serious one for every historical teacher and writer. To say this is not to say that it constitutes an equally serious obstacle to the progress of historical science. It is conceiv- able that the long continued study of history will gradually eliminate all errors arising from the interference of personal opinion : though, indeed, this sounds rather like saying that the errors of oue writer will be corrected by the errors of others. But for the moment we may leave the larger question aside. For 206 Place of History in Education. the individual teacher, in the present state of knowledge, there is a serious difficulty, and the nature of it must be made clear. History deals not with static things, like ideal circles, but with action and movement. We cannot be content to know only the cause of movement; we want also to know its direction. Everywhere in history the mind seeks for signs of advance in some sense and on the other hand for signs of retrogression or decay. It cannot be asserted that the search for such signs is not an his- torical inquiry. But in all such inquiries it is impossible to eliminate the personal and unhistorical opinions of the inquirer. He can only state what he sees. Whatever exactly be his theory of progress he can only apply it. If his philosophy show him pro- gress in this or that direction, it will be worse than useless falsification for him to pretend that he does not see it. And it may well be that no one, either on historical or on any other grounds, can convict him of error. So w r e reach rival views of the A Final Difficulty. 207 same facts, each of which may or may not be correct. Again, the importance of any fact may be said to vary with the point of view of him who sees it. In surveying the same group of correlated facts one writer w T ill emphasise this part of the group, another that. One writer will see the key of the problem here and another there. The relative values of the different features of the group, the perspective of the group as a whole, will alter according as the point of view is Cath- olic or Protestant, aristocratic or democratic or what not. And it will be impossible to determine the amount of truth or error in each of the resulting and rival presenta- tions without first determining all manner of big and unhistorical questions. It might be argued that, to judge of the truth of any particular view of any particular period of history, we need a complete synthetic philosophy of the universe. The teacher may, of course, try in practice to distinguish between what is generally re- 208 Place of History in Education. cognised as knowledge and what is not. He may say : Thus and thus it was, and more- over, thus and thus it seems to me to have been. In advanced teaching this must always be done. But in elementary teaching, where it is, perhaps, most needed, the distinction may be difficult to make clear. It is as well to commence inquiry into the nature of this difficulty by overstating it, as is done here. But the difficulty itself requires illustration, though, indeed, all the history books yet written are illustrations of it in some degree. In spite of this fact, I have resolved to try, by means of an illustration, to bring out sharply the extent and the kind of difference in the presenta- tion of correlated facts that may be made by an alteration of the point of view. To do this I shall take what is called the Keformation and treat it in a very summary fashion from three different points of view in turn. These three summary presenta- tions that follow are not, it may be said, intended to be minutely accurate any more A Final Difficulty. 209 than they are intended to be exhaustive. They are intended to illustrate the kind of exaggerations, the kind of understatements, the kind of omissions consequent on the adoption of unscientific points of view, as well as the more profound discrepancies arising from difference in the point of view. They are intended, however, to be plausible. This much may be added by way of pre- face. This process of trying to see things now from one point of view and now from another is a necessary process in historical thinking. Only it must be undertaken deliberately and honestly, and you must start by making it quite clear to yourself what assumptions are involved in each point of view taken. The endeavour to do so will tend to clarify all your thought. The greatest danger of thought is the presence of unrecognised assumptions ; its greatest difficulty is the detection and definition of them. 2IO XV. ILLUSTRATION OF THE DIFFICULTY. THE PREFORMATION (a). What we call the English Reformation of the sixteenth century had its definite begin- nings in the fourteenth. Whatever social and intellectual service the earlier Church had rendered, the Church of the fourteenth century, at least in England, had already become an obstructive organisation of privi- lege and superstition. The clergy formed a highly privileged class. Their crimes could not be punished by the methods of common law, and in fact were not punished in an adequate manner : their property was sacred to an extraordinary degree. Through its special courts the Church exercised a legal power of interference with ordinary lay life. Illustration of the Difficulty. 2 1 1 It claimed that its excommunication created a kind of outlawry, and whether the state practically recognised this or not, its ex- communication might be held to invalidate a marriage or a will. Questions concerning the validity of marriages and of wills were decided in the courts of the Church by a law over which neither king nor Parliament had any control. The canon lawyers had elaborated a law of marriage which made it at once dangerously easy to contract a marriage and noxiously difficult to contract one that could not be invalidated. It was a system that produced a maximum of inconvenience and injustice, and served no obvious purpose save that of drawing busi- ness to the Church courts. Already the ecclesiastical jurisdiction was detested, and already the immunities of the clergy had begun to seem absurd. The Church was rich and its wealth was ill -distributed and ill-applied. Most of it was in the hands of bishops and chapters and a few great monasteries. The Church had, indeed, failed 2 1 2 Place of History in Education. to establish its claim to immunity from taxation ; but it was generally believed that it escaped its proper share of the burden. The bishops were practically secular mag- nates, living in luxury, grasping, sometimes, at power and wealth, statesmen, perhaps, or