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The Sifted Grain and tlie Grain Sifters 229 In the next place, for the use and future behoof of those com- munities I hold that the careful and intelligent reading of the his- torical lessons of the past is all important. Without that reading^ and a constant emphasis laid upon its lessons, the nature of that mission and those ideas to which Lincoln and Lowell alluded can- not be kept fresh in mind. This institution I accordingly regard as the most precious of all Wisconsin's endowments of education. It should be the sheet-anchor by which, amid the storms and tur- bulence of a tempestuous future, the ship of state will be anchored to the firm holding-ground of tradition. It is to further this result that I to-day make appeal to the historian of the future. His, in this community, is a great and important mission ; a mission which he will not fulfil unless he to a large extent frees himself from the trammels of the past, and rises to an equality with the occasion. He must be a prophet and a poet, as well as an investigator and an annalist. He must cut loose from many of the models and most of the precedents of the immediate past, and the educational pre- cepts now so commonly in vogue. He must perplex the modern college professor by asserting that soundness is not always and of necessity dull, and that even intellectual sobriety may be carried to an excess. Not only is it possible for a writer to combine learn- ing and accuracy with vivacity, but to be read and to be popular should not in the eyes of the judicious be a species of stigma. Historical research may, on the other hand, result in a mere lumber of learning ; and, even in the portrayal of the sequence of events, it is to a man's credit that he should strive to see things from the point of view of an artist, rather than, looking with the dull eye of a mechanic, seek to measure them with the mechanic's twelve- inch rule. I confess myself weary of those reactionary influences amid which of late we have lived. I distinctly look back with regret to that more spiritual and more confident time when we of the generation now passing from the stage drew our inspiration from prophets, and not from laboratories. So to-day I make bold to maintain that the greatest benefactor America could have — far more immediately influential than any possible President or senator or peripatetic political practitioner, as well as infinitely more so in a remote future — would be some historical writer, occupying perhaps a chair here at Madison, who would in speech and book explain and expound, as they could be explained and expounded, the les- sons of American history and the fundamental principles of Ameri- can historical faith. It was Macaulay who made his boast that, disregarding the tra- ditions which constituted what he contemptuously termed " the dig-