It will be seen, then, that the business of archaeology is often misunderstood both by archaeologists and by the public; and that there is really no reason to believe, with Thomas Earle, that the real antiquarian loves a thing the better for that it is rotten and stinketh.  That the impression has gone about is his own fault, for he has exposed too much to view the mechanism of his work; but it is also the fault of the public for not asking of him a picture of things as they were.

Man is by nature a creature of the present.  It is only by an effort that he can consider the future, it is often quite impossible for him to give any heed at all to the Past.  The days of old are so blurred and remote that it seems right to him that any relic from them should, by the maltreatment of Time, be unrecognisable.  The finding of an old sword, half-eaten by rust, will only please him in so far as it shows him once more by its sad condition the great gap between those days and these, and convinces him again of the sole importance of the present.  The archaeologist, he will tell you, is a fool if he expects him to be interested in a wretched old bit of scrap-iron.  He is right.  It would be as rash to suppose that he would find interest in an ancient sword in its rusted condition as it would be to expect the spectator at Rheims to find fascination in the nuts and screws.  The true archaeologist would hide that corroded weapon in his workshop, where his fellow-workers alone could see it.  For he recognises that it is only the sword which is as good as new that impresses the public; it is only the Present that counts.  That is the real reason why he is an archaeologist.  He has turned to the Past because he is in love with the Present.  He, more than any man, worships at the altar of the goddess of To-day; and he is so desirous of extending her dominion that he has adventured, like a crusader, into the lands of the Past in order to subject them to her.  Adoring the Now, he would resent the publicity of anything which so obviously suggested the Then as a rust-eaten old blade.  His whole business is to hide the gap between Yesterday and To-day; and, unless a man is initiate, he would have him either see the perfect sword as it was when it sought the foeman’s bowels, or see nothing.  The Present is too small for him; and it is therefore that he calls so insistently to the Past to come forth from the darkness to augment it.  The ordinary man lives in the Present, and he will tell one that the archaeologist lives in the Past.  This is not so.  The layman, in the manner of the Little Englander, lives in a small and confined Present; but the archaeologist, like a true Imperialist, ranges through all time, and calls it not the Past but the Greater Present.