great builders or patrons of learning — anything rather than Christian pastors. And the prelates of the Church tended to become identified with the great baronial families. The Church was fast losing that democratic quality which, in the earlier middle ages, it to some extent possessed, and which helps to account for its earlier popularity. It was becoming more and more difficult for the poorly born man to rise high in the world by taking orders. The doctrinal system of the Church was already threadbare. It was tending to become a system in which personal religion disappeared in a system of sacramental forms. The believer's part was to conform, the Church's part to save him. The Church possessed a monopoly of the saving grace of God and dispensed it Illustration of the Diffictdty \ 213 for the profit of the clergy. The whole system was bound up with doctrines having no foundation either in reason or in the Bible. More and more, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Church doctrine took forms calculated to draw money from the faithful. The late doctrine of the treasury of merits, the consequent late development of the doctrine of indulgence, received the approval of papal practice for obvious reasons. More and more frankly the Church traded on superstition. And while the doctrinal system of the Church was being thus degraded, its authorities were en- deavouring more systematically than ever to suppress thought and to silence criticism. They set their faces against translations of the Bible into the living vernaculars at the very time when Latin was ceasing to be a living language. Above and behind all this is the Pope, immersed in petty French or Italian interests, now the tool of the King of France, now a triple-headed monster, and always, from the English point of view, 214 Place of History in Education. an interfering foreigner. He claims and he actually has the last word on many ques- tions that concern the lives of English people. He claims to be able to present to English benefices and to tax the English clergy. At best he is the head of an alien jurisdiction, the champion of clerical privi- lege : at worst he is John XXIII. or Alexander VI. So the English Reformation began with the statutes of provisors, the attempt to restrict appeals to Rome, the great prae- munire statute of 1393, and the dissolution of the alien priories. Popular feeling ex- pressed itself in attacks on clerical property and clerical privilege. Heresy grew and spread, and the advanced Lollards denied every doctrine that propped the actual position of the clergy. It may well be that only the anarchy into which England fell in the fifteenth century prevented a very destructive reformation of the Church in that age. At the commencement of the sixteenth cen- Illustration of the Difficulty. 2 1 5 tury the restored monarchy is fast developing a practical absolutism. The Church is weaker than ever. The nobles are powerless to protect it, even if they would. It has lost almost all its hold on the larger towns and on the mind of the educated class. In the higher classes even the most convinced Catholics are disgusted with its indulgences, its fraudulent miracles, and its spiritual clead- ness. The clergy form a wealthy, privileged body, whose privileges have few defenders, and whose wealth is coveted. Monasticism is dying : if the monasteries were not the dens of iniquity that Henry VIII. tried to make them out to be, at least they no longer served the moral or spiritual purposes of the age. They expressed no idealism but that of the most backward and ignorant minds. They were mere anachronistic survivals, and they had to be destroyed before the Church of England could be set on a foundation at once national and rational. Not only has the religion of the Church 2i6 Place of History in Education. ceased to be the religion of the nation, but for a long time past the Church has been more and more visibly repressive of religion. It has been identifying religion with the incredible, and making rational forms of religion impossible by suppressing them as heresy. All over Western Europe the more educated classes have been steadily drifting into sheer paganism. What we call the renaissance was a change in the mental tone and attitude of the upper classes, to which the Church had altogether failed to adjust itself. The growing national self - consciousness demanded at once the suppression of clerical privilege and the liberation of the English Church from Eome. The Church had to be nationalised, the clergy to be made subject to the common law, the doctrinal system of the Church had to be brought into some degree of harmony with the best thought of the time. The power to impose belief and set limits to thought had to be made one with the power of the State and used Illustration of the Difficulty. 2 1 7 for national purposes or not at all. The religiousness of the people had to be allowed to run into the forms natural to it. The Bible, as the source of Christianity, had to be disentangled from the net that had, little by little, been woven about it by interested hands. Up to a certain point the change was easy. It was easy to renounce the Pope and to destroy clerical immunities, but new forms for the religious consciousness were not so easily arrived at ; there is friction and muddle. Tradition dies hard, and the gulf between the educated and the ignorant is hard to bridge. The king is enormously strong, and has his own views. So, under Henry VIII. the Reformation is partial and tentative. The arrangements made have, in many respects, a merely provisional character, and the whole movement is to some extent perverted to base uses. Henry is invested with dictatorial powers in re- lation to religion and the Church, greater even than those the Pope had claimed. 218 Place of History in Education. The old doctrinal system is, for the most part, illogically maintained, and Henry impartially beheads Catholics for treason, and burns Protestants for heresy. But already much is effected, and more is implied. The denial of papal authority involves the denial that there is any power in England which can claim to restrain thought and settle belief, save only the power of the Crown, which is the power of England itself. The State may and it will still hold to the ideal of national unity in religion ; it may and will prescribe forms of worship and insist on conformity ; it may treat opinion as crime, but, at all events, there is no power but that of the State to do these things ; and the State can make no claim to pronounce finaHy as to what is true and what untrue. Even Henry VIII. does not claim infallibility. The State may, and does, declare, " This you must not deny or you shall be burnt " ; it cannot declare, " This you must believe or be damned." Here is a great step forward, Illustration of the Difficulty. 