[Sidenote:  The study of history.] When we begin in childhood the study of history we are attracted chiefly by anecdotes of heroes and their battles, kings and their courts, how the Spartans fought at Thermopylae, how Alfred let the cakes burn, how Henry VIII. beheaded his wives, how Louis XIV. used to live at Versailles.  It is quite right that we should be interested in such personal details, the more so the better; for history has been made by individual men and women, and until we have understood the character of a great many of those who have gone before us, and how they thought and felt in their time, we have hardly made a fair beginning in the study of history.  The greatest historians, such as Freeman and Mommsen, show as lively an interest in persons as in principles; and I would not give much for the historical theories of a man who should declare himself indifferent to little personal details.

[Sidenote:  It is full of practical lessons;] Some people, however, never outgrow the child’s notion of history as merely a mass of pretty anecdotes or stupid annals, without any practical bearing upon our own every-day life.  There could not be a greater mistake.  Very little has happened in the past which has not some immediate practical lessons for us; and when we study history in order to profit by the experience of our ancestors, to find out wherein they succeeded and wherein they failed, in order that we may emulate their success and avoid their errors, then history becomes the noblest and most valuable of studies.  It then becomes, moreover, an arduous pursuit, at once oppressive and fascinating from its endless wealth of material, and abounding in problems which the most diligent student can never hope completely to solve.

[Sidenote:  and helpful to those who would be good citizens.] [Sidenote:  Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.] Few people have the leisure to undertake a systematic and thorough study of history, but every one ought to find time to learn the principal features of the governments under which we live, and to get some inkling of the way in which these governments have come into existence and of the causes which have made them what they are.  Some such knowledge is necessary to the proper discharge of the duties of citizenship.  Political questions, great and small, are perpetually arising, to be discussed in the newspapers and voted on at the polls; and it is the duty of every man and woman, young or old, to try to understand them.  That is a duty which we owe, each and all of us, to ourselves and to our fellow-countrymen.  For if such questions are not settled in accordance with knowledge, they will be settled in accordance with ignorance; and that is a kind of settlement likely to be fraught with results disastrous to everybody.  It cannot be too often repeated that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  People sometimes argue as if they supposed that because our national government