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THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

APRIL, 1905.

No. CCCCXII.

ART. I.-THE HISTORY OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. The History of Twenty-five Years. By Sir SPENCER WALPOLE, K.C.B. 2 vols., 1856-1870. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1904.

A History of Modern England. By HERBERT PAUL. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Macmillan & Co., 1904.

The Political Writings of Richard Cobden. New edition, with a preface by Lord Welby, G.C.B. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903.

The Governance of England. By SIDNEY LOW, M.A. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1904.

Democracy and Reaction. By L. T. HOBHOUSE. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905.

MAN

ANY men have an almost invincible distaste for the history of the events which immediately preceded their own entrance upon the scene of life. In proportion, perhaps, as their interest in the present is strong and keen they are unwilling to linger over a past which they remember only with a tinge of the contempt which the younger feel for the older generation, and in the hurry and competition of existence they grapple with the problems of the moment with the words of Edmund Burke upon their lips: 'Applaud us when we run, console us when we fall, 'cheer us when we recover, but let us pass on, for God's 'sake let us pass on!' This repugnance to recent history is not by any means confined to persons devoid of the historical instinct. The interest which may be stimulated by the story of a more remote or more romantic past is repelled by a period which is so like our own in most of its details and so familiar in its general outlines as the

VOL. CCI. NO. CCCCXII.

T

mid-Victorian era, the study of which moreover is far more difficult than that of a period whose tendencies and results can be measured and whose records have been made available by adequate comment and research.

It may be doubted, however, whether for those at all events whose business it is to observe tendencies or to direct the political energies of a people there is any more indispensable possession than a full knowledge of the history of their own country in its later aspects. Some statesmen, indeed, there have been who like Lord Beaconsfield resolved history into a series of paradoxes, or who like Sieyes are so wedded to a priori methods that to judge of the present by the past is with them to judge of the known by the unknown.' But to the political Englishman history is the breath of life. Whig principles, it has been said, were essentially historical, depending as they did on the assertion of a series of facts and precedents relating to the rights of Englishmen; and the same may be said of the assertion of the leading ideas of political and commercial emancipation which raised this country to an unexampled height of greatness and prosperity during the course of the last century.

The historian who has lived in the period which he undertakes to describe, or sufficiently near it to have been familiar with the current opinions upon men and events, has some advantages and some disadvantages as compared with the historian of a more remote past. The chief of his advantages is the knowledge of the character, not only of the principal actors on the stage which he depicts but of the people at large, which such a writer must intuitively possess and which neither historical imagination nor documentary evidence can ever enable the student to reconstruct with absolute certainty and success. The value of this element will be evident to anyone who reflects how largely historical knowledge is based upon the tradition handed down either in writing or orally by contemporary observers or witnesses. Thucydides, Shakespeare, Clarendon, Voltaire are among the great writers who in this way have impressed upon the minds of all succeeding generations views of history and historical characters which no research can efface or even weaken. On the other hand, in the case of periods as to which documents exist the contemporary historian necessarily suffers from inability to consult them in anything like complete fashion, and the springs of action may therefore in many cases be hidden from him while they are revealed to a later inquirer.

Although the first two works mentioned at the head of this article happen to cover much the same period of history, it is evident that their design and purpose is dissimilar, and we do not therefore intend to compare them in these pages. Mr. Herbert Paul has made a brilliant commencement of his task, which is that of a delineation of modern England, and we shall watch with interest the further developement of his theme. The starting-point he has chosen, the year 1842, will give him the opportunity of drawing the contrast between two very different epochs in our history, and he will find in later volumes an ever greater opportunity of employing his gift of epigrammatic style, and the knowledge of politics and persons which his experience as a journalist and a member of Parliament has given him.

Sir Spencer Walpole's two volumes, on the other hand, form the continuation and completion of a history, in a more regular sense than that intended by Mr. Paul, of the period during which Great Britain grew into a popularly governed industrial State of a modern pattern, and they will undoubtedly take rank with the earlier portions as a standard book of reference on the subject. For his painstaking desire to get at the truth, the first merit of the historian, has enabled him to surmount the main difficulty of a chronicler of recent events, which arises from the multiplicity and inaccessibility of sources of information. He is satisfied, as he tells us, that most of the material which is likely to be available for British history in the period with which his latest volumes are concerned is already accessible, and it seems probable that neither his facts nor his conclusions will be seriously challenged by subsequent writers. The advantages which we have noted as belonging to a contemporary writer of history are possessed by him in a peculiar degree. From the circumstances of his birth as a member of the governing class and his own long and distinguished official career, he has been in close touch with public men and public affairs from his youth up. His views are therefore those of a trained and sagacious observer, and they are the more valuable from the fact that they are the result of independent thought and study, which, as is well known, have led him far from his early party traditions and associations.

It would be in the highest degree unfair to regard these two volumes as an isolated study of the period treated in them or as belonging to the category of a political essay,

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Even if the period embraced by Sir Spencer Walpole's survey had been longer and had included the last thirty years of the century, the difficulty we have indicated would perhaps not have been greatly diminished. The time has probably not yet arrived when anything like an authoritative appreciation of the tendencies of British developement in the nineteenth century could be successfully undertaken, and Bir Spencer Walpole has doubtless shown wisdom in resisting the temptation to speculations such as we have hinted at. Contemporaries are apt to see turning-points in national history when none really exist, and to treat as insignificant events which posterity discovers to have been crucial. There is for instance much exaggeration in the picture often drawn of mid-Victorian England wholly given over to ideas of laisser faire' and 'laisser passer' in domestic affairs and of non-intervention in foreign policy. Sir Spencer Walpole himself in the phrases we have quoted gives some colour to such a description which has of course a general truth; but it

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