219 for these two assertions are quite different. The Reformation abolishes for England an authority which claims to suppress thought in the interests of truth and for the salva- tion of souls. Henceforth if there is to be religious persecution, it will be based on considerations of national order and security ; there remains no other ground on which it can stand. If the State is not yet ready to concede a right of private judgment in matters of religion, this is because it does not feel it safe to do so. But it asserts its own right of judgment, and in doing so it implies the larger freedom. Legal religious toleration is now certain to come ; it is a mere matter of time and experience. The merely transitional or accidental features of the work of Henry VIII. dis- appear in the Elizabethan settlement, which completes it. Every one is now bound to go to church and nonconformist congrega- tional worship is criminal. But if you do not go to church on any one proper occasion you have only to pay a shilling fine, and 220 Place of History in Education. even if you attend nonconformist worship, you cannot, at all events, be put to death for so doing. Only a bare conformity is required ; while, on the other hand, the formularies of the Church are so drawn as to be capable of subscription by all but Romanists or extremists among Protestants. The Elizabethan Prayer-book is a master- piece of compromise, and its practical excellence lies in its ambiguity. But, ambiguous as it is, at least the medieval doctrinal system is thrown overboard. Even in those points in which it is not denounced it receives no official sanction. Transubstan- tiation is formally denounced ; but you may lawfully believe in consubstantiation, just as you may lawfully take a more thorough- going Protestant view of the great sacrament. If you are a layman the law has really nothing to say to your views so long as you outwardly conform. Within wide limits thought is legally free. Christianity is relieved of its handicap, gets, in this sense, a fresh start and another Illustration of the Difficulty. 221 chance. It had been in danger of being altogether lost under a fantastic super- structure. Now, at least, one can go back to the originals, to the gospels themselves ; and one has them, lawfully, in English. But there is more involved than this. Henceforth religiousness in England is bound to take a personal form. The Elizabethan system, while it limits the right of private judgment in practice, at the same time, by the vagueness of its formularies, calls for the exercise of it within wide limits. There is no longer any question of an infallible authority. You must determine the detail of your beliefs for yourself if you want them detailed. You must work out your own salvation. No priest can forgive your sins or save you through ceremonies. You stand on your own feet and there is no longer anything that can claim to stand between you and God. This change is the essence of the Reformation. 222 Place of History in Education. THE REFORMATION (6). Not to go still further back, we may say that all through the middle ages the Church was fighting for two great principles. In the first place it maintained the supremacy of the spiritual power over all things tem- poral. The spiritual power was embodied in the Church itself, an institution divinely founded and divinely guided, at once the repository and the interpreter of revelation, the keeper of the sacred book that was the light of the world. But behind and in- volved in the assertion of the authority of the Church was the assertion of an eternal and absolute principle of right, before which all mere legal and technical rights, all mere temporal authorities, kings or magistrates, must give way and to which they must be conformed. This is the essential assertion of the Church, that such a principle of right exists, and the Church claims authority as the appointed interpreter of that principle, Illustration of the Difficulty. 223 and on no other ground. Along with this goes the assertion that there are certain truths concerning the nature of man and his relation to God, knowledge of which is necessary to all souls if they would not be lost in the dark wilderness of the universe. Concerning these truths man has not been left without a guide, and his guide is the inspired Church, which is able to lead him into all truth, whereas his unaided reason can find no truth at all. On these first assertions, that there is knowledge necessary for salvation, that there are eternal principles of right, and that the Church is the inspired guardian of those principles and of that knowledge, a second great assertion is founded. It is that Christendom, as such, is a natural unity, a natural State, because in the Church all Christendom is one. All Christian society owns the same fundamental law, recognises the same essential principles. Diversity of laws, diversity of kingdoms and states, is an evil, and indeed illogical. It exists only 224 Place of History in Education. because the nominally Christian world is not really Christian. The triumph of the Church will mean the union of Christendom and ultimately of mankind. The Church is working to establish the Divine State, Civitas Dei, the Kingdom of God upon earth. The end of that State is the highest good of mankind : and this is life eternal in con- formity with the will of God. The earthly end of society is peace, " the peace of the rational soul," as St Augustine put it ; an ordered harmony in which man may con- template and learn and draw nearer to God. In the Christian Church, at last, all mankind will be one ; all class distinctions and race distinctions will be trivial, all rulers will be servants and every serf a disciple of Christ. This was the practical ideal to which the Church pointed, and which it strove to im- pose on men's minds. But the Church failed to conquer, that is, it failed to convert, the world. Every- where the mass of people remained un- believing, or only half believing, entangled Illustration of the Difficulty. 