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THE NEW HISTORY 
 
^2^^^ 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK . BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO.. Limited 
 
 LONDON . BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 ESSAYS ILLUSTRATING THE 
 
 MODERN HISTORICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON 
 
 PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1912 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
.R<bS8 
 
 Copyright, 1912, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 19 12. 
 
 Norfajootr 33res8 
 
 J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
 % 
 
 V 
 
PREFACE 
 
 All of the essays in this volume, with the exception 
 of the fourth, have been printed before, as addresses 
 or contributions to periodicals. They have, however, 
 not only been carefully revised, but have been ad- 
 justed so as to give as much coherence as possible 
 to the collection. They all illustrate, each in its 
 particular way, the conception of ''the new history" 
 developed in the first essay. 
 
 In No. I, I borrow portions from an article on 
 ^'Popular Histories and their Defects" which ap- 
 peared in the now defunct International Monthly, 
 July, 1900, but have made a new use of them. 
 The second paper was originally prepared as one 
 in a series of non-technical lectures delivered at 
 Columbia University in 1908 and published by the 
 Columbia University Press. With it has been com- 
 bined portions from a paper on ''The New History" 
 read before the Philosophical Society in Phila- 
 delphia, April 22, 1911. No. in was read before 
 the American Historical Association, December, 1910, 
 and printed in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, 
 and Scientific Method, March 16, 191 1, where No. 
 VIII also appeared on May n of the same year. 
 
VI PREFACE 
 
 No. V was read, under the caption "The Significance 
 of History in Industrial Education/' before the super- 
 intendents of the larger cities at the meeting of the 
 National Educational Association at IndianapoHs, 
 March 2, 1910, and was printed in The Educational Bi 
 Monthly, June, 1910. No.VI was read before the Ne 
 England Teachers Association at Hartford, April 2^ 
 1906. No. VH is a combination of two articles: 
 ''The Tennis Court Oath," prepared for the meeting 
 of the American Historical Association in 1894 and 
 published in their proceedings and in the Political 
 Science Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3, and "The French 
 Declaration of the Rights of Man," which was printed 
 in the latter journal, Vol. XIV, No. 4; together with 
 borrowings from an article in the American Historical 
 Review, April, 1906, on "Some Recent Tendencies 
 in the Study of the French Revolution." 
 
 J. H. R. 
 
 Columbia University, New York, 
 
 November, 1911. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 CHAPTER J 
 
 ■' I. The New History 
 
 26 
 
 II. The History of History 
 
 ^ III. The New Allies of History ...-70 
 
 IV. Some Reflections on Intellectual History ioi 
 
 V. History for the Common Man . • .132 
 
 ^ VI. "The Fall of Rome" I54 v/ 
 
 Vll. "The Principles of 1789" • • * • ^95 
 
 sVIII. The Conservative Spirit in the Light of 
 
 History 
 
 236 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 In its amplest meaning History includes every trace 
 W vestige of everything that man has done or thought 
 See first he appeared on the earth It may asprre 
 to follow the fate of nations or it may depict the habits 
 and emotions of the most obscure mdividual. It 
 Sources of information extend from the rude fiin 
 hatchets of Chelles to this morning's newspaper. It 
 ?s the vigue and comprehensive science of past human 
 aff ai s We are within its bounds whether we decipher 
 a mo tgage on an Assyrian tile, estimate the value o 
 JhrDiamond Necklace, or describe the over-.hort 
 pastry to which Charles V was addicted to his undoing^ 
 The tragic reflections of Eli's daughter-in^aw when 
 le learned of the discomfiture of her_ People at Eb- 
 ezer are history; so are the provisions of Magna 
 Charta the origin of the doctrine of transubstantia- 
 Sn L fall S Santiago, the difference between a 
 black friar and a white friar, and the certified circu- 
 Stt of the N^ York WorU ^PO"^ ^e^bruary 
 of the current year. Each fact has its interest 
 and importance ; all have been carefully record d^ 
 
 Now when a writer opens and begins to peruse the 
 thiS closely written volume of human experience, 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 With a View of making an abstract of it for those who 
 have no time to study the original work, he is imme- 
 diately forced to ask himself what he shall select 
 to present to his readers' attention. He finds that 
 the great book from which he gains his information is 
 grotesquely out of perspective, for it was compiled 
 by many different hands, and by those widely sepa- 
 rated m time and in sentiment — by Herodotus, 
 Machiavelli, Eusebius, St. Simon, Otto of Freising, 
 Pepys, St. Luke, the Duchess of Abrantes, Sallust' 
 Cotton Mather. The portentously serious alternates 
 with the lightest gossip. A dissipated courtier may 
 be allotted a chapter and the destruction of a race 
 be left unrecorded. It is clear that in treating history 
 for the general reader the question of selection and 
 proportion is momentous. Yet when we turn to our 
 more popular treatises on the subject, the obvious 
 and pressing need of picking and choosing, of selecting 
 reselecting, and selecting again, would seem to have 
 escaped most writers. They appear to be the victims 
 of tradition in dealing with the past. They exhibit 
 but little appreciation of the vast resources upon 
 which they might draw, and unconsciously follow for 
 the most part, an established routine in their selection 
 of facts. When we considerdiev^trange of human 
 interests, our histories furnish us with a sadly inade- 
 quate and misleading review of the past, and it 
 might almost seem as if historians had joined in a 
 conspiracy to foster a narrow and relatively unedi- 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 3 
 
 fying conception of the true scope and intent of his- 
 torical study. This is apparent if we examine any of 
 the older standard outhnes or handbooks from which 
 a great part of the public has derived its notions of 
 the past, either in school or later in hfe. 
 
 The following is an extract from a compendium 
 much used until recently in schools and colleges: 
 "Robert the Wise (of Anjou) (1309-1343), the suc- 
 cessor of Charles II of Naples, and the champion of 
 the Guelphs, could not extend his power over Sicily 
 where Frederick II (i 296-1337), the son of Peter of 
 Aragon, reigned. Robert's granddaughter, Joan 1, 
 after a career of crime and misfortune, was strangled 
 in prison by Charles Durazzo, the last male descendant 
 of the house of Anjou in Lower Italy (1382), who 
 seized on the government. Joan II, the last heir o 
 Durazzo (1414-143S), first adopted Alfonso V of 
 Aragon, and then Louis III, of Anjou, and his brother, 
 Rene Alfonso, who inherited the crown- of Sicily, 
 united both kingdoms (i43S), after a war with Rene 
 and the Visconti of Milan." 
 
 This is not, as we might be tempted to suspect, a 
 mere collection of data for contingent reference no 
 more intended to be read than a table of logarithms 
 It is a characteristic passage from the six pages which 
 a distinguished scholar devotes to the Italy of Dante, 
 Petrarch, and Lorenzo the Magnificent. In pre- 
 paring a guide for more advanced pupils and the 
 general reader, the author's purpose was, he tells us, 
 
4 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 '' that it should present the essential facts of his- 
 tory in due order, . . . that it should point out clearly 
 the connection of events and of successive eras with one 
 another; that through the interest awakened by the 
 natural, unforced view gained of this unity of history 
 and by such illustrative incidents as the brevity of the 
 narrative would allow to be wrought into it, the dry- 
 ness of a mere summary should be so far as possible 
 relieved." Now, in treating the Italian Renais- 
 sance, this writer has chosen barely to mention the 
 name of Francesco Petrarca, but devotes a twelfth \ 
 of the available space to the interminable dynastic 
 squabbles of southern Italy. We may assume that 
 this illustrates his conception of ^Hhe essential facts 
 of history presented in due order," for the extracts 
 quoted above can hardly be an example of ^'illustra- 
 tive incidents" wrought in to reheve the dryness of a 
 mere summary. 
 
