Let me pass to another topic.  We are often asked whether it is best to study subjects, or authors, or books.  Well, I think that is like most of the stock questions with which the perverse ingenuity of mankind torments itself.  There is no universal and exclusive answer.  My own answer is a very plain one.  It is sometimes best to study books, sometimes authors, and sometimes subjects; but at all times it is best to study authors, subjects, and books in connection with one another.  Whether you make your first approach from interest in an author or in a book, the fruit will be only half gathered if you leave off without new ideas and clearer lights both on the man and the matter.  One of the noblest masterpieces in the literature of civil and political wisdom is to be found in Burke’s three performances on the American war—­his speech on Taxation in 1774, on Conciliation in 1775, and his letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777.  I can only repeat to you what I have been saying in print and out of it for a good many years, and what I believe more firmly as observation is enlarged by time and occasion, that these three pieces are the most perfect manual in all literature for the study of great affairs, whether for the purpose of knowledge or action.  “They are an example,” as I have said before now, “an example without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or an actor, of great political situations should strive by night and by day to possess.  If their subject were as remote as the quarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes the opportunity of one of the most important of political experiments, we should still have everything to learn from the author’s treatment; the vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumination from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, the large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the vision, the noble temper.”  No student worthy of the name will lay aside these pieces, so admirable in their literary expression, so important for history, so rich in the lessons of civil wisdom, until he has found out something from other sources as to the circumstances from which such writings arose, and as to the man whose resplendent genius inspired them.  There are great personalities like Burke who march through history with voices like a clarion trumpet and something like the glitter of swords in their hands.  They are as interesting as their work.  Contact with them warms and kindles the mind.  You will not be content, after reading one of these pieces, without knowing the character and personality of the man who conceived it, and until you have spent an hour or two—­and an hour or two will go a long way with Burke still fresh in your mind—­over other compositions in political literature, over Bacon’s civil pieces, or Machiavelli’s Prince, and others in the same order of thought.