225 in their petty personal aims and needs. Everywhere the upspringing of the good seed was choked by the tares. To save itself from being altogether secularised and so destroyed, to prevent its clergy and bishops from becoming hereditary or from becoming mere nominees of secular magnates, the Church was forced to forbid its clergy marriage and to centralise its authority in the Pope. It was forced to insist on immu- nity for its clergy from the jurisdiction of lay courts, because these courts represented prin- ciples more or less antagonistic to those of the Church, and because the Church could not admit the supremacy of a law it did not itself sanction. It was forced to claim immunity from taxation because power to tax is power to destroy. To have admitted the supremacy of mere state - made law would have been an abandonment of the essential principles of the Church. It would have been to accept the division of Christendom, and to have acknowledged that the State, as such, is the judge of its own rights. The Church p 226 Place of History in Education. could no more admit the supremacy of the medieval state than the early Christian could sacrifice to Csesar. It was, in fact, the old question in a new form. But, of course, the Church failed. The growth of the national states rent Europe and the Church in pieces. The dream of a European unity faded in face of the plain impossibility of its realisation. Already in the fifteenth century the inter -state right asserted by the medieval Church is becoming the right of every state to take all it can get. The Church's ideal of peace is replaced by Machiavelli's grim implication — asserted later in so many words by Hobbes — that the natural relation between any two states is one of war. Justice becomes law, and the law of a legislative power over which the Church has little or no control. As the national states define themselves, the Church becomes more and more disorganised. Its disintegration begins long before the Refor- mation. The clergy themselves are infected by that national sentiment which is the Illustration of the Difficulty. 227 mother of schisms. The local Churches begin to think of themselves as national ; the bishops, forgetting Anselm and Becket, become servants of the king. Heresy in- creases and paganism revives. As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century a French king has the audacity to try to make of the Papacy an instrument for the advance- ment of French monarchy. In pagan fif- teenth-century Italy, the Pope himself tends to become a pagan. In the general failure of faith the Church loses faith also. This is the fault of the Church, that it lost faith and forsook its ideal. The Eeformation is the nemesis, but a nemesis not only for the Church but for all the peoples of Western Europe. The Church had pointed the way to a European hege- mony : the peoples refused to follow it. The Church had upheld the supremacy of the things of the spirit, and Europe followed after the flesh. It is the nemesis of failure in idealism, of narrow views, of racial feeling, of irrational dislikes and jealousies, of short- 228 Place of History in Education. sightedness and a petty mind. The Church is torn in pieces. What takes its place? There is nothing to take its place. Europe becomes an anarchy of immitigably hostile states. If it were good for man that Europe should be split into a series of independent warring states, bound together by no prin- ciple, acknowledging no superior, making each a god of its own material interests, recognising no higher law, taking The Prince for its gospel, and, true to its principles, denouncing its prophet, then the failure of the Church, of which the Reformation is the issue, was, without doubt, good for man. At the Reformation the European states finally declared and established their inde- pendence. In doing so they had to abandon far more than a dream of European unity. They forswore the principle of right as between state and state : they disowned religion itself. The nations asserted that state rights and state interests, as such, are primary and above all other considerations. Illustration of the Difficulty. 229 But the interest of a state, as such, is not the good of mankind, nor anything that can be called the salvation of souls. The Reformation marks the triumph of the prin- ciple of competition in inter-state relations. In denying the authority of the Church the nations denied the existence of national obligation and disabled Christianity itself. It is matter of course that they did not, at the time, know that they were doing these things. Protestantism repre- sents an attempt to reconcile Christianity with the absolutism of the State. The futility of such an attempt would have been obvious but for the strength of the desires and interests it subserved. The whole history of Protestantism goes to prove that Christianity stood or fell with the Church. From the outset the Protestant churches had no rational basis. They started by repudiating their only possible basis — the authority and tradition of the Church itself. They appealed from the Church to the Bible, ignoring the fact that without 230 Place of History in Education. the Church there is no Bible at all. It was the Church which had selected those Greek and Hebrew books which make up the Bible. If belief in their inspiration did not rest on the authority of the Church, upon what did it rest ? To repudi- ate the authority of the Church was, in the long-run, inevitably, to repudiate the Bible also. It was natural that men who had been brought up as Christians, and were, indeed, actually Christians, should fail to see that they were logically bound to re- pudiate Christianity along with the Church. They clutched at the Bible as a drowning man clutches at a straw. Soon the deep waters closed over them. Ever since the Reformation the Protestant churches have been drifting towards latitudinarianism, uni- tarianism, agnosticism, and the drift away from Christianity has only been partially arrested by the desire to retain the endow- ments and privileges they secured by their surrender to the State. The Christian Church had begun by defy- Illustration of the Difficulty. 