HINTS ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY AT THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES.
Ma. FRFEMAN' in the letter which will be found among our correspondence this week, draws attention to an important subject at an opportune time. He complains that the authorities of Oxford. are proposing, in their New Examination Statute, what is, in his opinion, a change for the worse in respect to the examinations in History; and that they are retaining that division of History into Ancient and Modern which is at once unphilosophical in idea and inconvenient and contradictory in practice. There can be no question that Mr. Freeman is right in what he says ; and that the only excuse for the proposed. Oxford. arrangement has to be sought, if anywhere, in the mechanical difficulties that attend the study of history as a separate and distinct branch of university instruction. With those it is hardly our province to deal; and we will only remark, that it seems unwise on the part of a great university to encourage in its students, by any of its regulations, the false and superficial notion that history consists of isolated, groups of events, which have only an accidental likeness to or connexion with each other. Certainly, if an university undertakes to teach history, the first and leading thought stamped upon its procedure ought to be the endeavour to elicit from the chaotic multiplicity of the phenomena of history a moral and intellectual order. Unless this is contemplated as possible we cannot understand on what _pound the university study of history can be fitly placed; and if it be contemplated as possible, we see no method of carrying it out but by treating history as one whole. Of course it is impossible to teach the whole of history, or to teach more than a very small portion of it at once ; but the scheme on which the university stamps its authority ought not on the face of it to contradict both the only true idea of history and some of its plainest facts. And probably the best practical way of showing its sense of this truth would be, that the university should connect the study of history with the study of politi cal philosophy ; the latter being the science of which the other is an ever-varying illustration. If this involves the consequence that a student is taken to his historical facts under the bias of an abstract system, and that he is in danger of finding in histo only the political truths or propositions which his professor hi him look for, it is only what happens in all other studies pursued under the guidance of a more advanced mind ; and we believe it to be the only method by which the student can be saved from inextricable confusion at the commencement of his studies in any particular branch. He cannot begin with researches intended to establish laws entirely unknown, or yet in question. He must be content for a long time to verify the conclusions at which others have arrived before him, to test their reasoning by the fresh facts which will pour upon him day by day, and gradually to strengthen himself for conclusions which may or may not coincide with those which his teacher endeavoured to impress upon him, but which will be in either ease at last the legitimate conclusions on the facts as they present themselves to his mind. It has often struck us, that we begin to teach history at the wrong end ; not only in the point just mentioned, that we attempt to teach its facts before its principles, but that we reverse the true order of its facts for a student. History is so vast a subject, embracing in its largest, truest sense, all we can know about the actions and fortunes of our race, that it matters little where we begin to study it, provided we study it with the keen interest which gives life to its records and turns the "old almanack " into a magnificent and agitating drama. But the one point is to rouse this keen interest ; and if we see, as we do, the majority of persons knowng nothing and caring to know nothing about history, yet taking the most lively interest in what is in fact contemporary history, one cause must lie in their never having been made to see that contemporary history loses all its grandeur when not viewed as the connecting link between the past and the future, and that to understand the present it is absolutely necessary to refer it to its cause in the past. We have in the almost universal interest taken by our countrymen in politics and social movements generally a natural starting-point on which to rest the study of history. But this we systematically neglect, and attempt to interest youths of all ranks and classes in events of which they can make out no details, and persons who are mere names to their imaginations. If we began with the present, we should find that we at once interested our students, and they would become eager to trace backward the events and the causes which are in operation in the present. Probably it would not be long before a strong desire to know the "beginning of things" took possession of minds which are now utterly insensible to the attractions of the past. If, then, we had to frame an ideal scheme for the study of history at an university, our first object would be to provide for the systematizing, or bringing into distinct coordination, that common knowledge of contemporary domestic history which every young man naturally possesses. And, as the central point of this knowledge, as being at once the most important and the most capable of independent development and the least open to objection as introducing mere party polities, we should select that group of organic laws which is comprehended under the name of constitutional. The teaching would answer the questions What are they ? and How did they become what they are ? and this latter question would involve the circumstances out of which they sprung, the course of events which shaped them thus or thus, and the persons by whom that course of events was guided. In other words, the fundamental instruction in the History School of an English university ought, in our opinion, to consist of lectures on the English Constitution and on Constitutional History ; and this ought to be a subsidiary and illustrative study to that of abstract political philosophy. A knowledge of any coherent system of " politics " would hnd a student prepared to contemplate the English constitution as the organism of a living body for the performance of functions necessary to the idea of a state ; and it would be simply impossible to avoid feeling interest in the inquiry how these organs have been developed historically, and afterwards how they differ from other varieties of the ideal type. Thus, step by step the student would be led to foreign history, and to what we ball ancient history. But, however far he went, or however short he stopped, his knowledge would be coherent and systematized, would be coordinated by principles, and would stay by him ; whereas, now, students read an immense deal of history, understand little of it, care little for it, think it a great bore, and forget it as soon as they can.
