That court, in an opinion delivered by Justice Cooley, held the law unconstitutional and void. It was urged that other States had construed a similar provision in their Constitution as prohibiting only the State as such from incurring debts in aid of such enterprises, while it left the subdivisions thereof free to give such aid as they saw fit, and pay the same by general taxation. In reply to this argument the learned Justice said, that whatever might be the just and proper construction of this provision when found in the Constitution of other States, whose history had been different, the public history of Michigan left no doubt that its people intended to deprive, not only the State as a whole, but its component parts as well, of the power to repeat the folly of the past. This decision has become a part of the history of the State, and has determined its policy ever since on the question of internal improvements. It is referred to here because the construction there given to an important constitutional provision is based solely upon the public history of the State, and the well known feeling of the people at the time of its adoption. Here then we find one of America's foremost constitutional lawyers recognizing and adopting the public history of a State as the best guide in the interpretation of its fundamental law.

When we reach the broader domain of International Law, we must rely wholly upon history for our precedents. Here there is no supreme power to prescribe rules of action; no court with jurisdiction to decide or power to enforce its de

are to be judged, in war or in peace, are to be learned only from the public history of the nations we call civilized; and the history of the intercourse of one nation with another is so intimately connected with the internal history of each, that no one can understand the former without some knowledge of the latter.

Much might be said on the value of history in solving the ever-recurring problems involving the security of life, liberty and property. All these questions have arisen and been answered in some way by every civilized people. The communistic and nihilistic tendencies of the present would seem to indicate that these problems have not been finally disposed of, and that the lawyer of the near future may be called upon to reconsider, and perhaps readjust them. In any discussion of these great questions, involving as they do the rights of all, the practical answers given to them by other nations, in other times, must always be of the highest importance.

It is perhaps needless to say that the study of history-to yield the benefits here indicated-must be something more than the daily conning of a given number of pages in a textbook. What the student needs to be taught is not the facts of history, but how to find them for himself. In no branch of study is it more important that the student should do the work himself than in history. No one would now attempt to teach chemistry and botany without requiring of the student practical work in the laboratory and the field. What the laboratory is to the student of chemistry, what the fields are to the student of botany,

the well furnished library is to the student of history. The text-book and the instructor are valuable as guides; but, after all, that which is most valuable is obtained only by the individual research of the student himself. In this research the student should be led as near as possible to the original sources from which the facts are to be ascertained. Our own national history furnishes a fertile field for investigation, and the ease with which its primary and secondary sources may be obtained, renders it peculiarly inviting. And may we not hope that at no very distant day, the archives of this Society may contain material for a comprehensive study of the history of our own commonwealth.

The range of history, like that of law, is limited only by the boundary that circumscribes the life of man. The historian deals with life as found entombed in the mute records of the past; the lawyer struggles with life governed by the passions, the prejudices, the hopes, and the fears of the present. Both alike, in reaching their conclusions, must tread upon uncertain ground, and remain content with proof far short of the absolute. Law stands foremost among the practical sciences, as an aid to history, and history in turn becomes the interpreter of law. As the lawyer gathers the facts of his case from the uncertain memories of living witnesses, as he draws his principles from the contradictory statements contained in his books, so the student of history must cross-examine his authors, probe their motives, estimate the influence of their prejudices, balance their testimony against that of others, and finally determine, by a preponderance of

[IN TWO PARTS.—PART II.] The imagination of pleasant detail and accessory, which delights us by the intimacy into which we are brought with the artist's innermost conception; develops into what, among the masters of the fifteenth century, I should call the imagination of the fairy tale. A small number of scriptural and legendary stories lend themselves quite particularly to the development of such beautiful accessory, which soon becomes the paramount interest, and vests the whole with a totally new character: a romantic, childish charm, the charm of the improbable taken for granted, of the freedom to invent whatever one would like to see but cannot, the charm of the fairy story. From this unconscious altering of the value of certain Scripture tales arises a romantic treatment, which is naturally applied to all other stories, legends of saints, biographical accounts, Decameronian tales (Mr. Leyland possesses Botticelli's illustrations of the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, the hero of Dryden's Theodore and Honoria, and our National Gallery a set of the story of Griseldis, attributed to Pinturicchio), and mythological episodes. Some of these have the

value of an episode of Boiardo or Spenser; others that of a mere old nurse's story; but they have all of them the charm of the fairy tale. There is, for instance, the story of a good young man (with a name for a fairy tale too, Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini), showing his adventures by land and sea and at many courts, the honors conferred on him by kings and emperors, and how at last he was made Pope, having begun as a mere poor scholar on a gray nag; all painted by Pinturicchio in the Cathedral library of Siena. There is the lamentable story of a bride and bridegroom, by Vittore Carpaccio: the stately, tall bride, St. Ursula, and the dear little foolish bridegroom, looking like her little brother; a story containing a great many incidents: the sending of an embassy to the king; the king being sorely puzzled in his mind, leaning his arm upon his bed and asking the queen's advice; the presence upon the palace steps of an ill-favored old lady, with a crutch and basket, suspiciously like the bad fairy who had been forgotten at the christening; the apparition of an angel to the princess, sleeping, with her crown neatly put away at the foot of the bed; the arrival of the big ship in foreign parts, with the bishop and clergy putting their heads out of the portholes and asking very earnestly, "Where are we?" and finally, a most fearful slaughter of the princess and her eleven thousand ladies-in-waiting. The same Carpaccio a regular old gossip from whom one would expect all the formulas, "and then he says to the king, Sacred Crown," "and then the Prince walks, walks, walks, walks,'

"A company of knights in armor nice and shining," "three comely ladies in a green meadow," and so forth, of the professional Italian story-teller-the same Carpaccio, who was also, and much more than the more solemn Bellini, the first Venetian to handle oil paints like Titian and Tintoret, painted the fairy tale of St. George, with quite the most dreadful dragon's walk, a piece of sea-sand embedded with bones and half-gnawed limbs, and crawled over by horrid insects, that any one could wish to see; and quite the most comical dragon, particularly when led out for execution among the minarets and cupolas and camels and turbans and cymbals of a kind of small Constantinople.

But the fairy tale, beyond all others, with these painters of the fifteenth century, is the antique myth. No Bibbienas and Bembos and Calvos have as yet indoctrinated them (as Raphael, alas! was indoctrinated), with the real spirit of classical times, teaching them that the essence of Antiquity was to have no essence at all; no Ariostos and Tassos have taught the world at large the real Ovidean conception, the monumental allegoric nature and tendency to vacant faces and sprawling, big-toed nudity of the heroes and goddesses, as Giulio Romano, and the Caracci so well understood to paint them. For all the humanists that hung about courts, the humanities had not penetrated much into the Italian people. The imaginative form and color was still purely medieval; and the artists of the early Renaissance had to work out their Ovidean stories for themselves, and work them out of their own material.