HISTOEICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
J. PETER MAYER
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HISTORICAL
AND
POLITICAL ESSAYS
BY
WILLIAM EDWARD HAETPOLE LECKY
NEW EDITION
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1910
All rights reserved
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
First Edition, 8vo. October 1908
Reprinted February 1909
New Edition, cr. 8vo. October 1910
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF TAT TFORNIA
SANTA BARBARA
PEEFACE
When Mr. Lecky had finished his last work, ' The Leaders
of Public Opinion in Ireland,' he did not intend to write
another long book. His health was broken ; he had said
most of what he wished to say. But he proposed collect-
ing in a volume a few Essays which he had written
at different times. As concentration was to him one of
the first conditions of good work, he did not often allow
his attention to be diverted from the book he was
writing by giving addresses or contributing articles to
reviews or magazines, unless he had some special reason
for doing so. The number is, therefore, small. He began
revising them ; and made some additions to ' Thoughts on
History,' 'The Empire,' 'The Memoir of the Fifteenth
Earl of Derby,' ' Queen Victoria as a Moral Force ' ; but
he unfortunately did not live to complete the revision
of the others.
In publishing this volume I have endeavoured to carry
out his intentions. Besides the Essays which he had
revised, I have included all that seemed to me to possess
a permanent value. Even though some of them deal with
questions of the day, the philosophic spirit in which they
are treated may give them more than a transitory interest
and the forcible arguments that are adduced may still have
weight in the future.
ELISABETH L^CKY.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Thoughts on History (1893) 1
The Political Value of History (1892) .... 19
The Empire : its Value and its Growth (1893) . . . 39
Ireland in the Light of History (1891) .... 62
Formative Influences (1890) 82
Carlyle's Message to His Age (1891) 95
Israel among the Nations (1893) 106
Madame de Stael (1891) 119
The Private Correspondence of Sir PiObert Peel (1891) . 137
The Fifteenth Earl of Derby (1894) . . . . 182
Mr. Henry Reeve (1896) 221
Dean Milman (1900) 227
Queen Victorla as a Moral Force (1901) 251
Old-age Pensions (1900) 272
Index 291
The Essays ' Thoughts on History,' ' Formative Influences,' ' Madame de
Stael,' ' Israel among the Nations,' ' Old-age Pensions,' appeared originally
in the American Eeview, the Fortim — the first under the title of ' The
Art of Writing History ' ; ' Ireland in the Light of History,' in the North
American Review. Those on Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Henry Reeve, and Dean
Milman were written for the Edinburgh Review. The Essay on ' Queen
Victoria as a Moral Force ' appeared first in the Pall Mall Magaziiie ;
' Carlyle's Message to His Age ' in the Contemporary Review. ' The
Political Value of History ' was a presidential address delivered before the
Birmingham and Midland Institute ; ' The Empire,' an inaugural address
delivered at the Imperial Institute ; and the ' Memoir of the Fifteenth Earl
of Derby ' was originally prefixed to the volumes of his speeches and
addresses.
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
THOUGHTS ON HISTOEY
I DO not propose in this paper to enter into any general
inquiry about the best method of writing history. Such
inquiries appear to me to be of no real value, for there are
many different kinds of history which should be written
in many different ways. A diplomatic, a military, or a
parliamentary history, dealing with a short period or
a particular episode, must evidently be treated in a very
different spirit from an extended history where the object
of the historian should be to describe the various aspects
of the national life, and to trace through long periods of
time the ultimate causes of national progress and decay.
The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and
industrial development, of scientific progress, have all
their different methods. A writer who treats of some
great revolution that has transformed human affairs
should deal largely in retrospect, for the most important
part of his task is to explain the long course of events
that prepared and produced the catastrophe ; while a
writer who treats of more normal times will do well
to plunge rapidly into his theme.
Historians, too, differ widely in their special talents,
and these talents are never altogether combined. The
power of vividly realising and portraying men, or societies
or modes of thought that have long since passed away ;
the power of arranging and combining great multitudes
B
2 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
of various facts ; the power of judging with discrimination,
accuracy, and impartiality conflicting arguments or
evidence ; the power of tracing through the long course
of events the true chain of cause and effect, selecting the
facts that are most valuable and significant and explaining
the relation between general causes and particular effects,
are all very different and belong to different types of mind.
It is idle to expect a writer with the gifts of a Clarendon,
a Kinglake, or a Froude to write history in the spirit of
a Hallam or a Grote. Writers who are eminently dis-
tinguished for wide, patient, and accurate research have
sometimes little power either of describing or interpreting
the facts which they collect. All that can be said with
any profit is that each writer will do best if he follows
the natural bent of his genius, and that he should select
those kinds or periods of history in which his special gifts
have most scope and the qualities in which he is deficient
are least needed.
