History and its philosophy are the true studies for a statesman in every age. In that educational point of view, we strongly suspect that the present ministerial cabinet is sorely deficient. The Whigs, as a body, are conversant with a very small space of history indeed. They are constantly jabbering about the fundamental principles of the constitution, which they date back no further than the advent of William of Orange. Their pet historian, and the ablest man among them, cannot make a single speech without dragging in, neck and heels, some vapidity about the Revolution Settlement of 1688; and they try to be profound in their criticisms upon the policy of Walpole and of Bute. Charles James Fox, of course, still continues to be their principal fetish, and they cling to antiquated party toasts with a superstition that would disgrace a Mussulman. But of the freer and bolder regions of history--of all that is great and elevating--of the numerous lessons to be gleaned, and the examples to be gathered from the grand old records of kingly and loyal England, or of the fall and fate of nations through the imbecility of their rulers, or the ambition of ignorant demagogues, they either know nothing practically, or they fail to acknowledge their importance. Whiggery is a small machine which works according to conventional rules of its own, and will not make allowance for the great springs of human action. A cabinet of Whigs is admirably adapted for the control and legislation of the sovereign state of Pumpfernickel, or some analogous German principality; but they never can assume their place at the helm of affairs in a great empire such as that of Britain, without landing the whole of us in dangerous difficulties, and sneaking off at the last hour under a humiliating sense of their own impotence and presumption.
The case is still worse when men like Mr Cobden come forward to try their hand either as pilots or as coadjutors. We presume that Mr Cobden, if the question were put to him, would candidly admit the narrowness of the range of his peculiar historical studies. We understand that he does not pretend to be a scholar, and that the amount, of the information which he possesses, however great that may be, is limited to modern facts and premises, upon which he usually reasons. A worse kind of education for a statesman, or for the leader of a popular movement, cannot be found than this. It was this kind of partial knowledge, unilluminated by the clear lucid light which bygone history alone can shed authoritatively upon passing events, which, in the recollection of many still alive, led to the dark catastrophe and horrors of the French Revolution. There is hardly one social change, hardly one political experiment now making, for which a prototype cannot be furnished from the pages of history. And of what possible use, it may be well asked, is history, if we are not to recur to it for a solution of the difficulties which may arise in our onward progress? Are we to gain no confidence, nor take any warning from the rise and decline of nations, not much less powerful than our own, whose checkered career and the causes of it are open to our view? Is the world behind us a blank, that we should go stumbling on at the instigation of every reckless adventurer, more culpable in his attempts to guide us, than the ship-captain who should presume to thread the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean without consulting the authoritative chart? Are we always to derive our information, not from what has been done and acted in the globe before--not from an attentive examination of men and their motives, and the countless springs of action which stir them, but from statistical tables and long columns of figures, compiled by rusty officials in their dens, and brought forth for the first time to be cited as overwhelming testimony by some premier who is meditating apostasy, or seeking some palliative to cover his shameful abandonment of a party? The features of the so-called statesmanship of the present day are essentially those of bureaucracy. A drudging arithmetical clerk, with whom a unit is every thing, and who would be nearly driven to despair by the discovery of a misquoted fraction, is a leading authority with our statesmen; and his vamped-up tables of export and import are considered sounder expositions of the destinies of the human race, than all the accumulated wisdom, learning, and experience which the annals of the world can afford.