theless, there is some truth in the saying that history is like
an old almanac, if we may take this to mean that, although the same
events never happen again in the same way, yet in the great movements
of the tide of the world's affairs a sort of periodical recurrence, an
ebb and flow, may be noticed. For example, we know that from the
fifteenth until near the end of the seventeenth century the Asiatic
armies of the Turkish Sultans were invading and conquering
South-Eastern Europe--they reached the gates of Vienna. Then followed
a swing backward of the pendulum, and from the eighteenth to the end
of the nineteenth century the European Powers, Russia and England,
were each extending a great dominion over Asia. Again, up to a few
years ago, the Turkish empire was a barbarous despotism, and we all
believed that it must break up and be extinguished. Yet it has now
revived in a new form, which may possibly restore its power and
prosperity. To search for and distinguish the operating causes, the
powers that underlie these incalculable changes, is a task for the
student of history.

There must be many of you for whom these high problems have a strong
attraction, who enjoy rapid flights over the broad surface of history,
wide outlooks over the past and future. Now, I admit that bold
generalisations are hazardous, unless founded upon very solid
knowledge; but in historical as well as in physical science they are
needed to sum up results, to bring facts into focus. They enable us,
so the late Lord Acton has said, to fasten on abiding issues, to
distinguish the temporary from the transient.

The late Lord Acton, who, as you may remember, was Professor of Modern
History at Cambridge, is reckoned by general consent to have surpassed
all his contemporaries, at least in England, by his encyclopaedic,
accurate, and profound knowledge of history. His reading was vast, his
learning prodigious, his industry never slackened. Yet the literary
production of his life is contained in three volumes of essays,
lectures, and articles; he has left us no complete book. Indeed, his
writing is so disproportionate to his reading that one is tempted to
liken his luminous intellect to a fire on which too much fuel had been
heaped; the ardent mind glowed and shot up its streaks of radiance
through the weight of erudition that overlaid it. Among Lord Acton's
published papers is a 'Note of Advice to Persons about to Write
History,' of which the first wor