STUDY OF HISTORY.*
PROFESSOR STUBBS was appointed to his chair on the unusual ground that he was master of the subject which he was called upon to teach. A critic, therefore, must be endowed with extra- ordinary learning or with extraordinary self-confidence if he ean venture to criticize the Regius Professor's Illustrations of English Constitutional History, and may be excused if he leaves eulogy to the half-dozen persons really competent to praise the book, and directs attention to some general considerations which the Professor's most valuable and interesting work suggests.
Much discussion has been wasted over the futile inquiry whether history is a science, and meanwhile the much more important pies- ton, how can history be made a systematic study? has been neglected. The public, indeed, consider for the most part that any man can 'be an historian who is gifted with average ability and ordinary diligence, and the " paradox " or " truism "—we leave to Professor Seeley the choice of terms—now propounded on high authority at Cambridge seems to be that the true method of historical in- quiry is to study the Times and gain a fair knowledge of the Annual Register. A little reflection will, however, convince most persons that historical researches ought to be conducted on some fixed principles, and that the main duty of a professor of iistory is to teach his pupils what these principles are, not by propounding paradoxes, but by providing them with models of the way in which history ought to be studied if it is ever to be anything worthy of the name of study. The great importance of Professor Stubbs' work is that it is each a model of the true method of historical research, and directly suggests the principles .on which students of past events must carry on their researches.
The first and main principle which every student ought to grasp
• Select Charters, and other Illustrations of English Constitutional history, from Me Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I. Arranged and edited by William Stubbs, 3I.A., Regius Professor of Modern History. Clarendon Press, Oxford. is that the study of history is nothing but the study of evidence. If you want to know, for example, what was the condition of Germany in the time of Tacitus, you can attain the desired knowledge, if attainable at all, only by a mode of inquiry the same in kind as that which is adopted when the point to be ascertained is whether A left a will bequeathing his property to B. In the one case, proof must be sought for in the statements con- tained in old documents (in the particular instance, some few pages of the Germania), whilst in the other case you must find A's will or a copy of it, or at anyrate some person who knows what it contained. In general terms, everyone admits that this is so, but there are few persons willing to concede all the results which follow from the admission. A primary consequence is that where there is no evidence there can be no history. Some ten pages of Pro- fessor Stubbs' work, for example, contain all the statements made by Caesar or Tacitus about the political institutions of the early Germans, and by the contents of these few pages our knowledge of these institutions is necessarily bounded. Many persons, we sus- pect, think that this is not so, and entertain a confused idea that by the use of historical analogies, by the manipulation of so-called laws of history, by the force of imagination, or by some other of the hundred ways by which men attempt to substitute fancy for fact, it is possible to know more of Germany than our authorities tell us. Still it is in the end to these scanty statements of Caesar and Tacitus to which we must return for all the real knowledge which we possess of early Germanic institutions. Their statements may be meagre or obscure, but they are the only basis on which we can build, and inferences not grounded upon them may be plausible or seductive, but are not history, and are of little sub- stantial value. A mere glance at Professor Stubbs' Origines brings home to the mind better than any lecture how infinitely narrow is the basis of fact on which piles of historical theories have been reared by historians who have not realized the principle that where there is no evidence, direct or indirect, there can be no history.
A further result of this canon is that the collection of evidence is the first duty of historical students. There are no doubt many most important subjects concerning which it will always be impos- sible to collect any knowledge beyond that already in our posses- sion. To return to the example already used, it is, though not impossible, in the highest degree improbable, that a new source of information as to the state of the German tribes in the time of Tacitns should be opened to us. But there are periods of history of which our knowledge might be largely increased by the labours of carefully trained investigators. There can be no doubt that some most important aspects of English history might be cleared up by the examination and publication of various un- published records. It is, for example, as we believe, the case, that there are masses of minutes of the proceedings of the Privy Council which are unpublished, and to a great extent unex- plored. There is again in the history of English law and its con- nection with political changes, a field for historical research which would amply repay the labour of any person who, like Pro- fessor Stubbs, was competent to conduct it. It is obvious, at any rate, that the " school " of an historical professor could not render any greater service than by investigating carefully periods or special historical questions with regard to which there still exists unexplored evidence, and that a work such as Illustrations of Eng- lish Constitutional History, though it cannot, from the necessity of the case, contain documents which are new or unknown, is a model of what a collection of historical Origines should be.