 I open a more recent volume which treats of the 
 whole of Europe in the eighteenth century, as it 
 approached the momentous crisis of the French Revo- 
 lution. Its author could hardly fail to realize the 
 necessity of sifting his material most critically in 
 order to make clear the regenerative workings of the 
 new spirit of enlightenment amid conditions essentially 
 difficult for us to understand. He does not hesitate, 
 however, to insert such statements as these: "Zin- 
 zendorf died in 1742, Stahremberg in 1745, Kinsky in 
 1748. While Uhlfeld became on Zinzendorf's death 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 5 
 
 nominally chancellor, Bartenstein remained from 
 1740 to 1753 Minister of Foreign Affairs, and had the 
 greatest influence in the secret conference of Min- 
 isters." Very true; but were there not, perhaps, 
 other things better worth telling about an ill-under- 
 stood century than the dates of the deaths of the 
 members of an Austrian cabinet ? 
 
 An able historian of the French Revolution, who 
 finds no time to tell us how it all came about, cheer- 
 fully devotes many paragraphs to matters like the 
 following : ''The bailHage of Aunis claimed to be inde- 
 pendent of Saintonge, the royal bailliage of Nivernais 
 asserted that it included the ducal bailHage, and the 
 old quarrel between Upper and Lower Auvergne again 
 broke out. Similar rivalry appeared between the 
 cities of Riom and Clermont-Ferrand, each claiming 
 to be the capital of the bailliage of Lower Auvergne, 
 and between the towns of Clermont-en-Argonne and 
 Varennes; Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais asserted that 
 it was a royal bailliage, and not dependent on 
 
 Chartres." 
 
 The tendency to catalogue mere names of persons 
 and places which have not the least importance for 
 the reader, or which for want of space must be left 
 as undetermined as x, y, and z in an unsolved equation, 
 is too common to require further illustration. The 
 question forces itself upon us, why do writers include 
 such seemingly irrelevant and unedifying details? 
 Sometimes, doubtless, from mere thoughtlessness; 
 
6 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the names mean something to the writer, who mis- 
 takenly infers that they are eloquent in themselves. 
 Or he may suppose that they give greater vivacity 
 to his tale, or will form the nucleus about which future 
 knowledge may crystallize. Names but once men- 
 tioned, however, rarely add vividness to a story, 
 but rather obscure it ; and it is safe to say that the 
 mention of Durazzo, Clermont-Ferrand, Kinsky, and 
 Rene are little likely to stimulate farther historical 
 research, but rather to promote general obfuscation. 
 
 It is, however, often urged that even the hastiest 
 and driest chronicle of the "chief events " in the world's 
 history is a good thing, — that we get at least a chron- 
 ological outline which we carry about with us as a 
 guide, which enables us to put our future knowledge 
 in its proper relations. We learn important dates 
 so as to read intelligently later of events of which in 
 school we learn only the names. We prepare our- 
 selves to place our contingent knowledge of literature, 
 philosophy, institutions, and art in what is called an 
 "historic setting." Aiany of us have, however, come 
 to suspect that such an outline amounts to very little. 
 It recommends itself, it is true, as the easiest kind of 
 history to teach, since it requires no thought, — only 
 memory. I once had occasion to ask a college pro- 
 fessor of great erudition and culture, who had resided 
 several years in the Orient, the date of the Hegira, 
 which, with that of Marathon, and the battle of Crecy' 
 is generally regarded as part of the equipment of every 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 7 
 
 educated gentleman. He did not know the date, 
 however, any better than I did, so we looked it up 
 in a dictionary. We might, indeed, have saved a 
 minute or two if we had had the information at our 
 tongue's end, but we had never missed it before. 
 
 A sensible carpenter or plumber does not constantly 
 carry a saw in his hip pocket, or a coil of lead pipe 
 over his shoulder, in order to be ready for a distant 
 emergency. He very properly goes to his shop and 
 his tool chest for his tools and materials. No more, 
 in these days of cheap and convenient books of ref- 
 erence, need the student of history go heavy-armed 
 for intellectual encounters. Of course all knowledge, 
 even that which is well forgotten, may beget a certain 
 habit of accuracy and sense of proportion, but for- 
 mulas should follow knowledge, as they do in our best 
 mathematical textbooks ; in historical instruction we 
 have ordinarily given our formulas first. 
 
 The really fundamental reason for hastening to 
 introduce the reader as early as possible to the son of 
 Peter of Aragon, to Zinzendorf, and that historic 
 spot, Chateauneuf-en-Thimerais, has doubtless been 
 the venerable predilection for merely political events 
 and persons which has until recently dominated our 
 writers of popular history. Carlyle's warning has 
 passed unheeded, that far away from senate houses, 
 battle fields, and king's antechambers, ^'the mighty 
 tide of thought and action was still rolling on its 
 wondrous course." Elaborate attempts have indeed 
 
8 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 been made to justify this seemingly disproportionate 
 fondness for political and military affairs. We are 
 bluntly told by Mr. Freeman that ''History is past 
 poKtics.'^ To Ranke the purpose of history was to 
 clarify our notions of the origin and nature of the 
 State, which forms the basis of the continuity that 
 we beHeve we observe in human development. An- 
 other German scholar claims that for thousands of 
 years the State, the political organism, has been the 
 chief and predominating theme of historical research 
 and that it should remain so.^ 
 
 It is impossible to discuss here the intricate ques- 
 tion of the role of the State in the past; nor is it neces- 
 sary to do so, for no one denies its great importance or 
 would advocate its neglect in our historical manuals. 
 The real question is, has not our bias for political 
 history led us to include a great many trifling details 
 of dynasties and military history which merely con- 
 found the reader and take up precious space that 
 should be devoted to certain great issues hitherto 
 neglected? The winning or losing of a bit of terri- 
 tory by a Louis or a Frederick, the laborious piecing 
 together of a puny duchy destined to speedy disinte- 
 
 * A bitter war was waged for some years among German scholars 
 over the question of the proper scope of history, whether the Stat 
 or general culture is its proper theme. Professor SchmoUer denounce 
 the effort to assert the exclusive claims of political history as "jen 
 Neigung enger bornierter Geister, die ihre Blossen mit Scheuklappe 
 zudecken um einen Rechstitel fur ihre Unwissenheit auf den Nacb 
 bargebieten zu haben." Jahrh. f. Gesetzgehung, etc., Vol. XIII, p. 148. 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 gration upon the downfall of a Caesar Borgia, struggles 
 between rival dynasties, the ambitions of young kings' 
 uncles, tae turning of an enemy's flank a thousand 
 years ago, — have not such things been given an un- 
 meritecl prominence? Man is more than a warrior, 
 a subj ect, or a princely ruler ; the State is by no means 
 his S(3le interest. In the Middle Ages he organized 
 a church more permanent, more penetratingly power- 
 ful, by all accounts, than any civil government ever 
 seer^^ even that of Rome itself. He has, through the 
 a.^es, made voyages, extended commerce, founded 
 cities, estabHshed great universities, written books, 
 built glorious cathedrals, painted pictures, and sought 
 out many inventions. The propriety of including 
 these human interests in our historical manuals is 
 being more and more widely recognized, but political 
 history still retains its supreme position, and past po- 
 litical events are still looked upon by the public as 
 history par excellence. 
 
