rapid a ratio as he found to be the case in Belgium. If, as Colonel Torrens assumes, capital only returns to agriculture when trade ceases to be productive, would the increase in the value of land which the growth of the city induces be as great as we find it? Assuredly not; and moreover if land followed such an impulse, it must, like trade, continually decrease in value, and be worth less from year to year. Now it is needless to say that the experience of no country in Europe confirms this view; but least of all do we find it to be the case in such lands as possess a flourishing trade and manufactures, or in such agrarian countries as allow unrestricted intercourse with those in which trade is thriving.

Whether in England the rents of towns and their dependent environs equal the income derived from agricultural rents, it is of course impossible to say, as long as we are so remarkably ignorant with respect to our own condition, as we are contented to be. The presumption is, that the agricultural rents are already outstripped by the others, because under other circumstances it is difficult to conceive how two-thirds (at least) of the population are supported by other than agricultural occupations. As it is clearly the interest of the farmer, no less than of the citizen, to see the disproportion between the producing and consuming classes (as far as farming produce is concerned) increase, we may hope that such presumed inequality in the rents will be hailed, when ascertained really to exist, as indicating a truly flourishing state of the country. Impressed with this conviction, all classes will find it advantageous to augment production in every possible manner, in defiance of Messrs. Ricardo's and M'Culloch's sinister prognostications, and to cultivate by all the means in their power the arts by which it is promoted.

72

ARTICLE III.

State of Historical Science in France.

1. Récits des Temps Mérovingiens. Précédés de Considérations sur l'Histoire de France. Par AUGUSTIN THIERRY.

2ième Edition, 2 vols. Paris, 1842.

2. HEGEL: Philosophie der Geschichte.

von Dr. E. GANS. Zweite Auflage.

Herausgegeben Berlin, 1840.

3. VICO: Scienza Nuova. Traduction de MICHELET. Brux

THE admirable work of M. Augustin Thierry, the second edition of which heads this article, has strongly impressed us with the necessity of examining the present state of historical science. It is a subject of vast importance or of wearisome frivolity, according to the view taken of the historic function; and as the former is the opinion we maintain, we shall spare no pains to set it in its true light. Perhaps there was never so great an historical tendency in European thought as is manifested in the present century; and seldom has the world seen such historians as those who have made this tendency illustrious. For many reasons, needless here to be explained, we shall confine ourselves principally to France, which may be taken as the centre of European speculation; our remarks will however apply also to other countries.

Looking at French thought, with a view of detecting its tendency, we everywhere find it either based upon, or inclining to, history. Philosophy, divided into so many schools, has the one pretension, in common to them all, of proving itself by the attestation of history. As with philosophy, so with art: the resuscitation of the past is the incessant endeavour of both classic and romantic writers. The delineation of the life of the middle ages, even to the minutest details of costume, is the problem which all artists set themselves to solve. Those who are without the necessary knowledge, affect it.

Where lies the cause of this tendency? It lies we believe

in the spirit of the age,-" an age destitute of faith, yet terrified at scepticism,”—an age of universal anarchy of thought, with strong desire for organization;-an age, succeeding one of destruction, anxious to reconstruct,-anxious, but as yet impotent. The desire of belief is strong; convictions are wanting there is neither spiritual nor moral union. In this plight we may hope for the future, but can cling only to the past: that alone is secure, well-grounded. The past must form the basis of certainty and the materials for speculation. This fact is very distinctly visible in the numerous endeavours to construct new philosophies and new christianities in France at the present time; all of them found their arguments on the results of historical philosophy; all proclaim the verification by history as conclusive.