The mere collection of proofs is but the first step in the exa- mination of evidence. The second and more difficult process is to estimate the worth of the documents collected, and to determine what the contents of these documents really prove. It is at this point more than any other that systematic training is wanted. An historian of reputation, who seized with unusual vividness the true idea that one main source of English history ought to be the laws of England, threw away the value of this really brilliant concep- tion by his having somehow taken up the notion that all that was said in the preamble to Acts of Parliament must necessarily be true, whilst, in fact, a preamble may be, and often is, an amusing example of legal imagination, and, at best, proves only that the writer of it wished certain statements to be believed to be true, and perhaps, too, that they were not then in all probability notoriously false. If an historian of great merit may show a singular incapacity for fairly estimating the exact bearing of the evidence which he has collected, it is certain that a student's greatest difficulty will lie in the interpretation of evidence. We have seldom come across an author who seems better fitted than the Regius Professor to instruct his pupils in the true principles of interpretation. He possesses a calm good-sense which cuts through a whole mass of useless theorizing and discus- sion. Anyone, for example, who has read even a very slight amount of the excited disquisitions and lectures published either in favour of or against the influence of Roman civili- zation on the history of England must be equally weary of the pedantry which traces the influence of Rome in arrangements common to every nation under the sun, and of the somewhat boisterous patriotism which seems to think it the proudest boast of an Englishman that he and his ancestors have been English from all time, and have never owed anything either to Celt or Roman.
It is at any rate a comfort to come across a well-informed writer who can treat an historical question simply as an historian, and sum up the practical result of a lengthy controversy in the follow- ing sentences, which are as calm and decisive as a judge's charge :
"Were the evidences of intermixture of race much stronger and more general than they are, to the student of constitutional history they are without significance. From the Briton and the Roman of the fifth cen- tury we have received nothing. Our whole internal history testifies un- mistakably to our inheritance of Teutonic institutions from the first immigrants. The Teutonic element is the paternal element in our system, natural and political."
An example of Professor Stubbs' powers as an interpreter of documentary evidence may be seen in his comments upon the force of the expression "counsel and consent" used from a very -early period in slightly varying shapes in the enactment of statutes. This formula is of great importance, as it affords some guidance in answering a question of primary consequence to the constitutional historian, what was the real power of the Crown at different periods. The Regius Professor carefully examines the real force of a form preserved during a long period under various develop- ments of the Royal power. He points out that the variations in the formula have a genuine historical significance, and that the origin of changes in it " may be exactly traced, and will be found to synchronize with the later changes in the balance of power between the several estates and the Sovereign," but he is equally careful to call attention to the fact that the actual force of the expression can only be approximately estimated, and certainly varied greatly under different Sovereigns.
The need of carefully weighing the exact value of expressions is a lesson to be impressed on all students of history, but the lesson is one specially needed by any one who studies the English Con- stitution. The history of its growth is to be found embodied in a series of formulas, but these formulas, though they always have a meaning, are particularly apt to suggest erroneous inferences from the fact that it is the essence of constitutionalism, at any rate, as developed in England, to disguise great changes under the use of unchanging forms. Edward I. acted by the counsel and consent of his Parliament, and Queen Victoria also acts by their advice and consent, but no one supposes that the powerlessness of Queen Victoria is the same thing as the considerable though not un- limited power of King Edward. It is as showing the real nature of mediaeval institutions, and also the real nature of
our Constitution, that the Illustrations of English Constitutional History has an interest for persons who cannot be called his- torical students. A perusal of the Dictum de Kenilworth brings
more vividly before the mind the relation of Church and State in the middle ages than do whole volumes of ordinary history, whilst no one can read the book with any care without realizing a fact as to our Constitution which seems to be often forgotten. This fact is that the Constitution not only is, but always was, a mass of fictions. In this it corresponded with the institu- tions of an age of which it has been well said that it regarded facts and forms, and had no sense of principles. The religion and the politics of the middle ages were all influenced in a way hardly -comprehensible to modern persons at once by formulas and by the facts of life. In theology and in jurisprudence Englishmen are gradually ridding themselves of mediaeval forms. In their constitutional politics they are still acting in the spirit of the middle ages. The nation is always indignant at the least hint, as in the case of the Irish Church Bill, that the Crown should exercise its veto, but the nation would be probably still more indignant at any Radical who proposed to enact that the veto should never be exercised. If anyone wants to understand this
practical paradox, he cannot do better than study the Illustrations of English Constitutional History.
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