 In contrast, and even in seeming contradiction, to 
 
 the tradition which gives prominence to pohtical 
 
 events and personages, there is a curious element 
 
 of the sensational in our popular histories. There 
 
 is a kind of history which does not concern itself with 
 
 the normal conduct and serious achievements of 
 
 \nkind in the past, but, like melodrama, purposely 
 
 Jects the picturesque and lurid as its theme. 
 
 ii«- annals of Fiance, a modern writer assures us, will 
 
 \y^ command special attention, for ''No other 
 
lO THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 modern nation has undergone changes more frequent, 
 more radical, more sudden, bloody, and \dramatic." 
 Then, too: "No land has given .birth to ipien morej 
 great, more good, more brave ; none has been cursed^ 
 with men more vile. No people have climbed higher 
 in the arduous pathway of Xdctory ; none hav e been 
 so pitilessly stricken down in defeat." In short, 
 ''France has furnished the epic poem of rp odern 
 history." The writer would therefore convint-^e us 
 that the more prodigious the occurrences narra. ted, 
 the better the history. A distinguished chemist on^-^e^ 
 considerately told me that it seemed to him that the"*'] 
 certitude of history varied in inverse ratio to what 
 we know about it. He might have added that some- 
 times, in common with the Police Gazette, its intrin- 
 sic interest appears to vary in direct ratio to its grue- 
 someness. 
 
 There would be less objection to perpetuating the 
 conception of history as a chronicle of heroic persons 
 and romantic occurrences, were it not that the craving 
 for the dramatic can be better met by confessed fiction, 
 and that those who see in history an epic poem give 
 us very imperfect and erroneous notions of the past. 
 In no other subject of study except history, is fortui- 
 tous prominence accepted as a measure of importance. 
 The teacher of chemistry does not confine himself 
 to pretty experiments, but conscientiously chooses 
 those that are most typical and instructive. Met- 
 potassium and hquefied air are less common ii 
 
 I 
 
THE NEW HISTORY II 
 
 laboratory than water, lime, and sulphuric acid. What 
 would be the opinion in regard to a clinical lecturer 
 who dwelt upon leprosy and the bubonic plague for 
 fear his students might be bored by a description of 
 the symptoms of measles and typhoid? In every 
 study except history the teacher seeks to make the 
 important and normal clear at any cost. All his 
 expedients are directed to that one end. The rule, 
 not the exception, is his object. 
 
 It is noteworthy, too, that we generally recognize 
 the misleading character of descriptions of contem- 
 poraneous conditions in which only the sensational 
 events are narrated. Romantic marriages and tragic 
 deaths; the doings of poisoners, adulterers, and 
 lunatics; the cases of those who have swallowed 
 needles to find them coming out at unexpected places 
 years after; who have taken laudanum for pare- 
 goric, or been run over by beer wagons; even the 
 fullest account of such matters furnishes, after all, but 
 a partial picture of the Hfe of a great city to-day. Yet 
 in the history of France alluded to above, the descrip- 
 tion of the feudal system scarcely extends beyond dun- 
 geons,— *' Oh how damp, dark, and cold ! "— knee clamps 
 and thumbscrews. The medieval church was, we might 
 infer, Httle more than the clever device of evil men 
 ' to gratify greed and lasciviousness, and abounded in 
 1 ''humbugs, frauds, and bogus miracles." To make 
 '*^true statements is not necessarily to tell the truth. 
 *^^We may, like the ''yellow" journaHst, narrate facts, 
 
12 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 but with such reckless disregard of perspective, and 
 with such a consistent anxiety to startle the reader, 
 that unvarnished fiction would be preferable. A 
 writer who, instead of endeavoring to make plain the 
 true greatness of the church, says, *' Miraculous oil 
 was common, portions of the true cross plentiful, 
 and such objects as St. Anne's comb and the Virgin 
 Mary's petticoat were accessible to the devout," 
 is guilty of gross misrepresentation within the bounds 
 of formal accuracy. 
 
 The partiality exhibited by our popular writers for 
 certain classes of historical facts is obviously no proof 
 that other and more pertinent facts should not be 
 brought to the reader's attention. For it may be, as 
 we have seen, either that events are narrated simply 
 because they are pleasing, or dramatic, or highly excep- 
 tional; or that they are mentioned because it is 
 deemed proper that an educated man should know that 
 Philip Augustus became king in 1180, and that the 
 Battle of the Boyne was fought in 1690. But a 
 writer who is governed by these motives in his selec- 
 tion of material will naturally produce a book in which 
 famous episodes and mildly diverting anecdotes are 
 given a didactic seriousness by a proper admixture of 
 dry, traditional information. 
 
 We are, further, ordinarily taught to view mankind 
 as in a periodic state of turmoil. Historical writers 
 do all they can, by studied neglect, to disguise the im- 
 portance of the lucid intervals during which the 
 
 I 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 13 
 
 greater part of human progress has taken place. 
 They skip lightly from one commotion to another. 
 They have not time to explain what the French Revo- 
 lution was by rationally describing the Ancien regime, 
 which can alone give it any meaning, but after the 
 quotation from La Bruyere, regarding certain fierce 
 animals, ''black, livid, and burnt by the sun," and a 
 repetition of that careless phrase, "After us, the del- 
 uge," they hasten on to the Reign of Terror as the be- 
 all and end-all of the bloody affair. And in this way 
 they make a second St. Bartholomew's of one of the 
 grandest and, in its essential reforms, most peaceful of 
 changes which ever overtook France or Europe. Ob- 
 viously the real significance of a revolution is to be 
 measured by the extent to which general conditions 
 were changed and new things substituted for the old. 
 The old must, therefore, be studied quite as carefully 
 as the new — more carefully, indeed, since our sym- 
 pathies are usually with the new, and our knowledge of 
 the more recent is fuller than that of the more remote. 
 Hence, we might far better busy ourselves with the 
 reasons why arbitrary imprisonments, the guilds, the 
 sale of offices, and so forth, were defended by many 
 thoughtful, well-intentioned citizens than waste time 
 in a gratuitous denunciation of them. 
 
 I know that at this point the perfectly natural ob- 
 jection may be raised, that while institutions and grad- 
 ual developments may be very legitimate objects of 
 study for those already trained in historical work, 
 
14 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 they are not proper subjects for any one except a 
 university student or an occasional serious-minded 
 and long-suffering general reader. Only conspicuous 
 events and striking crises are, it is ordinarily assumed, 
 within the scope of natural human interest, and the 
 influence of the personal element must, it is urged, 
 be exaggerated, simply because the general trend of 
 development and progress offers nothing which the 
 mind can easily grasp. We therefore substitute for 
 the real historical continuity a factitious continuity 
 and string our narrative upon a line of kings — Magnus 
 VI (1263-1281), followed by Erick II (1281-1299), 
 followed by Hakon V (1299-13 20), followed by Mag- 
 nus VII (13 20-1365). No one will deny, however, 
 that most of the names in even the best-known dynas- 
 ties remain mere names; and even if we learn that 
 Emperor Rudolph II was a learned man and an 
 astrologer, and his contemporary, Henry III of 
 France, '^a debauched weakling," this knowledge in no 
 way aids us in grasping the most fundamental and 
 valuable truth which the past has to teach us, that of 
 historical continuity. 
 