This conviction of the importance of history is a product of our age. For the first time a mission is assigned to the study of the past, worthy of fulfilment: this mission is, to exhibit the evolution of humanity, and to form thereby a social science. The very conception of a social science, whereby political measures will be no longer experimental expediences, but calculations founded upon ascertained laws, is of yesterday. True it is that history has always claimed for itself the office of "philosophy teaching by example,"-of furnishing us with "rules of conduct," and with "experiences of the past to be applied to the exigences of the present;" but these have been mere figures of speech, and as destitute of any real importance as the claims of astronomy before the time of Galileo. The philosophy of history was not even suspected, much less organized; and without this philosophy, all experiences and examples are as useless as are the isolated observations of phænomena unaided by a scientific theory. We want no more striking illustration of the barrenness of this "philosophy teaching by example," than is afforded by the dangerous and ridiculous imitations of the ancient republics at the time of the French Revolution: forms of constitution which grew up out of a state of things entirely and essentially different were attempted to be revived, as if France in the eighteenth century had been their natural soil. History has never been able to fulfil its pompous promises, because it has never been a science. It has assumed every shape but that of science: it has as

sumed that of a poetic narrative, a droning chronicle, a philosophic dissertation, a chaos of erudition, a party-pamphlet and a literary dilettante exhibition of style and information-never of a science. It has not been suspected till recently to be capable of scientific organization, except by a few solitary thinkers, such as Vico, Herder, etc.

We have said that a strong conviction of the importance of history has taken possession of European speculation; with this conviction there necessarily sprang up another, which proclaimed that the old methods of writing history were false and impotent. As formerly written, nothing could be more barren with reference to social science. Popes, kings and emperors-courts, camps and dungeons- these have filled the "swelling scene" to the exclusion of all that was important, vital-all that produced them and much else. Battles, conspiracies, dethronements, decapitations, treaties and extortions were deemed the great events, the staple of historic interest; and on them the writer spun his dissertations upon moral right and immoral wrong, on despotism, liberty and "flourishing civilization." The men of the past were judged according to the standards and ethics of the present; their acts were measured according to some abstract standard, and on this Procrustes bed received their degradation or applause. Whereas, if history tells one thing more plainly, more universally than another, it is that the ethical and ideal standards both of act and character vary with the revolving years; that the heroism of yesterday becomes the brutality of today; and the deed so necessary at one time as to be even virtuous, is at another superfluously vicious. But the historians of whom we speak, including even Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, had no conception of this-nor of much else, more important still. They wrote books which were more or less amusing and instructive-monuments of erudite industry, but not history-not the story of the life, growth and development of a nation, its characteristics, its greatness, its errors, and above all its connexion with the preceding and succeeding states of humanity. Moreover in the very province of erudition, where these writers were strongest, there was a great deficiency of critical acumen; the authorities were diligently sought after and cited, but seldom criticised; seldom

was the authority sifted, as we see in later writers. It is notorious among modern scholars that chronicles falsify, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes knowingly; that the public acts are equally to be suspected; that archives are to be confronted with facts and authorities; in a word, that every species of authority has to undergo a rigorous trial. We find little of this in the old historians. But, granting that the erudition was complete, and that the exactitude of facts and dates was irreproachable, how little could that avail where the great exactitudes of science and art were wanting! Of what significance were the scrupulously collected bricks, when the foundation was of sand? Let us not be understood as depreciating erudition and exactness; these are the materials wherewith to build, but they are not the house.

"The research and discussion of facts," says Thierry, "purely with a view to exactness, is but one side of every historical problem; and that accomplished, it becomes necessary to interpret and to paint ;-to detect the law which chains one fact to another; to give events their significance and character-in a word, their life, which should never be absent from the spectacle of human things......

"History gives lessons, and in turn receives them: its master is experience, which teaches it from epoch to epoch to judge itself better. The events of the last fifty years-events hitherto unheard of—have taught us to understand the revolutions of the middle ages, to perceive the spirit beneath the letter of the chronicler, to draw from the writings of the Benedictines that which those learned men never saw, or saw only in a partial incomplete manner without suspecting its significance. They wanted the comprehension and sentiment of great social transformations. They have curiously studied the laws, public acts, judicial formulæ, private contracts, etc.; they have discussed, classified, analysed texts with astonishing sagacity; but the political sense--all that was living beneath that dead letter the perception of the society and its adverse elements, whether young or old, whether barbarian or civilized, escapes them; and hence the insufficiency of their works. This perception we have acquired through our experience; we owe it to the prodigious changes of power and of society which have operated before our eyes."

But if the old methods of historical study were imperfect, are then the new complete?-No. We are in a transitionstate at present: we have discovered that our predecessors were wrong, but have not ourselves discovered the whole truth. We know that they were without the proper conception of history, and without the materials for rightly studying it; the