act; hence in free countries for all citizens. The virtue of attention is one of those which require most practice; it cannot begin too early. Whatever we see or hear we ought to try to understand, attempt at least to learn its connexion; of a word, term, thing, institution, person or event, their peculiar character, meaning, history, elements and causes. A single set of casters on our dining table, if viewed in all their connexions, may teach a vast lesson of political economy, geography and civilisation. We ought not to read the name of a place without combining the idea of its situation with it, or of a law without that of its operation. We thus not only acquire the knowledge of the thing itself, but our horizon expands, one species of knowledge supports others in our mind, our intellect acquires the proper classification of things a fixed frame-work for further acquisition; it gains clearness and retentiveness, and above all we learn to see things more and more in their true light and bearing, and as our knowledge becomes firmer, truer, and more substantial, we enable ourselves to become juster, and are less exposed to be swayed by casualties or impulses which originally may not have been bad. The judgment of some men upon the whole English revolution has been swayed by the exclamation of James II., when he returned to London, and found princess Anne too had fled: "Good God, my child too has left me!" He who can read this without emotion must have a hard heart; but so natural an exclamation of the afflicted father will weigh very little with him who views the infatuated king in his whole connexion with the country over which he so injudiciously ruled. Hardly had the world ceased to applaud the French for manfully resisting a criminal executive outrage, when many not only lavished their sympathy upon the duchess of Berry, for attempting to raise a civil war, and in their admiration of her spirited conduct forgot her licentious course of life, but actually turned their feeling against Louis Philippe. It may be hard for the duke of Bordeaux to be deprived of a throne, but if we view him in his whole connexion we may not find reason to wish him back in the Tuilleries.

LVII. We must gather experience; without it no man would be wiser at forty than he was at fifteen, or England be safer after her protestant settlement with its various organic law, than she was under Charles II. But what is experience? It is not the mere witnessing or going through the perils or drudgery of a thing, nor the bare knowledge that a fact has happened. It is the knowledge we derive by reflection upon that which happens. Men may pass through a variety of scenes without gathering any experience, as an obstinate physician may kill hundreds by the same physic in the same cases, because he refuses to reflect upon what he witnesses. Attention therefore to what we witness, see or learn, constitutes an ingredient of experience, and this experience may be personal or not, that is, we may see with our own eyes or not, perceive with our own senses or not. This distinction however is far less definite, than is generally supposed. For if personal experience relates to effects upon my own senses or person alone, it is necessarily extremely limited. If we extend its meaning, and would comprehend within it, what has happened at our own times, the distinction becomes arbitrary; for we may or may not know an event of our own times more thoroughly than one of past periods. It is the certainty of knowledge which is important, and this may at times be much greater when we were not present at an event, than when we were. Experience, true knowledge, a just view of the things and relations among which we live, or whatever we may call it, demand of every citizen two things, that he know the society he lives in as thoroughly as with his means he is able to do, and in order to do it, that he know the history of its growth, and of the development of its character (its generic history.)

There is an absolute duty of the citizen to make himself acquainted with the history of his country, for whatever it is, it has not sprung forth yesterday, but it became such gradually, and the institutions which surround the citizen, which form the essence of his government, are not known from their casual appearance as it may strike him at first glance, but from their operation, which is but their history; nor can we possibly know whither they tend, and whether they work good or evil without knowing the causes from which they sprung, and the mode in which they have operated. Besides no genuine and firm patriotism is possible without its receiving aliment from the knowledge of our institutions, the history of our country. Without it we shall feel and act as selfish insulated ephemerals"sojourners in our country, not citizens," as Sismondi expressed it. Cicero very truly compares those who do not know history to children, because they are deprived of experience. To rule or legislate for one's country one must know it, to know it, must study it; but our country is not these few millions who happen to be alive at this precise moment, nor this land on which they stand, which they cultivate-but our country, patria, is this land, with all the relations subsisting between it and the dwellers upon it, their institutions, their growth and history. "In it alone can the citizen study his obligations and rights," (1) which he really enjoys and ought carefully to preserve, and transmit inviolate to his children; through it alone he can learn how to appreciate what is good in it, and discover what requires amending, and how it ought to be mended.

A nation does not live an equally active and productive life at once in all spheres. A variety of circumstances must combine in order to produce a period in which, by the united activity of many a certain branch, a certain institution, a certain part of the public law will be cultivated with peculiar felicity and effect. General attention is directed with peculiar intensity to one or the other subject; many of the most gifted minds being engaged in the same pursuit or animated by the same idea, propel one another in their common or similar career; one discovery leads to another; while the public being influenced by the same spirit and common circumstances, incite and reward by their interest the peculiar votaries of that branch which is the flourishing one of the times, while at the same time, public opinion, keen as to this branch, acquires tact and taste, and modifies what may be extravagant or retards what may be over-zealous in those who give their whole mind to that particular subject. Thus are produced what I have called on another occasion the classical periods of these peculiar branches. (2) It is thus in literature, the arts, and in law and politics. If then we do not study history, and try faithfully to learn in which part persons have excelled, what are the results of the specific branch in its own classical age or in the period in which it was cultivated with success, when by fortunate circumstances the public mind was rendered peculiarly sensitive respecting it, we neglect the true fruits of civilisation and disregard one of the most solemn duties of man as a social being; that is, as a being, who is not only called upon to live in social relations with the living, but who owes his social, his human relation to the continuity of society, and who is socially connected with past generations that he is a social being not only as to the extent of the present society, but also lineally so as to the past generations, by being influenced, and as to the future, by influencing them. In order, therefore, that man may know his true position, he must understand the past likewise. This is the solemn and sacred character of history.

If we do not train our minds in duly finding and appreciating the elements of phenomena around us, we shall be unguarded against that fault in reasoning, to which all men, without exception, are but too liable, namely, the mistaking of the coexistence of two things, for a sufficient proof that they stand in the relation of cause and effect a fault which has produced very grave evils in politics. Nothing is more common than that public men or an administration are charged with the evils under which the country happens to suffer, merely because those men happen to be at the helm, although there may be no more connexion between the two, than between a general epidemic and the administration at the time. If we do not learn to discover the elements of the phenomena around us, we shall continually fall into that grave error, which has convulsed large nations, namely, the mistaking of great social evils for merely political evils; for a remedy of which we