164 THE INSPIRATIONS OF HISTORIANS

his descriptions of picturesque incidents, and he suggests an explanation

of Rhodes* workmanlike sense of proportion.

'Is it possible that his cool self-restraint was indirectly due to the long
years of his business training? . . . Business teaches what may be called a
clean-cut way of thinking; impulse is absolutely discarded; an accurate
knowledge of exact facts is essential; due weight must be allotted among
colliding suggestions. In short, the study given to the matter in hand must
be both exhaustive and dispassionate.1 Such had been Mr. Rhodes' mental
training for many years; and it had shaped the way in which he contem-
plated his subject matter. ... I strongly incline to believe . . . that Mr.
Rhodes* score of years in mere practical business were of substantial
advantage to him when he came to write the annals of a great multitude of
very hard and conflicting facts.*

Besides thus exercising the judgement, business practice can also
sharpen the intuition. In noticing that Schliemann divined at first glance
which was the true site of Troy, Emil Ludwig2 cites Herder's remark
to Goethe: 'With you the eye is everything'; and he goes on to com-
ment:

'This rapid, keen, surveying, collating eye was characteristic of Schlie-
mann ; and it cannot be denied that a decade spent in looking over stocks,
samples, steamships, and warehouses trains the eyes better than the study
of the opinions of a hundred experts when, before digesting them, the
archaeologist has never been himself to the place concerned.'

As for the training that business practice gives in the social art of
conveying ideas, John Stuart Mill3 observes, of his experience at the
India house, that

'it was valuable to me by making me, in this portion of my activity, merely
one wheel in a machine, the whole of which had to work together. As a
speculative writer, I should have had no one to consult but myself, and
should have encountered in my speculations none of the obstacles which
would have started up whenever they came to be applied to practice. But, as a
secretary conducting political correspondence, I could not issue an order
or express an opinion without satisfying various persons, very unlike my-
self, that the thing was fit to be done. I was thus in a good position for
finding out by practice the mode of putting a thought which gives it
easiest admittance into minds not prepared for it by habit; while I be-
came practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of
men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential
to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I
could not obtain everything.'4

This practical philosophy, into which Mill the logician was thus in-
ducted by Mill the India House clerk, is more likely to inspire effective
intellectual action than the impossibilism of the grammarian who, in

i la this respect, a practical career has the same effect in the province of public
administration as in that of private business. The occupation accustomed me to see
and hear the difficulties of every course, and the means of obviating them, stated and
discussed deliberately 'with a view to execution* (Mill, J. S.: Autobiography, chap. 3 ad
Jmem).—AJ.T.

1 In op. cit., p. 140. 3 In his Autdtiograpky, ibid.

* Mill, J. S,: AatobiograpkyY chap. 3 adfinem.