employers have a right to regulate all their servants do, because they live in their house, does not meet the case, for no one who has men-servants would refuse to give them an hour or two in the day for going out, though they must know perfectly well that the time is invariably spent in smoking and drinking, if not in betting as well.

When will the world begin to see that the talk about protecting women is literally talk and nothing more? One of the favourite arguments against the Women's Suffrage is that they would perhaps be present at very rough and unpleasant scenes. Till it has been tried, who can tell whether, if women were present, much of the roughness and unpleasantness might not disappear? At any rate it would be better to make laws for the preservation of order, or to enforce the law already existing, which enacts that an election is void where the electors are unable to come to the poll from intimidation. If we are so anxious to protect the weak, let us see that assaults on women, and more particularly on children, are punished in a manner more adequate to the injury inflicted, and that a girl be considered a child until she is at least sixteen. Let us see that a woman's property is hers absolutely, whether married or single, and that a mother's right to her children is equal to a father's. Let us take care that all such professions as doctors, lawyers, &c., are open to all, since if they are unfit for women, they will fail in them, and no harm can be done; but do not let us try and exalt ourselves at the expense of others, in the belief that we are protecting them, for that is persecution, not protection.

One would almost suppose that parents and employers were of opinion that women had no sense of morality of their own at all, from the way they try to restrain their liberties. Cannot women at any rate see what they are doing by not joining to put down such restraints? And what is really at the

bottom of them? Far from a just or complimentary estimate of women as a body; and I am not at all sure that the way in which women are expected to be more punctual and careful in their religious duties than men, does not contain a covert insult also. Let them think it over.

The idea that women are the property of their male relations is an invariable rule among savage nations, and though to a certain extent in civilized countries they are recognised by law as free, a sort of survival of the old savage feeling still seems to cling to people's minds on this subject; but it cannot be defended on any proper logical grounds, and if women would but unite to show that they feel it wrong and shameful in every way, it would probably soon die out. It is no use to wait till all this is put before them by men; women themselves are in a great measure to blame for the present state of things; and to get a different view taken of their position lies very much in their own hands, and is probably the first step towards less unjust laws about them.

Women are far too much afraid of what others may say or think. They do not like to go to a theatre or concert alone, in case people should think it odd; but if every one did it there would be nothing odd about it. They will hardly go out to walk by themselves in London, in case any one should speak to them, which is not very likely if they are quietly dressed and don't stare at every one they meet; —and here also, if all did it, the danger would be still further lessened.

Women should see that the more boldly the respectable part of society comes forward the more the vicious portion will be driven into a corner! Indeed it is not vice that the majority are afraid of, because they don't care what their men friends do, nor what life a woman really leads as long as her husband says nothing.

Surely it is time that these wearying vexations were given up. They put

those who have their living to make at a great disadvantage, they debar those who are better off from many innocent recreations, and they make the very rich even more frivolous and idle than they would otherwise be. All women should combine to do boldly what suits them; should not allow themselves to be put to inconvenience without any good reason; and should see that much in the present system of their lives shows a great want of selfrespect. Above all they should not be afraid of shadows, since that which is morally right and good cannot be unfit to be practised.

How can men: be expected to aid heartily in removing the political disabilities of women while they themselves, by their mode of treating their daughters and each other, appear to show that they consider them unfit to have the smallest particle of personal liberty? Let them see the thing in this its true light. Let women begin by showing the world that they at least consider themselves and each other rational beings, and not "perpetual infants,” and then they may, with even greater force than at present, demand the just rights given by property and citizenship.

FLORENCE W. HARBERTON.

I.

I HAVE been engaged for ten years in teaching history at one of our great universities. The period has been critical in our academical development. The studies of Cambridge have in this time become more wide and various than ever before, and among other new disciplines that of history has acquired influence and organisation. Not only do many

students now devote almost their whole time to this study, struggling for historical honours with the ambition which twenty years ago no subjects but mathematics and classics could inspire, but-what interests me still more-there has formed itself among the graduates, and in the teaching class of the University, a group of specialists, small as yet, but full of ardour, and steadily increasing in number, whose lives are devoted to historical study in the most comprehensive sense of the word. They move in no rut, and are cramped by no limitations; they wrestle freely with the question-What is the object of history, and what is its method? How ought it to be studied, and how ought it to be taught?

These papers will present some of the more general views about the study and teaching of history which have been reached by one of these specialists. They will have at once a scientific and an educational bearing. They will be No. 238.-VOL. XL.

addressed in the first instance neither to the general reader nor to the pure scientific theorist, but rather to those engaged in the higher education—those who inquire practically what place history is to fill in our national culture, and how the teaching of it as already established in schools and universities, and also in literature, may be made more reasonable and more useful.

