Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Claims of the Study of Colonial History Upon the Attention of the University of Oxford: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on April 28, 1906
But while the study of history can be supported from a practical standpoint, there are clear reasons why the study of Colonial history seems especially desirable.
Shut off for the most part from the field of foreign politics, the questions with which it mainly is concerned are precisely those constitutional and economic questions which bulk large in the public life of to-day.
But that this study may be useful, there is one caveat which must be entered. At present the Oxford curri culum, I understand, deals with English history only as far as the accession of Queen Victoria. What value there is in this rule, as far as English history by itself is concerned, I am not competent to say. I presume that the object is to keep clear of the field of party politics. But in fact party prejudices are the product of temperament, and the temperament, which makes the party man, can find food as much in the struggles of Cavalier and Roundhead, and of Whig and Tory, as in the issues of to-day. You know that in the early days of the Second Empire, when the press censorship was severe, brilliant writers managed to expound their views on current politics in disquisitions apparently intended for very different objects. You can only trust to the honour and good sense of a teacher that he will not unfairly bias his pupil in a party direction. It is not the thing taught but the manner of the teaching which matters, and I cannot imagine the somewhat critical attitude of Oxford intellectual life permitting that this tendency should here find much encourage ment.
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