It is the fashion of a modern school of historical
writers to deplore what they call the intrusion of literature
into history. History, in their judgment, should be
treated as science and not as literature, and the kind of
intellect they most value is not unlike that of a skilful
and well-trained attorney. To collect documents with
industry ; to compare, classify, interpret and estimate
them is the main work of the historian. It is no doubt
true that there are some fields of history where the
primary facts are so little known, so much contested or so
largely derived from recondite manuscript sources, that a
faithful historian will be obliged in justice to his readers
to sacrifice both proportion and artistic charm to the
supreme importance of analysing evidence, reproducing
documents and accumulating proofs ; but in general the
depreciation of the literary element in history seems to
me essentially wrong. It is only necessary to recall the
names of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Livy and Tacitus,
THOUGHTS ON HISTORY 3
of Gibbon and Macaulay, and of the long line of great
masters of style who have related the annals of France.
It may, indeed, be confidently asserted that there is no
subject in which rarer literary qualities are more demanded
than in the higher forms of history. The art of portray-
ing characters ; of describing events ; of compressing,
arranging, and selecting great masses of heterogeneous
facts, of conducting many different chains of narrative
without confusion or obscurity; of preserving in a vast
and complicated subject the true proportion and relief,
will tax the highest literary skill, and no one who does
not possess some, at least, of these gifts in an unusual
measure is likely to attain a permanent place among the
groat masters of history. It is a misfortune when some
stirring and momentous period falls into the hands of the
mere compiler, for he occupies the ground and a really
great writer will hesitate to appropriate and plagiarise the
materials his predecessor has collected. There are books
of great research and erudition which one would have
wished to have been all re-written by some writer of real
genius who could have given order, meaning and vivid-
ness to a mere chaos of accurate and laboriously sifted
learning. The great prominence which it is now the
fashion to ascribe to the study of diplomatic documents,
is very apt to destroy the true value and perspective of
history. It is always the temptation of those who are
dealing with manuscript materials to overrate the small
personal details which they bring to light, and to give
them much more than their due space in their narrative.
This tendency the new school powerfully encourages.
It is quite right that the treasure-houses of diplomatic
correspondence which have of late years been thrown
open should be explored and sifted, but history written
chiefly from these materials, though it has its own
importance, is not likely to bo distinguished cither by
artistic form or by philosophical value. Those who are
a 2
4 HISTORICAL AND POIJTICAL ESSAYS
immersed in these studies are very apt to overrate their
importance and the part which diplomacy and states-
manship have borne in the great movement of human
affairs.
A true and comprehensive history should be the life
of a nation. It should describe it in its larger and more
various aspects. It should be a study of causes and effects,
of distant as well as proximate causes, and of the large, slow
and permanent evolution of things. It should include, as
Buckle and Macaulaj'^ saw, the social, the industrial, the
intellectual life of the nation as well as mere political
changes, and it should be pre-eminently marked by a true
perspective dealing with subjects at a length proportioned
to their real importance. All this requires a powerful
and original intellect quite different from that of a mere
compiler. It requires too, in a high degree, the kind of
imagination which enables a man to reproduce not only
the acts but the feelings, the ideals, the modes of thought
and life of a distant past, and pierce through the actions
and professions of men to their real characters. Insight
into character is one of the first requisites of a historian.
It is, therefore, much to be desired that he should possess
a wide knowledge of the world, the knowledge of different
types of character, foreign as well as English, which
travel and society and practical experience of business
can give, and it will also be of no small advantage to him
if he has passed through more than one intellectual or
religious phase, widening the area of his appreciation and
realisations. He should also have enough of the dramatic
element to enable him to throw himself into ways of
reasoning or feeling very different from his own. One of
the most valual)le of all forms of historical imagination is
that which enables a writer to place himself in the point
of view of the best men on different sides, and to bring
out the full sense of opposing arguments. All these
gifts or qualities are never in a high degree united, but
THOUGHTS ON HISTORY 5
they are all essential to a great historian, and a true
school of history should widen instead of narrowing our
conception of it.