Two broad movements are now observable in the historical world. One aims at making history accessible and readable, the other aims at giving it the exactness of a science. I can most easily explain my own view by making some observations upon these two movements in turn. Let us look first at the great effort that has been made to popularise history and bring it within the reach of all the world. We have all heard how the romances of Walter Scott brought history home to people who would never have looked into the ponderous volumes of professed historians, and many of us confess to ourselves that there are large historical periods which would be utterly unknown to us but for some story either of the great romancer or one of his innumerable imitators. Writers, as well as readers, of history were awakened by Scott to what seemed to them the new discovery that the great personages of history were after all men and women of flesh and blood like ourselves. Hence in all later

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the effort to make history more personal, more dramatic than it had been before. We can hardly read the interesting Life of Lord Macaulay without perceiving that the most popular historical work of modern times owes its origin in a great measure to the Waverley Novels. Macaulay grew up in a world of novels; his conversation with his sisters was so steeped in reminiscences of the novels they had read together as to be unintelligible to those who wanted the clue. His youth and early manhood witnessed the appearance of_the Waverley Novels themselves. Year after year he saw history made the fashion by this fascinating pen, and historical persons, Louis XI. or the Stuart kings, made as real—for this is the phrase we commonly use-as only imaginary persons, Achilles or Lear or Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe, had ever been to the majority of mankind before. Macaulay tells us himself that in his rambles about the streets of London his brain was commonly busy in composing imaginary conversations among historical persons; these conversations, he says, were like those in the Waverley Novels. Thus trained, he became naturally possessed by the idea which is expressed over and over again in his essays, and which at last he realised with such wonderful success, the idea that it was quite possible to make history as interesting as romance. There is perhaps something a little odd, when we think of it, in the notion that what is real may, by proper skill in the handling, be brought home to us as much as if it were imaginary. Novelists had before been praised for the magic skill with which they had made fiction look like truth. In a bookish age there was room for a magician who should reverse this feat, and charm mankind equally by making truth look like fiction.

Macaulay is only the most famous of a large group of writers who have been possessed with the same idea.

mance, he may be said to have founded the romantic history. And to this day it is an established popular opinion that this is the true way of writing history, only that few writers have genius enough for it. The characters, it is thought, should start into life at the historian's touch. His descriptions, it is thought, cannot be too vivid, nor his narrative too exciting. As the object of a book is to be read, it is clear, so runs the popular argument, that the best book is that which is most readable. It is inconceivable to the popular mind that a man should write a book which it is difficult to read, when he might have written a delightful and fascinating one. A historical work therefore written in these days, if it is only as interesting as histories used to be before the days of Scott and Macaulay, or if it is at all difficult to read, is popularly regarded as missing its mark. It is taken for granted that the writer meant it to be like a romance, only he wanted imagination; of course he did not mean it to be tough reading, only he was stupid, and had not the talent of explaining things clearly. In like manner I have observed that many teachers of history take it for granted that the problem before them is how to present history in a form which shall be attractive to their pupils, how to appeal to their imaginations. They say that they find some parts of history leave their pupils cold, but others visibly take hold of them, fix their attention, kindle the eye, and make the breath come quick; and they infer, as a matter of course, that these interesting parts should be selected for teaching, and the uninteresting parts passed over.

Now this popular opinion is plausible enough, particularly when we consider how history first began, and what its object was for many ages supposed and assumed to be. Is it not the function of Clio to keep alive the memory of famous deeds? "and is she

not a Muse? Evidently then she must speak to the great world, and with the sound of a trumpet. It is not her part to plod along the ground in creeping prose; her sphere is the open sky, and she moves upon the wings of poetry. There is much reason in this; and it is most right and desirable that there should always be historians of the type of Macaulay. Noble deeds should be told in splendid language; great events should pass before us in swelling and stately narrative. Nay, even the historical romance perhaps has its place, though that is more doubtful. The element of falsity that will creep in where pleasure, rather than truth, is the object, is here admitted too freely; in critical times like these the mature taste rebels against flights of imagination which in Shakspeare's time, when all history was but a proud tradition, were natural. But boys and girls at any rate need not be grudged their historical romance, and one would pity the boy that had not read Ivanhoe, in spite of its historical blunders.

On the other hand it must be urged against this kind of history that very few subjects or periods are worthy of it. Once or twice there have appeared glorious characters whose perfection no eloquence can exaggerate; once or twice national events have arranged themselves like a drama, or risen to the elevation of an epic poem. But the average of history is not like this; it is indeed much more ordinary and monotonous than is commonly supposed. The serious student of history has to submit to a disenchantment like that which the experience of life brings to the imaginative youth. As life is not much like romance, so history when it is studied in original documents looks very unlike the conventional representation of it which historians have accustomed us to. It is much more uniform and ruled by routine; there is less in it both of virtue and vice, of extraordinary wisdom or insane folly, than is

supposed. You are at first disposed to ask yourself what can be the use of mastering a mass of detail at once so intricate and so dull; you do not recognise there the splendid things,

nor

yet the interesting things, which historians profess to have discovered. Where they saw an act of heroic virtue, you find only an ordinary piece of official routine; the crime which they denounced in tragic tones turns out, when you understand the point of view of the accused person, to have been a perfectly natural action. And where some great event has happened, a nation gloriously emancipated, or falling ignominiously, you do not find the proportion you expected between the events themselves, and the actors in them. This man, whom posterity execrates as the author of a nation's ruin, turns out to have been a very respectable and intelligent person; that admired liberator or worshipped triumphator you find to have been wholly uninteresting. In short you find the maxim that "historical personages were men and women of flesh and blood like ourselves" to be for most practical purposes untrue.

What is perhaps more annoying still, you find that on many of the questions which it would be most interesting to decide, no conclusion whatever is attainable. In the way of making history as interesting as romance, there is not only the obstacle that the persons and events very often turn out on examination to have been actually uninteresting, but also another obstacle. The romancer is never troubled by want of knowledge; he knows everything, all the family relations, all the intimate thoughts of his personages. Whatever the reader wants to know, he can tell him; he can supply whatever is necessary to create a complete and satisfying impression on the reader's imagination. But the historian knows very little. Of the real facts, of the lives of his personages, only a