 Those therefore who would view with distrust any 
 attempt radically to alter our current methods of 
 presenting general history, would probably withdraw 
 their opposition to a change, if some scheme could be 
 devised by which conditions and institutions could be 
 made interesting and comprehensible, and a real con- 
 tinuity be substituted for the kingly nexus with which 
 
THE NEW HISTORY IS 
 
 We now bind the past together. Now I firmly believe 
 that "institutions" (which are after all only national 
 habits) can be made interesting. I use the word "m- ^ 
 stitutions" in a very broad sense to include the ways 
 in which people have thought and acted m the past, 
 their tastes and their achievements in many fields 
 besides the political. Events are the more or less 
 clear expression of "institutions" in this sense, and the 
 events properly selected will serve to make the "m- 
 stitutions" clear. 
 
 Hitherto writers have been prone to deal with events 
 for their own sake ; a deeper insight will surely lead us, 
 as time goes on, to reject the anomalous and seemingly 
 accidental occurrences and dwell rather upon those 
 which illustrate some profound historical truth.' And 
 there is a very simple principle by which the relevant 
 and useful may be determined and the irrelevant re- 
 jected Is the fact or occurrence one which will aid 
 the reader to grasp the meaning of any great period of 
 human development or the true nature of any momen- 
 tous institution? It should then be cherished as a 
 precious means to an end, and the more engaging it is, 
 the better; its inherent interest will only facihtate 
 our work, not embarrass it. On the other hand, is 
 an event seemingly fortuitous, isolated, and anoma- 
 lous, -like the story of Rienzi, the September mas- 
 sacres, or the murder of Marat ? We should then hesi- 
 tate to include it on its own merits, — at least in a 
 brief historical manual - for, interesting as it may be 
 
l6 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 as an heroic or terrible incident, it may mislead the 
 reader and divert his attention from the prevailing 
 interests, preoccupations and permanent achievements 
 of the past. 
 
 If we have not been unfair in our review of the more 
 striking pecuHarities of popular historiography, we 
 find them to be as follows : — 
 
 (i) A careless inclusion of mere names, which can 
 scarcely have any meaning for the reader and which, 
 instead of stimulating thought and interest, merely 
 weigh down his spirit. 
 
 (2) A penchant more or less irresistible to recite 
 political events to the exclusion of other matters 
 often of far greater moment. 
 
 (3) The old habit of narrating extraordinary epi- 
 sodes, not because they illustrate the general trend of 
 affairs or the prevaiHng conditions of a particular time, 
 but simply because they are conspicuous in the annals 
 of the past. This results in a ludicrous disregard of 
 perspective which assigns more importance to a de- 
 mented journalist like Marat than to so influential a 
 writer as Erasmus. 
 
 II 
 
 The essay which immediately follows this will be 
 devoted to a sketch of the history of history, and will |j 
 explain more fully the development of the older id(als j| 
 of historical composition. It will make clear that thbse 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 1 7 
 
 ideals have changed so much from time to time that it 
 is quite possible that an essentially new one may in 
 time prevail. History is doubtless 
 
 An orchard bearing several trees 
 And fruits of different tastes. 
 
 It may please our fancy, gratify our serious or idle 
 curiosity, test our memories, and, as Bolingbroke says, 
 contribute to '' a creditable kind of ignorance." But 
 the one thing that it ought to do, and has not yet effec- 
 tively done, is to help us to understand ourselves and 
 our fellows and the problems and prospects of man- 
 kind. It is this most significant form of history's 
 usefulness that has been most commonly neglected. 
 
 It is true that it has long been held that certain 
 lessons could be derived from the past, — precedents 
 for the statesman and the warrior, moral guidance and 
 consoHng instances of providential interference for 
 the commonalty. But there is a growing suspicion, 
 which has reached conviction in the minds of most 
 modern historians, that this type of usefulness is purely 
 illusory. The present writer is anxious to avoid any 
 risk of being regarded as an advocate of these sup- 
 posed advantages of historical study. Their value 
 rests on the assumption that conditions remain suffi- 
 ciently uniform to give precedents a perpetual value, 
 while, as a matter of fact, conditions, at least in our 
 own time, are so rapidly altering that for the most part 
 it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to apply 
 
^8 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 past experience to the solution of current problems 
 Moreover, we rarely have sufficient reliable informa- 
 tion m regard to the supposed analogous situation in 
 the past to enable us to apply it to present needs. 
 
 Mostoftheappealsofinexpensiveoratoryto"whathis 
 tory teaches" belong to this class of assumed analogies 
 which will not bear close scrutiny. When I speak of 
 history enabling us to understand ourselves and the 
 problems and prospects of mankind, I have something 
 quite different in mind, which I will try to make plain 
 by calhng the reader's attention to the use that he 
 makes of his own personal history. 
 
 We are almost entirely dependent upon our mem- 
 ory of our past thoughts and experiences for an under- 
 standing of the situation in which we find ourselves at 
 any given moment. To take the nearest example the 
 reader will have to consult his own history to under- 
 stand why his eyes are fixed upon this particular page 
 If he should fall into a sound sleep and be suddenly 
 awakened, his memory might for the moment be 
 paralyzed, and he would gaze in astonishment about 
 the room, with no realization of his whereabouts. 
 The fact that all the familiar objects about him pre- 
 sented themselves plainly to his view would not be 
 sufficient to make him feel at home until his memory 
 had come to his aid and enabled him to recall a cer- 
 tam portion of the past. The momentary suspension 
 of memory's functions as one recovers from a faint- 
 ing fit or emerges from the effects of an an<estheric 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 19 
 
 is sometimes so distressing as to amount to a 
 sort of intellectual agony. In its normal state the 
 mind selects automatically, from the almost infimte 
 mass of memories, just those things in our past 
 which make us feel at home in the present. It 
 works so easily and efficiently that we are unconscious 
 of what it is doing for us and of how dependent we 
 are upon it. It supplies so promptly and so precisely 
 what we need from the past in order to make the 
 present intelligible that we are beguiled into the mis- 
 taken notion that the present is self-explanatory and 
 quite able to take care of itself, and that the past is 
 largely dead and irrelevant, except when we have to .^ 
 make a conscious effort to recall some elusive fact. ." 
 