231 ing Caesar. It refused to admit that the will of Caesar made absolute law ; it asserted a higher law to which that will must con- form itself. All through the centuries that followed the collapse of the Eoman Empire the Church was striving to establish that higher law. But in the sixteenth century, over a great part of Europe, at last the Church surrenders. It does sacrifice to Csesar. Henceforth its ideals are those of the State, which defines its doctrine, limits its action, pays its ministers, appoints its bishops. The reformers had fondly imagined they were releasing it from bondage to the Pope ! The Reformation, it is true, was not wholly destructive. What it helped to build or to strengthen was, however, simply the modern state. Calvinism, indeed, tried to escape the inevitable by a new identification of Church and State, by establishing a gov- ernment of the righteous, a reign of the saints. But such identification as it aimed at proved in the long-run to be 232 Place of History in Education. impossible, and Calvinism directly produced nothing, politically, but short-lived and re- actionary tyrannies. If one looks at England in particular, the destructive, the illogical, the irreligious character of the Reformation is there as apparent as everywhere else ; the State is the only gainer. There is a political and legal and social change of great importance : and it is essentially political, legal, and social. The government plunders the Church of its property, turns its bishops into royal officials, assumes power to dictate doctrine and settle ritual as it pleases, and bribes the landowning class with the spoil of the monasteries. The destruction of the monas- teries involves not merely much temporary misery, but the loss of a series of magnifi- cent monuments of medieval art, the aesthetic value of which it is permissible to regard as greater than that of all the art work of the renaissance. Finally, the Elizabethan compromise is arranged, and the best its apologists seem able to say for it is that it Illustration of the Difficulty. 233 involved an approach to state toleration in religion, and that its formularies were so vague as to mean practically nothing. It is described as a masterly compromise which saved the country from civil war ; but, in fact, it did not even do that : the civil war came less than a hundred years later. In any case what gain is there for religion or for thought ? You get a Church the " articles " of which favour Protestantism, but are so worded that a not too consistent Catholic can say he believes them ; the liturgy of which tries to look as though it were Catholic and does not dare to be so ; the rubrics of which are so vague and con- fused that no one has ever been able to be sure of what precisely they mean. And doctrine, liturgy, and rubrics alike are at the mercy of Parliament. It is claimed that the Reformation, indirectly but necessarily, freed thought and led to the establishment of legal religious toleration. Very indirectly was it so, if at all. The dogmatism of the reformers was 234 Place of History in Education. at least as great as that of the Church. "It is certain," wrote Luther, "that whoever does not hold with me will be damned eternally." In England, toleration was the result not of the Reformation but of the great struggle of the seventeenth century. Its establishment involved the breakdown of the Elizabethan system. As a matter of fact, the Reformation led everywhere to religious persecution. Under Wolsey, books were burnt, but not men. It was the Reformation that brought into fashion the burning of heretics. The State assumes absolute control of the Church, and heresy logically becomes a crime against the State. Toleration was in no real sense a result of the efforts of the religious reformers of the sixteenth century. It resulted simply from the discovery, through bitter experience, that national unity in religion was unat- tainable and that the effort to attain it involved chronic civil war. It had always been the State which burned heretics when they were burned, — and this not merely Illustration of the Difficulty. 235 in a technical sense but for its own pur- poses. Wycliffe died in his bed in spite of papal anathema and prosecution ; and if later Lollards were burned it was rather as dangerous social revolutionaries than as heretics. Protestants habitually attribute to the Church much for which the Church as such was in no way responsible. They refer one to the Spanish Inquisition ! But the Spanish Inquisition was a state -made, state-controlled machine, established in de- fiance of the Pope and used to destroy the freedom of the Church itself and to increase the royal power in Spain. The real fact, indeed, is that the Spanish Inquisition was an essentially Protestant institution. The only religious revival of the sixteenth century of any value in the long-run was the Catholic revival expressed in the re- formed Papacy, the Jesuits and the Coun- cil of Trent. On the religious side the Reformation was the Counter-Reformation. 236 Place of History in Education. THE REFORMATION (c). People brought up in a Protestant tradi- tion are especially likely to find it difficult to understand the Keformation. They are taught from the outset to regard the Reformation as having essentially consisted in the development of the various forms of Protestantism. But the complex body of changes which we roughly summarise as " the Reformation " can never be understood on this theory. The common and popular error in dealing with what is called the Reformation consists in starting from an assumption that the Reformation was primarily and essentially concerned with religion and religious systems of thought. The Reformation, we are told, was a rebellion against Catholic doctrine or against the claims of the Pope. It was a restatement of Christianity, a return to the Bible or a re- turn to the early Church. It was an assertion of essential Christianity as against a barbarous Illustration of the Difficulty. 237 and fantastic travesty. By persons less in- clined to lay stress on the importance of dog- matic religion, we are told that the Reformation was in the main a moral revolt, a revolt against iniquity in high places, an assertion that personal righteousness is the one thing needful. All such statements equally miss the main point. The Reformation was neither essentially religious nor essentially moral. It might be more true to say that it was essentially non-moral and irreligious. It was, in truth, essentially social and political. The collapse of the Roman Empire involved a period of chaos. For a long time life, property, and institutions were alike ex- tremely insecure. But at every moment there is a striving after order and security. As the social settlements become definitive, as the great immigrations of barbarians cease, the struggle becomes more hopeful. There is, as a matter of course, talk of reviving the Roman Empire. Efforts are even deliberately made to that end. But 238 Place of History in Education. all such talk was nonsensical. Difficulties of transport and