PROFESSOR SEELEY AND HIS REVIEWER.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—Allow me to point out that you have seriously misrepre- sented a passage in my " Lectures and Essays." You say, " He seems to think it" (military despotism) "promotes the develop- ment of the feminine virtues. No doubt those virtues did become developed under the Roman Empire, but it does not follow that the system ought to have the credit of producing them."
You will see on referring to the passage you quote from that I say precisely what you say, and not a word more. I have con- tented myself with chronicling a fact in the history of the Empire ; about the cause of it I have not even hinted a conjecture. I have indeed in another part of the volume connected the religiousness of the later Empire with the sufferings it had to undergo, and particularly with the despotism under which it laboured. Belies gions feeling, I find, has often been called out in nations by suffering. But that despotism is favourable to the feminine, virtues generally, or to any class of virtues, I do not believe. The
utmost I should affirm is that if any virtues can contrive to live under a military despotism, it is more likely to be the feminine than the masculine ones.
You speak with so much respect of my views on education in general, that perhaps it may interest you to be told that I do not at all consider my theory of the proper way of teaching history the mere ingenious paradox you represent it. You write as if you doubted whether I seriously believe it myself. I can assure you that I believe it very firmly, and that I have been so strongly con- firmed in it by the experience I have had as a teacher of history, that I have come to consider it as one of those elementary truths which it is wearisome to discuss.
Lastly, let me assure you that it was by no oversight that I used the word " philosophy " where you think I ought to have said "psychology," and that I was so ignorant, and continue so ignorant still, as to think my use of the word " philosophy" quite legitimate, and that to have substituted " psychology " would have spoiled the
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