" CONSOLIDATION " OF THE STATUTE LAW.—No. I.
Jun before the end of the last session of Parliament, the Lord Chancellor laid upon the table of the House of Lords eight bills, all professing-in their titles and preambles to be "Acts for the Consolidation of the &state Law" in respect of the particular matters of each several bill. They were at that period of time necessarily presented with the intention that their contents should be considered during the recess of Parliament, and judged of with a view to their adoption, modification, or rejection, in the now coming session. And it is of the utmost importance that in this ease a non-Parliamentary discussion of both the matter and the processes involved should precede the Parliamentary discussion. We are generally rather proud than otherwise of the practical and nu-systematical spirit of Parliament—of its inclination to provide for the proved necessities of the day only, and its disinclination, if not its incapacity, to deal with questions
merely of form, method, or general or abstract policy or principle, such as is every measure that is purely one of mere reconstruc tion or consolidation of existing laws. These bills especially are
confined to the rearrangement of the present statutory provisions relating to "Indictable Offences' "—a merely technical connexion of matters best known to a small class of practising lawyers, and
after these to the criminal population, not supposed to be represented in Parliament, and but little known or oared for in their details by anybody else until he in his own person becomes a victim of some offence. The matter is looked on mainly as a lawyer's matter ; the bills come from the Lord Chancellor and a Commission, consisting, with their draughtsmen employed on the details, exclusively of lawyers, who, it is assumed, must know all about it ; and if the lawyers in both Houses are content with them, a lay Member will scarcely venture to dismiss the subject in a critical manner. Indeed, the public and Parliament are expressly urged to accept and pass these measures on trust and without discussion, on the ground that the eminent persons responsible for their preparation are fully competent to the task, that they make no substantial changes in the law, and that if they be discussed in Parliament their passing is rendered practically impossible.
Yet it is to be remembered, that no one of all the mischievous or inefficient, or defective, or discordant provisions in all this body of " Criminal " Law as it is called, but has been devised, draughted, and passed through Parliament, by eminent lawyers, and with the concurrence of all or most of the distinguished lawyers at the time in both Houses. Laws that satisfy lawyers are such as lawyers themselves can understand ; and that result being realized—it being in any instance reasonably clear to them that in a litigated case a judicial conclusion with the proposed effect could be attained—the frame of the law is satisfactory to the apprehension of most lawyers. That the
law should, besides this i intelligibility to lawyers and judges, be also clear in its expression, connected. n plan and order, and so adapted to the apprehension of the millions of men and women who are to derive their ordinary protections from it, and are bound at all times and in all places to obey it—and to whom it is the utmost evil to have to learn its provisions by a breach of those provisions, or from the advice of a lawyer, or from the decision of a court of justice—is a result which, without any intention to impute any improper selfishness to them, lawyers and judges are in the constant habit of disregarding. At all events, neither Parliament as a body, nor lawyers nor judges, have ever yet in England, with perhaps two or three exceptions, shown themselves to be in any great degree masters of the practice of clear and simple expression even in purely legal matters, and still less masters in practice of those principles on which depend the connexion of the matter to be expressed, the collection together of analogous matters throwing mutual light on each other, the ordering of the succession of the matters in such a way that the most complicate results are reached by proceeding through their separate and more simple and intelligible parts and stages, and the subordination of those parts under such general heads that their several places alone express better than any words can possibly do all the general and special considerations to which those parts are to be subjected. Yet these are the real processes of "consolidation" or "codification "—without them the intended results are impossible. If the Bar or the Bench or Parliament had produced occasionally a few small acts of Parliament displaying on ever so limited a scale the practical applications of such processes, it might be permitted to us to hope that some combination of their members as a Commission would insure their application to any " consolidations " that such a Commission might produce. But as experience as yet is opposed to such an assumption, the ground fails for the demand now made on us by the Lord Chancellor and by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, that we should accept without discussion the bills now before us.
It is therefore proposed, in a few short but carefully-considered papers, to examine the necessity and the possibility of a clear and well-ordered statement, whether called digest," " consolidation " or " code " of the matter of the Statute-Law, the more important requisites of such an arrangement, and the extent to which these " eonsolidations " now before us realize what is requisite and possible,' and would justify the implicit confidence which their authors require that Parliament and the public should re pose in them. 0. 0.
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