communication, difficulties of language and racial habit and law, made any sort of European fusion or order an impossibility. Order and security could only be established from a number of independent centres. All efforts to create a central control for Christendom ended by merely creating friction and increasing disorder. The Roman Empire of the middle ages was a mere fiction, a dream with hardly the substance of a dream. But the Hildebrandine dream of a Christendom united in the Church was equally a baseless vision. It had no real relation to the facts. To think of Christen- dom as such as a natural state was to be the victim of a grossly exaggerated notion of the power and place of religion in the life of man. Christendom was itself a fiction. In no profound religious sense was Europe ever Christian at all. Had all Europe desired what Hildebrand desired, something might have been achieved ; though even then difficulties of transit and of language would Illustration of the Difficulty. 239 have proved an insurmountable barrier to any effectual union. But as very few people indeed really desired anything of the sort, the ideal of the Papacy was almost as mere a dream as that of the Empire. Nevertheless, the Church for a long time served the cause of law and order. It gave a new moral sanction to law, it gave its aid to secular powers struggling to keep the peace, it consecrated the king, it upheld an ideal of order and unity and peace, it helped to keep Latin as the language of Christendom. By performing these and other services it acquired wealth and privilege, jurisdictions and immunities and an international recos- nition. But the monarchies, or some of them, outgrew the Church. They became strong enough to stand on their own feet without the crutches of religion. They began to treat the Church as its superiors and to try to master it. Gradually, from the point of view of the growing secular monarchies, the Church becomes an obstruction in the path, a hindrance to co-operation, a restraint 240 Place of History in Education. on the action of the central power. There is a long struggle. People have spoken of WyclifTe as the "morning star of the Refor- mation," or declared that the Reformation began for England in the fourteenth century. These ideas arise merely from the Protestant association of the Reformation with doctrinal systems adverse to that of Rome. The Reformation had begun for England when Henry II. drew up the Constitutions of Clarendon ; it had begun when Henry I. defeated or successfully evaded the vast undefined claims that underlay the opposition of Anselm ; it had begun when William I. ruled that his barons were not to be excom- municated by the Pope without his leave given. The Reformation is merely the final and decisive phase of an age-long struggle between the secular and the ecclesiastical powers. The sixteenth century is the age of the definitive triumph of the national monarchies and of the secular power in all its forms, in West Europe generally. That definitive Illustration of the Difficulty. 24 1 victory is the Reformation. Or if this way of putting the fact be regarded as too flagrantly at variance with the common use of the term, then we must say that the Reformation, the strictly " religious " Refor- mation, is merely a comparatively unim- portant aspect of this victory of the secular power. Everywhere the Reformation meant a nationalisation or at least a secularisation of the Church. To associate it with Pro- testantism is merely misleading. It had really only an accidental and circumstantial connection either with Protestantism or with Catholicism. It took place, in greater or less degree, in Catholic and Protestant countries alike. Francis I.'s concordat with the Pope in 1516, whereby the appointment of all bishops in France was given to the Crown and his Ordinance of Villers Coterets in 1539, curtailing ecclesiastical jurisdiction, involved changes exactly similar to those effected by Henry VIII. in England. In Protestant Germany the princes secularise — that is to say, appropriate — church property, Q 242 Place of History in Education. dissolve the monasteries, subject the clergy to their tribunals, turn the bishops into nominees of their own. But Ferdinand of Austria equally dissolves monasteries and appropriates the property, and every " Catholic " German prince went as far as he dared in the same direction. In Spain the king established control over his clergy by means of the Inquisition, and nothing but Protestant tradition prevents us from seeing the Inquisition as the great instrument of the Reformation in Spain. The so - called Protestant states are merely those in which the subjugation of the Church by the secular power is most complete and most formal. In all this religion as such plays a very small part. The closer you get to the facts of the Reformation in any country, the less you will see of religion as a factor therein. Princes follow the lines of least resistance and are Protestant or Catholic as circumstances dictate. Is there a single instance of a "Protestant" prince whose interests were not bound up with the Illustration of the Difficulty. 243 triumph of Protestantism, or of a prince remaining Catholic in spite of his interests? It is indeed probably true that every "Catholic" prince in Germany, except the emperor, would have become " Protestant " had he dared. On the whole the sovereigns of Europe were inclined to Protestantism, because it enabled them to plunder the Church and to efface it as an obstacle. Francis I. patronised Protestantism just as long as he felt it safe to do so. But in France Protestantism became identified with provincial separatism, and so prevented the Reformation from going further than it did go. But it is not a question of the princes only. With the masses it was at bottom the same. The " religious opinions " of the masses were, as they always are, determined not by religious aspirations or by contro- versy, but by local needs and convenience. Protestantism became the religion of all those to whom, for all manner of circumstantial reasons, Protestantism was convenient. In city after city Protestantism appears merely 244 Place of Histo/y in Education. as the last phase of an age-long struggle against its bishop. Geneva became the very capital of Protestantism ; but it was so even at Geneva. For an age past the city had been struggling against its bishop's claims to sovereignty. In the early six- teenth century the bishop, unable any longer to maintain his claim without as- sistance from without, had obtained the support of the Duke of Savoy. The object of the Duke was of course to establish himself as sovereign in the city. The re- public was hard pressed. That under these circumstances it should become Protestant is a mere matter of course. On the one hand the bishop's claims could be far more radically and effectively dealt with on a Protestant than on a Catholic basis ; on the other, the support of the Protestant Swiss cantons against the Duke of Savoy could not be easily obtained on other terms. So, and for no other reason, Geneva became Protestant. Is any one prepared seriously to maintain that the Geneva popu- Illustration of the Difficulty. 