 What we call history is not so different from our 
 more intimate personal memories as at first sight it 
 seems to be ; for very many of the useful and essential 
 elements in our recollections are not personal experi- 
 ences at all, but include a multitude of things which we 
 have been told or have read; and these play a very 
 important part in our life: \ Should the reader of this 
 page stop to reflect, he would perceive a long succession 
 of historical antecedents leading up to his presence m a 
 particular room, his ability to read the English lan- 
 guage, his momentary freedom from pressing cares, and 
 his inclination to center his attention upon a discus- 
 sion of the nature and value of historical study. Were 
 he not vaguely conscious of these historical antece- 
 dents, he would be in the bewildered condition spoken 
 
^° THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 hL'^°"- JT °^ '''' "^^"^°"^^ "^-^^ary to save 
 him from his bewilderment are parts of his own past 
 experience, but many of them belong to the ririmi 
 
 were he confined either to the immediatrimpresrns of 
 the momen , or to his personal experiences. ItXs 
 one something of a shock, indeed, to consider whTa 
 very small part of our guiding convictions are in anv 
 way connected with our personal experience S 
 
 act as that of Artaphemes or of Innocent III • we are 
 forced to a helpless reliance upon the evMe^ce of 
 others for both events. cviuence ot 
 
 _ So it comes about that our personal recollections 
 
 he word. History, from this point of view, may be 
 regarded as an artificial extension and broadening o 
 our memories and may be used to overcome the na'ura 
 bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations. Could we 
 suddenly be endowed with a Godlike and exhaustive 
 know edge of the whole history of mankind, far ml 
 omplete than the combined knowledge of a 1 the hi 
 tones ever written, we should gain forthwith a God- 
 l.ke appreciation of the world in which we live, and a 
 Godlike insight into the evils which mankind now suf! 
 f ers, as well as into the most promising methods for alle- 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 21 
 
 viating them, not because the past would furnish prece- 
 dents of conduct, hut because our conduct would be based 
 upon a perfect comprehension of existing conditions 
 founded upon a perfect knowledge of the past. As yet we 
 are not in a position to interrogate the past with a view 
 to gaining light on great social, poHtical, economic, 
 rehgious, and educational questions in the manner in 
 which we settle the personal problems which face us — 
 for example, whether we should make such and such a 
 visit or investment, or read such and such a book, — by 
 unconsciously judging the situation in the Kght of our 
 recollections. Historians have not as yet set them- 
 selves to furnish us with what lies behind our great 
 contemporaneous task of human betterment. They 
 have hitherto had other notions of their functions, and 
 were they asked to furnish answers to the questions that 
 a person au courant with the problems of the day would 
 most naturally put to them, they would with one ac- 
 cord begin to make excuses. One would say that it 
 had long been recognized that it was the historian's 
 business to deal with kings, parliaments, constitutions, 
 wars, treaties, and territorial changes ; another would 
 declare that recent history cannot be adequately 
 written and that, therefore, we can never hope to 
 bring the past into relation with the present, but must 
 always leave a fitting interval between ourselves and 
 the nearest point to which the historian should venture 
 to extend his researches ; a third will urge that to have 
 a purpose in historical study is to endanger those prin- 
 
22 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 ciples of objectivity upon which all sound and scien- 
 tific research must be based. So it comes about that 
 our books are like very bad memories which insist 
 upon recaUing facts that have no assignable relation 
 to our needs, and this is the reason why the practical 
 value of history has so long been obscured. 
 
 In order to make still clearer our dependence upon 
 history in dealing with the present, let the reader 
 remember that we owe most of our institutions to 
 a rather remote past, which alone can explain their 
 origin. The conditions which produced the Holy 
 Roman Apostolic Church, trial by jury, the Privy 
 Council, the degree of LL.D., the Book of Common 
 Prayer, ''the liberal arts," were very different from 
 those that exist to-day. Contemporaneous religious, 
 educational, and legal ideals are not the immediate 
 product of existing circumstances, but were developed 
 in great part during periods when man knew far less 
 than he now does. Curiously enough our habits of 
 thought change much more slowly than our environ- 
 ment and are usually far in arrears. Our respect for 
 a given institution or social convention may be purely 
 traditional and have little relation to its value, as 
 judged by existing conditions. We are, therefore, in 
 constant danger of viewing present problems with ob- 
 solete emotions and of attempting to settle them by 
 obsolete reasoning. This is one of the chief reasons 
 why we are never by any means perfectly adjusted to 
 our environment. 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 23 
 
 \ 
 
 Our notions of a church and its proper function in 
 society, of a capitalist, of a liberal education, of paying 
 taxes, of Sunday observance, of poverty, of war, are de- 
 termined only to a slight extent by what is happening 
 to-day. The belief on which I was reared, that God 
 ordained the observance of Sunday from the clouds of 
 Sinai, is an anachronism which could not spontane- 
 ously have developed in the United States in the 
 nineteenth century ; nevertheless, it still continues to 
 influence the conduct of many persons. We pay our 
 taxes as grudgingly as if they were still the extortions 
 of feudal barons or absolute monarchs for their per- 
 sonal gratification, although they are now a contribu- 
 tion to our common expenses fixed by our own rep- 
 resentatives. Few have outgrown the emotions con- 
 nected with war at a time when personal prowess played 
 a much greater part than the Steel Trust. Conserva- 
 tive college presidents still feel obliged to defend the 
 "liberal arts" and the ''humanities" without any 
 very clear understanding of how the task came to be 
 imposed upon them. To do justice to the anachro- 
 nisms in conservative economic and legal reasoning 
 would require a whole volume. 
 
 Society is to-day engaged in a tremendous and un- 
 precedented effort to better itself in manifold ways. 
 Never has our knowledge of the world and of man been 
 so great as it now is ; never before has there been so 
 much general good will and so much intelligent social 
 activity as now prevails. The part that each of us 
 
24 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 can play in forwarding some phase of this reform will 
 depend upon our understanding of existing conditions 
 and opinion, and these can only be explained, as has 
 been shown, by following more or less carefully the 
 processes that produced them. We must develop his- 
 torical-mindedness upon a far more generous scale 
 than hitherto, for this will add a still deficient element 
 in our intellectual equipment and will promote ra- 
 tional progress as nothing else can do. The present 
 has hitherto been the willing victim of the past; 
 the time has now come when it should turn on the 
 past and exploit it in the interests of advance. 
 
 The ''New History" is escaping from the limitations 
 formerly imposed upon the study of the past. It will 
 come in time consciously to meet our daily needs ; it 
 will avail itself of all those discoveries that are being 
 made about mankind by anthropologists, economists, 
 psychologists, and sociologists — discoveries which 
 during the past fifty years have served to revolution- 
 ize our ideas of the origin, progress, and prospects of 
 our race. There is no branch of organic or inorganic 
 science which has not undergone the most remarkable 
 changes during the last half century, and many new 
 branches of social science, even the names of which 
 would have been unknown to historians in the 
 middle of the nineteenth century, have been added to 
 the long Hst. It is inevitable that history should be 
 involved in this revolutionary process, but since it 
 must be confessed that this necessity has escaped many 
 
THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 25 
 
 contemporaneous writers, it is no wonder that the in- 
 teUigent public continues to accept somewhat archaic 
 ideas of the scope and character of history. 
 
