William Stubbs

“ The Assizes of Jerusalem lay like a crystal block, a model of usages, incapable of enforcement and incapable of growth. The kings lived for the most part the life of adventurers or knights-errant, playing their part in the defence of Christendom, but still, like the great military orders and fragmentary principalities of Palestine, only as an isolated garrison in the middle of a world out of which they were being gradually driven; no more, as Richard had hoped, an advance post in the great campaign by which the East was to be humbled before the West. ”

“ I see a cold, steady, strongly-purposed man, patient, secret, circumspect; with not many scruples, yet not regardless of men's opinions; very clear sighted; very willing to wait for reconciliation where there is a chance, and not hasty where vengeance is the only course; but ruthless where his own purpose is directly, endangered, and sparing neither friend nor foe where he is not strong enough to rely on himself alone. It may have been a nature too cold to care for popular love; or too self-contained to condescend to court it; there is no evidence that Henry VII ever dreamed of winning it. ”

“ No doubt the possession or even the anticipation of the possession of great power is a dangerous obstacle to education; and in every case of a royal minority which we have in English history we find the same miserable story of a most important charge neglected, and the most important of all possible trusts unfulfilled. It may be that Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches had to work on an unkindly soil. In the child of John and Isabella we should not look for much inherited goodness; yet Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother, was a very different man from Henry himself. ”

“ Is the task of empires to conquer or to colonise; the task of colonies to extirpate or to develope? Is a commercial or a military policy the surest agent of civilisation? Can a worn-out nation be revived and refreshed and recruited by a bracing treatment? can it be revived at all? Does the difference between European and Asiatic history consist in the vitality of the historic nations in Europe and the inexhaustibleness of the hive in Asia? If not, how is Europe to treat Asia, so that the march of civilisation may affect the lands in which the stream of history seems to have long been stayed? ”

“ The English, disliking his attempts at foreign sovereignty, represented him as a foolish, extravagant, tricky man, who for the name of Emperor sacrificed his real interests and imperilled the interests of his country; a man who would let the Germans delude him out of all his treasure and then come back to England and take the unpopular side, as he did in the barons’ war. The Germans, who always treated the English kings as rich fools to be handled from time to time for their own profit, got out of him all they could in the way of money and privileges, and showed their gratitude by mocking him. ”

“ For I desire to introduce myself to you, not as a philosopher nor as a politician, but as a worker at history. Not that I have not strong views on politics, nor short and concise opinions on philosophy, but because this is my work, and I have taken it up in all sincerity and desire of truth, and wish to keep to my work and to the sort of truth that I can help on in the inquiry; because you have plenty of politicians and plenty of scholars to whom, if they wish to have it, I certainly win not begrudge the name of philosophers. ”

“ But I am sure that they have a great object—to increase human knowledge in minuteness of accuracy as well as in breadth and firmness of grasp; to perfect the instruments of historic study; to make, perhaps subordinately and subsidiarily, their exploration of our history throw light on the dark places, the obscure passages and flickering popular institutions of their own land. I wish that we should do the same, that we could and would so study not merely the works of Waitz, Sohm, Brunner and the Maurers, but the documentary evidence on which those writers have based their conclusions. ”

“ Leopold von Ranke is not only beyond all comparison the greatest historical scholar alive, but one of the very greatest historians that ever lived. Unrivalled stores of knowledge, depth of research, intimate acquaintance with the most recondite sources, have been, in his case, supplemented by everything which could be conferred by a long life, continuous study, close association with the great political actors and thinkers of the greatest part of the most eventful century of the world's history. ”

“ There is enough of the idea of liberty and sound government to lift the struggle out of the region of mere legal resistance to mere legal oppression: there is a growth towards liberty in all the vindication of even class rights and special privileges: a growth towards liberty so spontaneous, I had almost said so little self-conscious, as to show that it is a natural, not a factitious growth: it is not taught by philosophers, it is not extorted by agitators, it is the outgrowth of law and a law-abiding spirit, tending by its very nature to freedom and order conjointly. ”

