By those who stand aloof from us we are represented as grasping at wealth and territory, incapable of imaginative sympathy with subject races, and de… - Samuel Rawson Gardiner

Certainly the politics of the seventeenth century, when studied for the mere sake of understanding them, assume a very different appearance from that which they had in the eyes of men who, like Macaulay and Forster, regarded them through the medium of their own political struggles. Eliot and Strafford were neither Whigs nor Tories, Liberals nor Conservatives. As Professor Seeley was, I believe, the first to teach directly, though the lesson is indirectly involved in every line written by Ranke, the father of modern historical research, the way in which Macaulay and Forster regarded the development of the past—that is to say, the constant avowed or unavowed comparison of it with the present—is altogether destructive of real historical knowledge.

Unless the historian can feel an affectionate as well as an intelligent interest in the personages with whom he deals, he will hardly discover the key to the movements of the society of which they formed a part. The statesman, too, will be none the worse if, in studying the past, he is reminded that his predecessors had to deal with actual men and women in their complex nature, and if thereby he learns that pity for the human race which was the inspiring thought of the New Atlantis, and which is the source of all true and noble effort.

England, it has been said by one who, in our own days, has exhibited the old Puritan virtues to a world which had well-nigh forgotten them, has been saved by its adventurers—that is to say, by the men who, careless whether their ways are like the ways of others, or whether there may not be some larger interpretation of the laws by which the world is governed than any which they have themselves been able to conceive, have set their hearts on realising, first in themselves and then in others, their ideal of that which is best and holiest. Such adventurers the noblest of the Puritans were. Many things existed not dreamed of in their theology, many things which they misconceived, or did not even conceive at all; but they were brave and resolute, feeding their minds upon the bread of heaven, and determined within themselves to be servants of no man and of no human system.