Parallels from France, or anywhere else, may supply literary amusement; they may furnish a weapon in the play of controversy.  They shed no light and do no service as we confront the solid facts of the business to be done.  Lewis the Fourteenth was the author of a very useful and superior commonplace when he wrote:  “No man who is badly informed can avoid reasoning badly.  I believe that whoever is rightly instructed, and rightly persuaded of all the facts, would never do anything else but what he ought.”  Another great French ruler, who, even more than Lewis, had a piercing eye for men and the world of action, said that the mind of a general ought to be like a field-glass, and as clear; to see things exactly as they are, et jamais se faire des tableaux,—­never to compose the objects before him into pictures.  The same maxim is nearly as good for the man who has to conquer difficulties in the field of government; and analogies and parallels are one way of substituting pictures for plans and charts.  Just because the statesman’s problem is individual, history can give him little help.  I am not so graceless as to depreciate history or literature either for public or for private persons.  “You are a man,” Napoleon said to Goethe; and there is no reason why literature should prevent the reader of books from being a man; why it should blind him to the great practical truths that the end of life is not to think but to will; that everything in the world has its decisive moment, which statesmen know and seize; that the genius of politics, as a great man of letters truly wrote, has not “All or Nothing” for its motto, but seeks on the contrary to extract the greatest advantage from situations the most compromised, and never flings the helve after the hatchet.  Like literature the use of history in politics is to refresh, to open, to make the mind generous and hospitable; to enrich, to impart flexibility, to quicken and nourish political imagination and invention, to instruct in the common difficulties and the various experiences of government; to enable a statesman to place himself at a general and spacious standpoint.  All this, whether it be worth much or little, and it is surely worth much, is something wholly distinct from directly aiding a statesman in the performance of a specific task.  In such a case an analogy from history, if he be not sharply on his guard, is actually more likely than not to mislead him.  I certainly do not mean the history of the special problem itself.  Of that he cannot possibly know too much, nor master its past course and foregone bearings too thoroughly.  Ireland is a great standing instance.  There is no more striking example of the disastrous results of trying to overcome political difficulties without knowing how they came into existence, and where they have their roots.  The only history that furnishes a clue in Irish questions is the history of Ireland and the people who have lived in it or have been driven out of it.