The supreme virtue of the historian is truthfulness,
and it may be violated in many different degrees. The
worst form is when a writer deliberately falsifies facts
or deliberately excludes from his picture qualifying
circumstances. But there are other and much more
subtle ways in which party spirit continually and often
quite unconsciously distorts history. All history is
necessarily a selection of facts, and a writer who is
animated by a strong sympathy with one side of a
question or a strong desire to prove some special point
will be much tempted in his selection to give an undue
prominence to those that support his view, or, even
where neither facts nor arguments are suppressed, to give
a party character to his work by an unfair distribution
of lights and shades. The strong and vivid epithets are
chiefly reserved for the good or bad deeds on one side,
the vague, general and comparatively colourless epithets
for the corresponding deeds on the other side ; and in
this way very similar facts are brought before the reader
with such different degrees of illumination and relief that
they make a wholly different impression on his mind. In
the history of Macaulay this defect may, I think, be
especially traced. The characteristic defect of that great
and in most respects admirable writer, both as historian
and artist, was the singular absence of graduation in his
mind. The neutral tints which are essential to the
accurate shading of character seemed almost wanting,
and a love of strong contrasted lights and shades, coupled
with his supreme command of powerful opitlicts, con-
tinually misled him. J3ut no attentive reader can fail to
observe how unequally those epithets are distributed and
how clearly this inequality discloses the strong bias under
which he wrote.
6 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
The truth of an historical picture lies mainly in its
judicious and accurate shading, and it is this art which
the historian should especially cultivate. He will
scarcely do so with success unless it becomes to him
not merely a matter of duty, but also a pleasure and
a pride. The kind of interest which he takes in his
narrative should be much less that of a politician and
an advocate than of a painter, who, now darkening and
now lightening the picture, seeks by many delicate touches
to catch with exact fidelity the tone and hue of the object
he represents.
The degree of certainty that it is possible to attain in
history varies greatly in different departments. The
growth of institutions and laws, military events, changes
in manners and in creeds, can be described with much
confidence, and although it is more difficult to depict the
inner moral life of nations, the influences that form their
characters and prepare them for greatness or decay, yet
when the materials for our induction are sufficiently large
this field of history may be studied with great profit.
Diplomatic history and the more secret springs of political
history can only be fully disclosed when the archives
relating to them have been explored and when the con-
fidential correspondence of the chief actors in them has
been published. The biographical element in history is
always the most uncertain. Even among contemporaries
the judgment of character and motives depends largely
on indications so slight and subtle that they rarely pass
into books and are only fully felt by direct personal con-
tact, and the smallest knowledge of life shows how quickly
anecdotes and sayings are distorted, coloured, and mis-
placed when they pass from lip to lip. Most of the ' good
sayings ' of history are invention, and most of them have
been attributed to different persons. A history which is
plainly written under the iniluencc of party bias has the
value of an advocate's speech giving one side of the
THOUGHTS ON HISTORY 7
question. When our only materials for the knowledge of
a period are derived from such histories, the sa3dng of
Voltaire should be remembered— that we can confidently
believe only the evil which a party writer tells of his own
side and the good which he recognises in his opponents.
In judging the historian we must consider his nearness to
the events he relates, his probable means of information,
and the internal evidence in his narrative of accuracy,
honesty, and judgment, and we must also consider the
standard of proof and the methods of historical writing
prevailing in his time. A modern writer who placed in
the mouths of his personages speeches which he himself
invented would be justly discredited, but in antiquity it
was a recognised custom for a historian to embody in ficti-
tious speeches the reflections suggested by his narrative
and the motives which he believed to have actuated his
heroes.
Different ages differ enormously in the severity of
proof which they exact, in the degree of accuracy which
they attain. The credibility of a statement also depends
not only on the amount of its evidence, but also on its
own inherent probability. Everyone will feel that an
amount of testimony that would be quite sufficient to
persuade him that a butcher's boy had been seen driving
along a highway is wholly different from that which
would be required to persuade him that a ghost had been
met there. The same rule applies to the history of the
past, and it is complicated by the great difference in
different ages of the measure of probability, or, in other
words, by the strong predisposition in certain stages of
knowledge to accept statements or explanations of facts
which in later stages we know to be incredible or in a
high degree improbable. Few subjects in history arc
more dilficult than the laws of evidence in dealing with
the supernatural and the extent to which the authority
of historians in relating credible and probable facts is
8 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
invalidated by the presence of a mythical element in their
narratives.
