Geography had been one of his strong points. He was aware of the rivers
of Asia in their order, and of the principal products of Uruguay; and he
could name the capitals of nearly all the United States. But he had
never been instructed for five minutes in the geography of his native
county, of which he knew neither the boundaries nor the rivers nor the
terrene characteristics. He could have drawn a map of the Orinoco, but
he could not have found the Trent in a day's march; he did not even know
where his drinking-water came from. That geographical considerations
are the cause of all history had never been hinted to him, nor that
history bears immediately upon modern life and bore on his own life.
For him history hung unsupported and unsupporting in the air. In the
course of his school career he had several times approached the
nineteenth century, but it seemed to him that for administrative reasons
he was always being dragged back again to the Middle Ages. Once his
form had "got" as far as the infancy of his own father, and concerning
this period he had learnt that "great dissatisfaction prevailed among
the labouring classes, who were led to believe by mischievous
demagogues," etcetera. But the next term he was recoiling round Henry
the Eighth, who "was a skilful warrior and politician," but "unfortunate
in his domestic relations;" and so to Elizabeth, than whom "few
sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character comes out
unscathed after the closest examination." History indeed resolved
itself into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily
grouped under the names of persons who had to be identified with the
assistance of numbers. Neither of the development of national life, nor
of the clash of nations, did he really know anything that was not
inessential and anecdotic. He could not remember the clauses of Magna
Charta, but he knew eternally that it was signed at a place amusingly
called Runnymede. And the one fact engraved on his memory about the
battle of Waterloo was that it was fought on a Sunday.
And as he had acquired absolutely nothing about political economy or
about logic, and was therefore at the mercy of the first agreeable
sophistry that might take his fancy by storm, his unfitness to commence
the business of being a citizen almost reached perfection.
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