as well as in the seventeenth century, efforts to discover the true remedy end for a long time in failure, or at least in very partial success, till at last the true remedy appears almost by accident and takes root, because it alone will give relief.

He, therefore, who studies the society of the past will be of the greater service to the society of the present in proportion as he leaves it out of account. If the exceptional statesman can get on without much help from the historian, the historian can contribute much to the arousing of a statesmanlike temper in the happily increasing mass of educated persons without whose support the statesman is powerless. He can teach them to regard society as ever evolving new wants and new diseases, and therefore requiring new remedies. He can teach them that true tolerance of mistakes and follies which is perfectly consistent with an ardent love of truth and wisdom. He can teach them to be hopeful of the future, because the evil of the present evolves a demand for a remedy which sooner or later is discovered by the intelligence of mankind, though it may sometimes happen that the whole existing organisation of society is overthrown in the process. He can teach them also not to be too sanguine of the future, because each remedy brings with it fresh evils which have in their turn to be faced. These, it may be said, are old and commonplace lessons enough. It may be so, but the world has not yet become so wise as to be able to dispense with them.

A further question may arise as to the mode in which this teaching shall be conveyed. Shall a writer lay down the results at which he has arrived and sketch out the laws which he conceives to have governed the course of society; or shall he, without forgetting these, make himself familiar, and strive to make his readers familiar, with the men and women in whose lives these laws are to be discerned? Either course is profitable, but it is the latter that I have chosen.

As there is a

danger of converting our knowledge either of past or present society into a collection of anecdotes, there is also a danger of regarding society as governed by external forces, and not by forces evolved out of itself. The statesman of the present wants perpetually to be reminded that he has to deal with actual men and women. Unless he sympathises with them and with their ideas, he will never be able to help them, and in like manner a historian who regards the laws of human progress in the same way that he would regard the laws of mechanics, misses, in my opinion, the highest inspiration for his work. Unless the historian can feel an affectionate as well as an intelligent interest in the personages with whom he deals, he will hardly discover the key to the movements of the society of which they formed a part. The statesman, too, will be none the worse if, in studying the past, he is reminded that his predecessors had to deal with actual men and women in their complex nature, and if thereby he learns that pity for the human race which was the inspiring thought of the New Atlantis, and which is the source of all true and noble effort.

That my own work falls far short of the ideal which I have set before myself, none of my readers can be so conscious as I am myself. Whatever it may be worth, it is the best that I have to offer.

SOUTH VIEW,

BROMLEY, KENT.

SAMUEL R. GARDINER.