"The effect," he says, "of any particular arrangement of the judicial power, is seen directly in the greater or less purity with which justice is administered; but there is a further effect, and one of the highest importance, in its furnishing to a greater or less portion of the nation one of the best means of moral and intellectual culture--the opportunity, namely, of exercising the functions of a judge. I mean, that to accustom a number of persons to the intellectual exercise of attending to, and weighing, and comparing evidence, and to the moral exercise of being placed in a high and responsible situation, invested with one of God's own attributes, that of judgment, and having to determine with authority between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, is to furnish them with very high means of moral and intellectual culture--in other words, it is providing them with one of the highest kinds of education. And thus a judicial constitution may secure a pure administration of justice, and yet fail as an engine of national cultivation, where it is vested in the hands of a small body of professional men, like the old French parliament. While, on the other hand, it may communicate the judicial office very widely, as by our system of juries, and thus may educate, if I may so speak, a very large portion of the nation, but yet may not succeed in obtaining the greatest certainty of just legal decisions. I do not mean that our jury system does not succeed, but it is conceivable that it should not. So, in the same way, different arrangements of the executive and legislative powers should be always regarded in this twofold aspect--as effecting their direct objects, good government and good legislation; and as educating the nation more or less extensively, by affording to a greater or less number of persons practical lessons in governing and legislating." History is an account of the common purpose pursued by some one of the great families of the human race. It is the biography of a nation; as the history of a particular sect, or a particular body of men, describes the particular end which the sect or body was instituted to pursue, so history, in its more comprehensive sense, describes the paramount object which the first and sovereign society--the society to which all others are necessarily subordinate--endeavours to attain. According to Dr Arnold, a nation's life is twofold, external and internal. Its external life consists principally in wars. "Here history has been sufficiently busy. The wars of the human race have been recorded when every thing else has perished."