Note 26 — Front matter
Reading edition
N'attendez donc pas les leçons de l'expérience; elles coûtent trop cher aux nations.—O. Barrot, Mémoires, ii. 435. Il y a des leçons dans tous les temps, pour tous les temps; et celles qu'on emprunte à des ennemis ne sont pas les moins précieuses.—Lanfrey, Napoléon, v. p. ii. Old facts may always be fresh, and may give out a fresh meaning for each generation.—Maurice, Lectures, 62. The object is to lead the student to attend to them; to make him take interest in history not as a mere narrative, but as a chain of causes and effects still unwinding itself before our eyes, and full of momentous consequences to himself and his descendants—an unremitting conflict between good and evil powers, of which every act done by any one of us, insignificant as we are, forms one of the incidents; a conflict in which even the smallest of us cannot escape from taking part, in which whoever does not help the right side is helping the wrong.—Mill, Inaugural Address, 59.