245 lace was won over by the sheer power of the word of Farel or of Calvin ? Their preaching prevailed because its pratical drift coincided with the desires of the citizens of Geneva. Calvin's dictatorship at Geneva is essentially similar to the "tyranny" established in some hard - pressed Italian city in the fourteenth century. Protestantism is in fact a mere by-pro- duct of the Reformation. It is an attempt to readjust religious conceptions to a new political and social order. The medieval system of society, already for long broken up and disorganised, is being violently swept away, and various religious systems emerge as by-products of the revolution or as neces- sities of the new conditions. In themselves they involve no kind of intellectual advance. Nor is there much truth in the assertion that Protestantism made for religious tolera- tion. The first effect of the Reformation was to make toleration impossible and to produce persecutions on a scale and of a severity impossible under the earlier system. 246 Place of History in Education. Yet on this point, too, much popular mis- conception exists. It may fairly be said that there never was such a thing as re- ligious persecution. No government, that is, ever persecuted a religion from a zeal for truth or for the sake of the salvation of souls. Men would have to be very much more religious than they have ever been to make religious persecution possible. So- called religious persecutions are the outcome of political and social conflicts in which religion is the merest incident. The greatest "religious persecutions" Europe has known were an outcome of the Reformation. 247 XVI. CONCLUSION. Historical truth is a highly complex thing ; and partly because of its complexity, partly for lack of evidence, it can never be given anything like complete definition. From any point of view you may catch a partial glimpse, you may see a real aspect of the many-sided, indefinable fact. But a partial truth is not a truth. It is in fact what Dr Johnson would have called a lie. Before truth is attained all our partial glimpses have to be combined in a single, complex, and comprehensive statement. But views so contradictory as those expressed in the fore- going statements concerning the Reformation cannot be logically combined. Are we doomed, by the constitution of our minds, 248 Place of History in Education. to arrive at nothing but a series of " views " which will not combine and yet which can- not, severally, be convicted of falsehood? Which of these three ways, for instance, of looking at the facts of the Reformation is the right one ? We may say at once that we do not know and that, as historians, we do not care. From the historian's point of view all three statements are manifestly in the wrong. It is not that they suffer from over - emphasis or from compression. The emphasis is deliberate and the compression is unavoidable. Our objection to them is not based on their numerous sins of omission or of commission in detail. We object to them simply because they are essentially unhistorical statements. All three involve assumptions as to what is good for mankind, in the mass or individually, which, whether justified or not, lie far beyond the scope of historical inquiry. The assumption that the liberation of religious thought or the religious sense is supremely important, the assumption that the recognition of a higher law than that Conclusion. 249 of the State is supremely important, the assumption that the difference between religious opinions is the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, to all these and all similar assumptions history has nothing whatever to say. They are, from the historian's point of view, pure irrelevan- cies. When from these three " views " of the Reformation we have eliminated all such irrelevancies, we shall probably find that they are susceptible of reconciliation. Every science has a borderland. When we come to determine the importance a par- ticular change has for humanity we have reached the absolute frontier of history ; and, as historians, there we must stop. If we do not stop there, we shall inevitably set about answering the question by means of considerations which may or may not be philosophically sound, but which are certainly unhistorical. We have reached the point at which history begins to merge into some- thing larger. In every science it is the same : you come to a point at which your 250 Place of History in Education. inquiry becomes part of a question which does not wholly belong to your science. History can and will throw light on these questions as to what constitutes progress for humanity. It cannot pretend to resolve them save in an arbitrarily limited sense. History is essentially concerned with change and the causes of change. With the direc- tion of change it is concerned only so far as this can be determined by purely histori- cal inquiries. " If," some one will probably say, " we are to study causation simply, and in doing so are to suppress as irrelevant all our notions of what is good and what is evil in the largest sense, how are we ever to discriminate between what is important and what is not ? We shall have no measure of values at all. Every measure of value implies a philosophy of life. Would you have us assume that all changes are equally important ? In that case we can go as we please and history becomes a mere chaos." Conclusion. 