assured Metternich that Prussia was likely to become the most dangerous Power in Europe. Talleyrand recorded the scene twenty years later with satisfaction tempered with surprise at so gross a mistake. This was the feeling which Wellington took with him to Belgium; and Gneisenau informed the officer sent to attend him that he was an excellent commander, but as false as the wiliest Hindoo. From that day until his administration in 1830, it was a standing maxim at the Berlin foreign office that the duke might always be counted upon to desert a friend.
Probably there is no considerable group less in harmony with our sentiments in approaching the study of history than that which is mainly represented by Sybel, Droysen, and Treitschke, with Mommsen and Gneist, Bernhardi and Duncker on the flank. Up to this moment it is the best found and the most energetic of all; and as there is no symptom of declining favour and authority, it is important to understand along what lines of reasoning men so eminent, so quick to inquire into every new thing, have adhered to maxims which it has cost the world much effort to reverse. The theory of the political historian is distinct from the plea of the partisan. The historian displays the laws governing human life: it is not his duty to expound a private view, or to explain, like the wise Castilian, how much better the universe would be contrived if he had been consulted in time. He attends to the ship's course, not to the passengers. The forces to be reckoned are those which, in the long-run, prevail. The historian justifies only that which is just by the judgment of experience. It is the heresy of history to choose a side that seems good in our eyes, to reject the appointed course and the dominion of law, in order to degrade the life of nations under the anarchy of casual and disconnected causes. Consistency in the powers that direct the world is the supreme acquisition of all German thought. It is not partiality, but renunciation of party feeling and personal preference, to hold that the world works well, that what lives permanently in the light and
