By exhibiting to us the results of the life and of the experience of centuries, by teaching us by what steps the human mind has risen to its present eminence, and what the education given it in the past has been, it has enabled us to ascend from phenomena to the principles which preside over them; from facts to the law; and it has substituted for arbitrary assumptions and purely ideal systems, the slow but progressive work of the genius of nations. Not that it turns a deaf ear to the exalted lessons of philosophy, nor that it denies the _eternal relations resulting from the nature of things_. Far from it. On the contrary, it supplies a solid basis to intellectual investigations, and, so to speak, an answer for all the moral sciences, to this saying of Rœderer: “Politics is a field which has been traversed thus far only in a balloon; it is time to put foot on solid ground.” Neither does history, as thus understood, confine itself to mere description; it also assumes the office of judge. While it pulls down much that passion and inaccuracy have reared, and thus restores respect for the past, it does not turn that past into a fetish. It looks it boldly in the face and questions it, instead of prostrating itself before it and worshipping it with downcast eyes. Thus, by plainly showing us the many bonds which tie us to it, it escapes at once both the rashness of impatience and the wearisomeness of routine. The impartiality it inculcates is not indifference; and there is no danger that the justice it metes out to past ages shall degenerate into a vain scepticism or a convenient optimism. The study of history, thus understood, has another advantage; it accustoms us to those patient and disinterested investigations, to those lengthy labors, the positive result of which at first escapes us for a time, only to burst on our eyes, with so much more brilliancy, when rigorous research has succeeded in discovering it. It frees us from the deadly constraint of immediate utility. There is nothing more fatal to science than the feverish impatience for results which obtains only too much in our own days, and which induces people to run after him who is in the greatest hurry, and which leads to hasty conclusions. “Research undertaken from a disinterested love of science,” says the learned Hugo, one of the masters of the historical school of law in Germany,(5) “that research which at first promises no other advantage but truth and the culture of the mind, is precisely that which brings us the richest rewards. Would we not be behind, in all the sciences, if we had clung only to those principles, the utility of which in practice was already known? Do we not, to-day, from many a discovery, reap advantages of which its author never dreamed?”