The Project Gutenberg eBook, Lectures on Modern history, by Baron John
Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

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Title: Lectures on Modern history

Author: Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

Release Date: June 26, 2006 [eBook #18685]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LECTURES ON MODERN HISTORY***

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LECTURES ON MODERN HISTORY

by

LORD ACTON (JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON)

INAUGURAL LECTURE

ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY

Delivered at Cambridge, June 1895

FELLOW STUDENTS--I look back today to a time before the middle of
the century, when I was reading at Edinburgh and fervently
wishing to come to this University. At three colleges I applied
for admission, and, as things then were, I was refused by all.
Here, from the first, I vainly fixed my hopes, and here, in
a happier hour, after five-and-forty years, they are at last
fulfilled.

I desire, first, to speak to you of that which I may reasonably
call the Unity of Modern History, as an easy approach to questions
necessary to be met on the threshold by any one occupying this
place, which my predecessor has made so formidable to me by the
reflected lustre of his name.

You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject to
which neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning,
because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a
void; because, in society as in nature, the structure is
continuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, until
we dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests of
Germany. No end, because, on the same principle, history made
and history making are scientifically inseparable and separately
unmeaning.

"Politics," said Sir John Seeley, "are vulgar when they are not
liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature
when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics."
Everybody perceives the sense in which this is true. For the
science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the
stream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river;
and the knowled