V.] HISTORY FOR ITS OWN SAKE AGAIN. 117 read and write with the single and simple purpose of collecting, testing, and arranging the facts of history, to discover causes and work out consequences, to determine the rights and wrongs of questions as they arise, the growth and decline of institutions as they emerge from and retire into darkness when their work is done, to build up history as a treasure-house of knowledge, that may enable the man who attempts the task to read with like facility thé history of the past and present, to solve the difficulties of conflicting testimony, and hold the balance of equitable judgment between conflicting systems ; the study, for I must recur to the first of our three heads, the study of History for its own sake can scarcely be regarded as a method Co-ordinate with the other three. But it unites the advantages of all three, and furnishes still more formative and disciplinary influence of its own. It is, in relation to its subject, an end in itself, and is not to be classed among means and methods ; if there be a science, this is the science. And yet, strange to say, this idea, like the others, is apt to be lowered and made vulgar by the impatience and intolerance of utilitarian theory; and of all intolerant things, utilitarian theory, or theoretic utilitarianism, is the most so. As however I do not wish to use language unnecessarily strong, I will leave this, and remark upon two other educational theories connected with the subject. History may be read either backwards or forwards. That is, the man who has time for it may begin at the beginning and read on to modern times ; noting every influence in its origin and effects, the growth and decay, as I have just said, of institutions, the origin, complications, and counterchanges of rights and wrongs; and, whether he reads on a wide scale or on a narrow one, he will, if he lives long enough, arrive at such a knowledge of the situation of things at the present day, as will give him a right to make his