Connected with this subject is also the question how
far it is possible by merely internal evidence to decompose
an ancient document, resolving it into its separate elements,
distinguishing its different dates and its different degrees
of credibility. The reader is no doubt aware with what
a rare skill this method of inquiry has been pursued in
the present century, chiefly by great German and Dutch
scholars, in dealing with the early Jewish writings. At
the same time, without disputing the value of their work
or the importance of many of the results at which they
have arrived, I may be pardoned for expressing my belief
that this kind of investigation is often pursued with an
exaggerated confidence. Plausible conjecture is too fre-
quently mistaken for positive proof. Undue significance
is attached to what may be mere casual coincidences, and
a minuteness of accuracy is professed in discriminating
between the different elements in a narrative which
cannot be attained by mere internal evidence. In all
writings, but especially in the writings of an age when
criticism was unknown, there will be repetitions, con-
tradictions, inconsistencies and diversities of style which
do not necessarily indicate different authorship or dates.
I have spoken of the uncertainty of the biographical
element in history. It must, however, be said that when
a historian is deahng with men who have played a very
prominent part on the stage of life, the general acceptance
of his judgment is a strong corroboration of its truth.
It may be added that the later judgment of men is not
unfrequently more true than the contemporary judgment.
The wisdom of a teaching or of a policy is shown by its
results, and these results are in most cases very gradually
disclosed. Great men are like great inountains which are
surrounded by lower peaks that often obscure their
grandeur and seem to a near observer to equal or even
THOUGHTS ON HISTOEY 9
to overtop them. It is only when seen from far off that
their true dimensions are fully realised and they soar to
heaven above all rivals. In the page of history men are
judged mainly by the net result of their lives, by the
broad lines of their characters and achievements. Many
injudicious words, many minor weaknesses of conduct, are
forgotten. Faults of manner, deficiencies of tact, awk-
wardnesses of appearance, which tell so largely upon the
judgments of contemporaries, are no longer seen. The
conversational nimbleness and versatility of intellect, the
charm or assurance or magnetism of manner, the weight
of social position, all of which tend to secure to an
inferior man a pre-eminence in the circle in which he
moves, are equally evanescent, and the shy, rugged, and
tactless recluse often emerges on the strength of his
genuine and abiding performances to a position in the
eyes of the world which he never attained during his
lifetime.
That fine saying of Cardan, ' Tempus mea possessio,
tempus ager meus,' might be the motto of the historian.
Time is the field which he cultivates, and a true sense of
space and distance should be one of the chief character-
istics of his work. Few things are more difficult to
attain than a just perspective in history. The most
dramatic incidents are not the most important, and in
weighing the joys and sorrows of the past our measures
of judgment are almost hopelessly false. The most
humane man cannot emancipate himself from the law of
his nature, according to which he is more affected by
some tragic circumstance which has taken place in his
own house or in his own street than by a catastrophe which
has carried anguish and d(!sohition over enormous areas in
a distant continent. In history, too, there are vast tracts
which are almost necessarily unrealised. We judge a
period mainly by its great men, by its brilliant or salient
incidents, by the fortunes of a small class ; and the great
10 HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
mass of obscure, suffering, inarticulate humanity, whose
happiness is often so profoundly affected by political and
military events, almost escapes our notice. It should
be the object of history to bring before us past events in
their true proportion and significance, and one of the
greatest improvements in modern history is the increased
attention which is paid to the social, industrial, and moral
history of the poor. The paucity of our information and
the difficulty of realising the conditions of obscure multi-
tudes will always make this branch of history very im-
perfect, but it is one of the most essential to the just
judgment of the past.
Another task which lies before the historian is that of
distinguishing proximate from ultimate causes. Our first
natural impulse is to attribute a great change to the men
who effected it and to the period in which it took place,
and to neglect or underrate the long train of causes which
had been, often through many generations, preparing its
advent. A faithful historian must especially guard against
this error. He must study the slow process of growth as
well as the moment of efflorescence, the long progress of
decay as well as the final catastrophe. He will probably
find that the part played by statesmen and legislatures is
less than he had imagined, and that the causes of the
movements he relates must be sought over a wider area
and through a longer period.
Moral, intellectual, or economical movements very
slightly connected with political life are often those
which have most largely contributed to the good or evil
fortunes of a nation ; and even in the sphere of politics it
is not the events which attract the most vivid con-
temporary interest that have the most enduring influence.
Few things contribute so much to the formation of the
social type as the laws regulating the succession of
property and especially the agglomeration or division of
landed property. The growth of militarism in a nation,
THOUGHTS ON HISTORY 11
besides its direct and obvious consequences, forms a type
of character which will sooner or later show itself in
almost every department of legislation, and the tendency
of politics to enlarge or narrow the sphere of individual
liberty or of government control, will affect most deeply
the habits of the people. Laws regulating private enter-
prises, substituting State control or initiative for individual
action, encouraging or discouraging thrift, and above all
interfering with free contracts, have much more than
an immediate influence, for they become the prolific
parents of many further extensions. In the words of an