“ So rapid is the progress of political life and opinion that even these great subjects are becoming quickly extinct or lost influences among the crowds of new ones. The Reform History has come to be regarded no longer as a grand revolution, of which its chief agents could predicate perfection and finality, but merely as a single stage in a progress the present velocity of which would have made the projectors dizzy. ”

“ It is not to make proselytes to one system of politics or another that the work of education is to be directed; a university is no political club or propaganda; I desire to use my office as a teacher of facts and of the right habit of using them.
And to do this we must begin at the right end, work from the past forwards, not backwards from the present. Our students ought not to go into the world a prey to newspaper correspondents: they ought not to go into public life ready to be moulded to the political views of the first clique that may catch hold of them. ”

“ In Modern History, on the contrary, you are dealing with the living subject: your field of examination is the living, working, thinking, growing world of to-day; as distinguished from the dead world of Greece and Rome, by the life that is in it, as it is in geographical area and in the embarrassing abundance of the data from which only in their full integrity it is safe, or ever will be safe, to attempt to philosophise. ”

“ If you like, put it the other way, believe in the great Protestant statesman, treat Charles as the overrated fine gentleman, the narrow-minded advocate of a theory which he did not understand, the pig-headed maintainer of the cause you dislike. You may be a partisan, but can you not believe that, if you believe your own side of the question, truth when it is explored will be found on your side? ”

“ History, the knowledge of the adventures, the development, the changeful career, the varied growths, the ambitions, aspirations, and, if you like, the approximating destinies of mankind, claims a place second to none in the roll of sciences. Arising from one of the first and most anciently cultivated instincts, the desire to know how we come to be what we are, and how the world comes to be what it is, the love of history is certainly second in origin to no other sort of love of knowledge. ”

“ Seldom has so much promise, seldom have so great earnests of great work been so sadly or so fatally blighted: we cannot look that his place can ever in all respects be so filled that there will not still be much, very much, to desiderate; for it is not Oxford alone that laments him, nor the cause of Historical study only with which he had identified himself both here and throughout the literary world. ”

“ I do not indeed suppose that the scholars and students of Göttingen and Vienna are doing as Von Moltke and his agents are said to have done before the war of 1870, collecting plans, and charts, and itineraries, and models of fortresses, and raised maps of provinces, whilst they were training men and officers both at work and play for conquest. I do not believe that they want to take from us anything, not even the pride of knowing more of our own history than they do, or that they want to engross to themselves by conquest the whole domain of historical knowledge. ”

“ Why then should not cycles of history, two, three, or more cycles of history, be allowed to exist, within which all the really important factors have their origin and development, and, it may be, work out their full destiny; successive great dramas of ages, the interest of which is self-contained, although there is enough of common ground between them and those which precede and follow to give them a simple continuity, and although there is doubtless in the divine mind one great plan of cosmical action in which each drama of the human ages serves as a single act or even a single incident? ”

“ And with real political awakening I shall trust that moral and religious progress will do more than keep pace. I go further; if the study of History can really be made an educational implement in schools, it will raise up a generation who not only will know how to vote, but will bring a judgment, prepared, trained, and in its own sphere exercised and developed, to help them in all the great affairs of life. Therefore let us have lectures many and good, books few and good; but above all school teaching fair, honest, and thorough. ”

“ We respect the man who, when he has to vote on any public question, goes to his books to get up the question instead of voting as the party whip would wish him; we would rather that his education had fitted him to do right at once, that he had studied public questions to begin with, or that he had, by the culture of educational reading, exercised his mind to discern between good and evil; but we do not despise him even if he votes wrong in the end. Even an indifferent Cyclopaedia is better than a paid party agent as a guide in doubtful questions. ”

“ History may be read either backwards or forwards. That is, the man who has time for it may begin at the beginning and read, on to modern times; noting every influence in its origin and effects, the growth and decay, as I have just said, of institutions, the origin, complications, and counter-changes of rights and wrongs; and, whether he reads on a wide scale or on a narrow one, he will, if he lives long enough, arrive at such a knowledge of the situation of things at the present day, as will give him a right to make his opinion heard. ”