ould be as uninstructive as fairy lore; its chief use
would be to amuse the fancy; and little more practical advantage could
result from investigating the causes of the failure of James II.'s
designs on civil and religious liberty, than from an inquiry into the
artifices by which Jack-the-Giant-killer contrived to escape the maw of
the monsters against whom he had pitted himself. What is commonly
understood, however, by a Science of History is something far beyond the
idea entertained of it by such temperate reasoners as Mr. John Stuart
Mill and Mr. Fitzjames Stephen. The science, for the reality of which M.
Comte in France and Mr. Buckle in England have been the foremost
champions, would bear the same relation to political events as Optics
and Astronomy do to the phenomena of light and of the solar and sidereal
systems. It would deal less with the conjectural and probable than with
the predicable and positive. 'In the moral as in the physical world,'
say its leading advocates, 'are invariable rule, inevitable sequence,
undeviating regularity,' constituting 'one vast scheme of universal
order.' 'The actions of men, and therefore of societies, are governed by
fixed eternal laws,' which 'assign to every man his place in the
necessary chain of being,' and 'allow him no choice as to what that
place shall be.' One such law is that, 'in a given state of society, a
certain number of persons must put an end to their own lives:' another,
that a certain number of persons must commit murder; a third, that when
wages and prices are at certain points, a certain number of marriages
must annually take place, 'the number being determined not by the temper
and wishes of individuals, but by large general facts, over which
individuals can exercise no authority.' These are general laws; but the
special question as to who shall commit the crimes or the indiscretion
enjoined by them, 'depends upon special laws, which, however, in their
total action must obey the large social law to which they are all
subordinate.' A Science of History would consist of a collection of
'social laws,' duly systematised and codified, by the application of
which to given states of society the historical student might predict
the future course of political events, with a confidence similar to that
with which he could foretell the results of familiar chemical
combinations, or the movement of the planets.[22]

This is the theory which a few years ago was so much disc