 The title of this little volume has been chosen with 
 the view of emphasizing the fact that history should 
 not be regarded as a stationary subject which can only 
 progress by refining its methods and accumulating, 
 criticizing, and assimilating new material, but that it is 
 bound to alter its ideals and aims with the general 
 progress of society and of the social sciences, and that 
 it should ultimately play an infinitely more important 
 role in our intellectual life than it has hitherto done. 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 
 
 "History" is so vague a term at best, and has dur- 
 ing the past twenty-five hundred years undergone such 
 considerable changes in character and purpose, that 
 it is well for one to review its somewhat startling 
 vicissitudes if he desires to understand the conflicting 
 notions which prevail to-day in regard to the signifi- 
 cance of the past and the proper way of dealing with 
 it. When we look back over the history of history, 
 from Hecataeus of Miletus and Herodotus to the 
 freshest doctor's dissertation, we perceive that its 
 point of view has never been a settled one; that it 
 has been the victim at once of routine and of tran- 
 sient circumstances. Some of its former ambitions 
 it has now been forced to surrender; it has been 
 chastened by a growing consciousness of ignorance; 
 but these humiliations have been far more than offset 
 by the extraordinary extension of its domain, which 
 has taken place very recently and almost insensibly. 
 Half a century ago, man's past was supposed to in- 
 clude less than six thousand years ; now the story is 
 seen to stretch back hundreds of thousands of years. 
 But it is not man alone that has a history, — animals, 
 plants, rocks, stars, even atoms, have theirs as well. 
 So the zoologist, the botanist, the geologist, the as 
 
 26 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 27 
 
 tronomer, even the chemist have come to worship at 
 History's shrine. / 
 
 The growth of historical-mindedness is thus perhaps 
 the chief intellectual trait of our age. It is deeply 
 affecting not only the social sciences but our general 
 conceptions of the whole organic and inorganic world. 
 
 I Yet in its beginnings history had no very serious aims. 
 
 *4t was doubtless discovered, in the first instance, by 
 the story-teller, and its purpose has usually been to 
 tell a tale rather than to contribute to a well-con- 
 sidered body of scientific knowledge. Indeed we 
 shall not be far astray, if we view history, as it 
 has existed through the ages, and even down to 
 our own day, as a branch of general literature, the 
 object of which has been to present past events in an 
 artistic manner, in order to gratify a natural curiosity 
 in regard to the achievements and fate of conspicuous 
 persons, the rise and decay of monarchies, and the 
 signal commotions and disasters which have repeat- 
 edly afflicted humanity. 
 
 Although the persistence of this primitive notion of 
 history is so obvious as scarcely to demand illustration, 
 it is interesting to note that as late as 1820, Daunou, a 
 reputable French historian of his time, in a course of 
 lectures upon the pursuit of history delivered at the 
 College de France, declares that the masterpieces of 
 epic poetry should claim the first attention of the 
 would-be historian, since it is the poets who have 
 ;reated the art of narrative. Then, from the modern 
 
28 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 novel, Daunou continues, the student may learn "the 
 method of giving an artistic pose to persons and events, 
 of distributing details, of skillfully carrying on the 
 thread of the narrative, of interrupting it, of resuming 
 it, of sustaining the attention and provoking the curios- 
 ity of the reader." After the poets and novelists, the 
 works of standard historians should be read with a 
 view to surprising the secrets of their style — Herodo- 
 tus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Plutarch ; 
 C^sar, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus ; and, among the 
 moderns, MacchiavelH, Guicciardini, Giannone, Hume, 
 Robertson, Gibbon, and Voltaire. When the founda- 
 tions of an elegant Hterary style are firmly estabhshed, 
 the student may re-read the standard treatises with 
 attention to the matter rather than the form; for, as 
 even the judicious Daunou concedes, before writing 
 history "it is evidently necessary to know it." Both 
 Daunou's program and his list of names — unques- 
 tionably the most distinguished among historians 
 throughout the centuries — testify to the strength 
 of Hterary traditions among historical writers. 
 
 Yet a formal distinction at least has of course al- 
 ways been made between history and other branches of 
 Hterature. This is emphasized by Polybius, writing 
 in the second century before Christ. "Surely," he 
 says, "an historian's object should be not to amaze his 
 readers by a series of thrilhng anecdotes, nor should he 
 aim to produce speeches which might have been ^de- 
 livered, nor to study dramatic propriety in detail, Hkcit 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 29 
 
 writer of tragedy. On the contrary, his function is, 
 above all, to record with fidelity what was actually 
 said or done, no matter how commonplace it may be." 
 
 These warnings of Polybius were, however, com- 
 monly neglected by the ancient historian, whose ob- 
 ject was to interest his readers in the great men and 
 striking events of the past, or to prepare him for pub- 
 he hfe by describing and analyzing the policy of former 
 statesmen and* generals, or to teach him to bear with 
 dignity the vicissitudes of fortune by recalling the 
 calamities of others. It is clear that these ends of 
 amusing, instructing, or edifying were to be attained 
 mainly by literary skill rather than by painful his- 
 torical research. 
 
 To Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus, history ap- 
 peared to be purely human and secular. Its signifi- 
 cance was confined to this world. To them any allu- 
 sion to the influence of the gods or to providence would 
 have seemed quite out of place. But with the estab- 
 lishment of the Christian church the past began to 
 take on a religious and theological meaning. 
 
 II 
 
 To the early Christians Hebrew history, as narrated 
 in the Old Testament, served as a very important 
 substantiation and illustration of their contention 
 that the Messiah had at last come. By means of 
 allegorical interpretation the most casual episodes of 
 
30 
 
 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 a remote past could be given a vivid and essential re- 
 lation to the present. The Christians were perhaps the 
 first to suspect a real grandeur in history, for to them 
 it became a divine epic, stretching back to the creation 
 of man and forward to the final separation of the good 
 and evil in a last magnificent and decisive crisis. 
 
 But this theological unity and meaning of history 
 was won at the tremendous sacrifice of all secular per- 
 spective and accuracy. The Amorites were invested 
 with an importance denied the Carthaginians. Enoch 
 and Lot loomed large in a past which scarcely knew of 
 a Pericles. Allegory rendered all literary or historical 
 criticism irrelevant, if not an impious questioning of 
 God's own revealed truth. Then Augustine came to 
 give an elaborate and plausible form to his theory of 
 two cities, — a City of God which had existed from the 
 first and which could be traced through the Old Testa- 
 ment into the New, and a City of Satan, founded by 
 the fallen angels, exemplified in King Belus and Queen 
 Semiramis, and trailing its obscene existence down 
 through the Roman Empire to his own day. History 
 became sacred and profane. The fantastically inter- 
 preted Jewish records, continued in the story of Chris- 
 tian martyrs and miracles, constituted history par 
 excellence. 
 
 All the achievements of Egypt, Greece, and Rome 
 tended to sink out of sight in the mind of Augus- 
 tine's disciple, Orosius; only the woes of a devil- 
 worshiping heathendom lingered. At Augustine's 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 31 
 
 suggestion he prepared his Seven Books of History 
 directed against the Pagans. His aim was to refute 
 those heathen detractors of Christianity who main- 
 tained that their age was accursed above all others, 
 owing to the desertion of the ancient gods. He boldly- 
 maintained that, on the contrary, a veritable carnival 
 of death had preceded the appearance of Christianity. 
 To prove this he brought together, as he tells us, in the 
 compass of a single volume, all the examples he could 
 find in the annals of the past ''of the most signal hor- 
 rors of war, pestilence, and famine, of the fearful devas- 
 tations of earthquakes and inundations, the destruc- 
 tion wrought by fiery eruptions, by lightning and hail, 
 and the awful misery due to crime." His convenient 
 and edifying treatise became the standard manual of 
 universal history for a thousand years to follow. It 
 was agreeable reading to medieval Christians, and it 
 enjoyed the sanction of the chief among the church 
 fathers. History thus became for Orosius, and for 
 his innumerable readers in succeeding centuries, the 
 story of God's punishment of sin and of the curse which 
 man's original transgression had brought upon the 
 whole earth. 
 
