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Précis
John Buchan acknowledged that the study of history might lead some people to neglect the pressing problems of today, but he nonetheless believed that neglecting history was far more dangerous. History, he said, was akin to a navigational chart, and when the future is so dark to us we should be grateful for anything to help plot a safe course.
History’s chart must also be read right across its breadth, he warned. Sometimes the safe path will lie with daring innovation, at other times it will lie with caution. Any narrow reading of history that keeps us always in the same channel, even the seemingly safe middle channel, will ultimately lead to shipwreck.
One charge has been brought against the study of history that it may kill reforming zeal. [...] There is justice in the warning, for a man may easily fall into the mood in which he sees everything as a repetition of the past, and the world bound on the iron bed of necessity, and may therefore lose his vitality and zest in the practical work of to-day. It is a danger to be guarded against, but to me it seems a far less urgent menace than its opposite — the tendency to forget the past and to adventure in a raw new world without any chart to guide us. History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.
There is little to sympathise with in the type of mind which is always inculcating a lack-lustre moderation, and which has attained to such a pitch of abstraction that it finds nothing worth doing and prefers to stagnate in ironic contemplation.
Nor is there more to be said for the temper which is always halving differences in a problem and trying to find a middle course. The middle course, mechanically defined, may be the wrong course. The business of a man steering up a difficult estuary is to keep to the deep-water channel, and that channel may at one hour take him near the left shore and at another hour close to the right shore. The path of false moderation sticks to the exact middle of the channel, and will almost certainly land the pilot on a sandbank.
These are the vices that spring from a narrow study of history and the remedy is a broader and juster interpretation. At one season it may be necessary to be a violent innovator, and at another to be a conservative; but the point is that a clear objective must be there, and some chart of the course to steer by. History does not provide a perfect chart, but it gives us something better than guess-work. It is a bridle on crude haste; but it is not less a spur for timidity and false moderation.