251 It has already been pointed out that it would be worse than useless for any indivi- dual inquirer to suppress his honest and carefully considered impression of the truth. Any attempt to justify such procedure would be mere sophistry. It is not by any kind of pretences that truth is to be won. But the implications of the question as above put are unjustifiable. The conception of historical science itself implies a measure of values quite apart from our personal philosophies. In the first place a social fact or a social change is important in proportion to the extent of its action and results includ- ing its whole duration in time. But apart from this we have another measure aris- ing from general agreement as to the funda- mental importance of certain human needs, of which the need for food is the most absolute. An historical phenomenon, we may say, is important as it affects common needs and in proportion to the extent and duration of its effects upon them. The measure is not, of course, exact, and it is far 252 Place of History in Education. from comprehensive. Once we get beyond the needs that are really fundamental, "need" becomes matter of opinion. But of " needs " not generally recognised the historian as such must beware. But there exist other and more compre- hensive historical measures of value. The idea of progress may have reference to the individual or to states, nations, or races, or to humanity in the gross. The individual history has only to consider as a factor, and with his " happiness " or his moral elevation it is totally unconcerned. The progress of a state or nation history will measure by reference to survival, to proof of fitness, to energy, security, and domination. But history has also its own idea of progress for humanity, and in this idea it finds a comprehensive measure of value. The historical idea of progress must at bottom be an historical generalisation. It must be wide enough to include all the known facts of man's development and it must be established beyond doubt. It can have no connection Conclusion, 253 with religious or ethical systems or ideas of happiness. There are two respects in which, reckoning from the Stone Age, man may be said, without doubt, to have advanced. He has advanced in 'knowledge and he has advanced in power. Nor need we, in so saying, shrink from using the word advance as meaning something more than increase. In so using it we are, indeed, making an assumption that does not stand beyond the reach of criticism. Yet, provisionally and as a working hypothesis, we may fairly make it, since the general sense of civilised mankind will be with us in so doing. Man has advanced in knowledge and in power, and the two movements are not the same. For power comes not only of knowledge but also of co - operation, and co - operation does not come wholly of knowledge but depends also on moral factors. Let the historian therefore fix his mind on these two things and fearlessly measure all change by reference to them. This measure he may use fearlessly because it is incontrovertibly 254 Place of History in Education. based on history itself. Progress in other senses or in some yet larger sense there may be, but with that he has no concern. If history is to play the part in progress which it yet may play it must begin by recognising its limitations. 255 XVII. POSTSCRIPT. It is only by assuming the existence of a system of education, at least ideally, that we can assign to History or to any other subject any " place " in education at all. A system implies a theory. Where there is a theory there will be a system, even though no public money be spent upon it : and where there is no theory there can be no system, though we spend millions a -year from rates or taxes upon machinery. If we had a number of co- existing and rival systems, then History might have a place in each of them, and if so, it would be, in each case, a different place. But it is only on a theory of education, based on a theory of values, that we can determine the place 256 Place of History in Education. in education of anything. It is really im- possible to discuss the place of History in education except in reference to a theory of what education should do. We might, indeed, content ourselves with pointing out that History may do this, that, or the other for the mind, according as you deal with it. A book of considerable size might be written on these lines. It would be a waste of paper. When one has succeeded in reading a book through, it is generally necessary to complete the process by asking oneself what it has all been about. This is a question that may well be asked by authors as well as by readers. What is it that we have been discussing? Here, in England, we have no system of education. Have we, then, been trying to determine the " place " of History not in education, as we set out to do, but in cosmic space ? A system of education can only be based on agreement as to values. It must allow for difference, but it must be founded on Postscript. 257 agreement. On our agreements a system might be built, and perhaps is being built. It is the place of History in such an hypo- thetical system that we have been discuss- ing. We have tried to reach a basis of agreement below all controversies. Just as the teacher of History is bound to dis- tinguish between his personal philosophy and his positive knowledge, so the educa- tionalist is bound to suppress his own inti- mate opinions and try to dig down to the level of values generally recognised. Only at that depth can safe foundations be laid. If we, collectively, had a religion, many other problems would be solved besides the problem of religious education. Actually the problem of religious education is not an educational problem. We have conflict- ing religions and we have no religion, and our problem is to reconcile interests rather than philosophies. Whichever it be, the problem is not educational. But if we had a religion, not only would our present diffi- culty about religious education disappear, 258 Place of History in Education. but our difficulties about the place of His- tory in education would, for the most part, also disappear. For a religion is a belief concerning the cosmos which deter- mines our sense of values. It is not clear that any completely satisfying system of education can be founded on anything smaller than a religion. It may be argued that we can never solve any of our educa- tional problems till the religious difficulty has disappeared. In any case, provisionally, there is but one thing to do. We must dig down below our controversies and found our system on our agreements. It may be that we shall find these insufficient to bear any very lofty or weighty structure. It may even be that they will bear nothing but a makeshift, temporary structure of planks — a system of technical education. But it will be well to make sure that they will not bear more. PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 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