 But we need not expose ourselves to the hot and 
 withering blasts of Orosius's rhetoric in order to 
 realize the salient contrast between his conception of 
 history's purpose and usefulness, and that of the clas- 
 sical Greek and Roman writers. In the old days the 
 danger had been that Cho would fall into the way of 
 
32 
 
 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 aping her sisters, Poetry and the Drama, and of bor- 
 rowing their finery. Now, she permitted herself to 
 be led away bHndfolded by Theology, which was for 
 so long to be the potent rival of literature. The Greek 
 historians and the greatest of the Romans, Tacitus, 
 were forgotten in the Middle Ages ; so the polemical 
 pamphlet of Orosius served to distort Europe's vision 
 of the past for a thousand years until Thucydides and 
 Polybius came once more within its ken. 
 
 But even the revival of classical learning by no 
 means put an end to the "providential" conception of 
 the past. This finds beautiful expression in Bossuet's 
 Universal History. He perceives behind all the great 
 events which he recalls, the secret ordering of Provi- 
 dence : — 
 
 Dieu tient du plus haut des cieux les renes de tous les 
 royamnes ; il a tous les coeurs en sa main ; tantot il retient les 
 passions, tantot 11 leur lache la bride, et par la il remue tout le 
 genre humain. Veut-il faire des conquerants ; il fait marcher 
 I'epouvante devant eux, et il inspire a eux et a leurs soldats une 
 hardiesse invincible. Veut-il faire des legislateurs ; il leur en- 
 voie son esprit de sagesse et de prevoyance ; il leur fait prevenir 
 les maux qui menacent les etats, et poser les fondements de la 
 tranquillite publique. II connoit la sagesse humaine, toujours 
 courte par quelque endroit ; il I'eclaire, il etend ses vues, et puis 
 Tabandonne a ses ignorances ; il I'aveugle, il la precipite, il la 
 confond par elle-meme ; elle s'enveloppe, elle s'embarrasse dans 
 ses propres subtilites, et ses precautions lui sont un piege. Dieu 
 exerce par ce moyen ses redoutables Jugements, selon les regies de 
 sa justice toujours infaillible. ^ 
 
 1 Discours sur I'histoire universelle, concluding chapter. 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 33 
 
 Unhappily the mysterious character of divine dis- 
 pensations opened the door to conflicting views of their 
 meaning. All history seemed to Bossuet to exhibit 
 God's constant solicitude for the Catholic Church and 
 his anger against all who swerved from the faith de- 
 livered to Peter and handed down by his successors. 
 Luther, on the other hand, believed that History sup- 
 ported him in his attack upon what he called the ^'Teu- 
 fels Nest zu Rom." And not long after his death a 
 group of Protestants had compiled a vast history 
 of the church — The Magdeburg Centuries, as it was 
 called — in which they sought to prove the diabolical 
 origin of the papacy and of the Roman Catholic 
 Church. Cardinal Baronius replied in twelve foHo 
 volumes, written, as he trusted, under the direct 
 auspices of the Virgin Mary, in which he set forth "the 
 calamities divinely sent for the punishment of those 
 who have dared to oppose in their arrogance, or con- 
 spire against, the true church of God." For three 
 centuries each party continued to suborn history in its 
 own interest, and one must still, to-day, allow for 
 religious bias in important fields of historical research. 
 Yet in spite of all their bitterness and bhndness, reli- 
 gious controversies have stimulated much scholarly in- 
 vestigation in modern times, and we should be much 
 poorer if certain works of a distinctly partisan char- 
 acter had never been written, — such, for example, as 
 Raynaldus' continuation of Baronius and, in our own 
 days, Janssen's History of the German People. 
 
34 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 To the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries and 
 to Cardinal Baronius — to Protestant and Catholic 
 historians alike — the great, obvious, determining 
 historical forces were God and the devil. Our con- 
 ception of God, as well as our ideas of history, have, 
 however, been changing since the sixteenth century, 
 and it is rare now to find a historian who possesses the 
 old confidence in his ability to penetrate God's coun- 
 sels and trace his dispensations in detail. As for the 
 devil, few events can longer be ascribed to him with 
 perfect assurance. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The reversion to the worldly standards of historical 
 composition, represented by Macchiavelli and Guic- 
 ciardini in the early sixteenth century, became pro- 
 nounced in the eighteenth. Gibbon, Voltaire, Hume, 
 Robertson, and others successfully resecularized his- 
 tory and strove to give their narrative of poHtical 
 events the ancient elegance of form. 
 
 Lord Bolingbroke, in his Letters on the Study of 
 History, written about 1737, says: '^An appHca- 
 tion to any study that tends neither to make us better 
 men and better citizens is at best but a specious and 
 ingenious sort of idleness; . . . and the knowledge 
 we acquire by it is a creditable kind of ignorance, noth- 
 ing more. This creditable kind of ignorance is, in my 
 opinion, the whole benefit which the generality of 
 men, even the most learned, reap from the study of 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 35 
 
 history : and yet the study of history seems to me of .; 
 all others the most proper to train us up to private ' 
 and public virtue." History, he quite properly says, 
 is read by most people as a form of amusement, as 
 they might play at cards. Some devote themselves 
 to history in order to adorn their conversation with 
 historical allusions, — and the argument is still 
 current that one should know enough of the past to 
 understand Hterary references to noteworthy events 
 and persons. The less imaginative scholar, Boling-7 
 broke complains, satisfies himself with making fair] 
 copies of foul manuscripts and explaining hard words ! |\ 
 for the benefit of others, or with constructing more or ! 
 less fantastic chronologies based upon very insecure 
 data. Over against these Bolingbroke places those 
 who have perceived that history is after all only 
 ''philosophy teaching by example." For ''the exam- 
 ples which we find in history, improved by the lively 
 descriptions and the just explanations or censures of 
 historians," will, he believes, have a much better and 
 more permanent effect than declamation, or the "dry 
 ethics of mere philosophy." Moreover, to summarize 
 his argument, we can by the study of history enjoy in 
 a short time a wide range of experience at the expense 
 of other men and without risk to ourselves. History 
 enables us "to live with the men who Hved before us, 
 and we inhabit countries that we never saw. Place 
 is enlarged, and time prolonged in this manner : so 
 that the man who applies himself early to the study of 
 
36 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 history may acquire in a few years, and before he sets 
 foot in the world, not only a more extended knowledge 
 of mankind, but the experience of more centuries than 
 any of the patriarchs saw.'' Our own personal expe- 
 rience is doubly defective ; we are born too late to see 
 the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of 
 many things. History supplies in a large measure 
 these defects. 
 
 There is, of course, little originality in Bolingbroke's 
 plea for history's usefulness in making wiser and better 
 men and citizens. Polybius had seen, in history a 
 guide for statesmen and military commanders; and 
 the hope that the striking moral victories and de- 
 feats of the past would serve to arouse virtue and dis- 
 courage vice has been urged by innumerable chroniclers 
 as the main justification of their enterprises. To-day, 
 however, one rarely finds a historical student who would 
 venture to recommend statesmen, warriors, and moral- 
 ists to place any confidence whatsoever in historical 
 analogies and warnings, for the supposed analogies 
 usually prove illusive on inspection, and the warnings, 
 impertinent. Whether or no Napoleon was ever able 
 to make any practical use in his own campaigns of the 
 accounts he had read of those of Alexander and Caesar, 
 it is quite certain that Admiral Togo would have de- 
 rived no useful hints from Nelson's tactics at Alexan- 
 dria or Trafalgar. Our situation is so novel that it 
 would seem as if political and military precedents of 
 even a century ago could have no possible value. As 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 
 
 37 
 
 for our present ^^ anxious morality," as Maeterlinck 
 calls it, it seems equally clear that the sinful extrava- 
 gances of Sardanapalus and Nero, and the conspicuous 
 public virtue of Aristides and the Horatii, are alike 
 impotent to promote it. 
 
 In the eighteenth century a considerable number of 
 ''philosophies of history" appeared and enjoyed great 
 popularity. They were the outcome of a desire to 
 seize and explain the general trend of man's past. Of 
 course this had been also the purpose of Augustine 
 and Bossuet, but Voltaire devoted his Philosophie de 
 Vhistoire (1765) mainly to discrediting religion as 
 commonly accepted ; and instead of offering any par- 
 ticular theory of the past he satisfied himself with pick- 
 ing out what he calls "les verites utiles." He addresses 
 Madame du Chatelet in the opening of his Essai sur 
 les Mceurs et V esprit des nations as follows : — 
 
 Vous ne cherchez dans cette immensite que ce qui merite 
 d'etre connu de vous ; I'esprit, les mceurs, les usages des 
 nations principales, appuyes des faits qu'il n'est pas permis 
 d'ignorer. Le but de ce travail n'est pas de savoir en quelle 
 annee un prince indigne d'etre connu succeda a un prince 
 barbare chez une nation grossiere. Si Ton pouvait avoir le 
 malheur de mettre dans sa tete la suite chronologique detoutes 
 les dynasties, on ne saurait que des mots. Autant il faut con- 
 naitre les 'grandes actions des souverains qui ont rendu leurs 
 peuples meilleurs et plus heureux, autant on peut ignorer le 
 vulgaire des rois, qui ne pourrait que charger la memoire. . . . 
 Dans tous ces recueils immenses qu'on ne peut embrasser, il 
 faut se borner et choisir. C'est un vaste magazin oil vous 
 prendrez ce qui est a votre usage. 
 
38 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 Voltaire's reactions on the past were naturally just 
 what might have been expected from his attitude 
 toward his own times. He drew from *4e vaste mag- 
 azin" those things that he needed for his great cam- 
 paign, and in this he did well, however uncritical his 
 criticism may seem at times to a modern historical 
 student. 
 
 Herder in his little work, Auch eine Philosophie der 
 GeschicUe zur Bildung der Menschheit. Beitrag zur 
 vielen Beitragen des Jahrhunderts (1774), condemns 
 the general hght-heartedness and superficiaHty of 
 Voltaire and other contemporary writers who were, he 
 thought, vainly attempting to squeeze the story of the 
 universe and man into their puny philosophic cate- 
 gories. Ten years later he wrote his larger work, 
 Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, in which he strove 
 to give some ideal unity and order to the vast historic 
 process, beginning with a consideration of the place of 
 the earth among the other heavenly bodies, and of 
 man's relations to the vegetable and animal kingdoms. 
 ^'If," he says, "there be a god in nature, there is in 
 history too ; for man is himself a part of creation, and 
 in his wildest extravagances and passions must obey 
 laws not less excellent and beautiful than those by 
 which all the celestial bodies move. Now, as I am 
 persuaded that man is capable of knowing, and des- 
 tined to attain the knowledge of, everything that he 
 ought to know, I step freely and confidently from the 
 tumultuous scenes through which we have been wander- 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 
 
 39 
 
 ing, to inspect the beautiful and sublime laws of nature 
 by which they have been governed.'^ Humanity is 
 the end of human nature, he held, and the human race 
 is destined to proceed through various degrees of civi- 
 lization in various mutations ; but the permanency of 
 its welfare is founded solely and essentially on reason 
 and justice. It is, moreover, a natural law that "if a 
 being or system of beings be forced out of the perma- 
 nent position of its truth, goodness, and beauty, it 
 will again approach it by its internal powers, either in 
 vibrations or in an asymptote, since out of this state 
 it finds no stability.'^ Herder formulates from time 
 to time a considerable number of other "laws" which 
 he believes emerge from the confusion of the past. 
 Whatever we may think of these "laws," he con- 
 stantly astonishes the modern reader not only by his 
 penetrating criticism of the prevaihng philosophy of 
 his time, but by flashes of deep historical insight. He 
 is clearly enough the forerunner of the "Romantic" 
 tendency that culminated in Hegel's celebrated Phi- 
 losophy of History. 
 
 IV 
 
 Since the middle of the eighteenth century, new 
 interests other than the more primitive literary, 
 political, military, moral, and theological, have been 
 developing. These have exercised a remarkable 
 influence upon historical research, radically altering 
 
 b 
 
40 
 
 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 its spirit and aims and broadening its scope. To take 
 a single example, Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws — 
 first published in 1748 — reviews the past with the 
 purpose of estabHshing a purely scientific proposition, 
 namely, the relativity of all human institutions, social, 
 political, educational, economic, legal, and mihtary. 
 The discussions attending the drafting of the first 
 French Constitution (1789-1791) served to provoke a 
 study of constitutional history which has never since 
 flagged. 
 
 Early in the nineteenth century the cosmopolitan 
 sentiments so conspicuous at the opening of the French 
 Revolution began to give way to the spirit of national- 
 ity which was awaking in the various European states, 
 especially in Germany. This almost immediately 
 showed itself in a new and highly characteristic in- 
 terpretation of the philosophy of history. Although 
 the writer makes no pretensions to understanding 
 Hegel, it may be worth while to repeat a few things 
 he said in his lectures on the philosophy of history, 
 first delivered in Berhn in the winter of 1822-1823, 
 for many people have thought they did understand him 
 and were deeply affected by his teachings. As he 
 looked back over the restless mutations of individuals 
 and peoples, existing for a time and then vanishing, 
 he was confident that he could trace the World-Spirit 
 striving for consciousness and then for freedom, its 
 essential nature. This spirit assumes successive forms 
 which it successively transcends. Tj'hese forms are 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 41 
 
 exhibited in the peculiar natural genius of historic 
 peoples. The spirit of a particular people, having 
 strictly defined characteristics, ^^erects itself," Hegel 
 explains, ^^into an objective world that exists and 
 persists in a particular form of religious worship, cus- 
 toms, constitution and poHtical laws,— in short, in 
 the whole complex of its institutions, and in the events 
 and transactions that make up its history." The Per- 
 sians, Hegel held, were the first world-historical people, 
 for was it not in Persia that the World-Spirit first 
 began to attain an ''unlimited immanence of subjec- 
 tivity"? The Greek character was "individuality 
 conditioned by beauty." ''Subjective inwardness" 
 was the general principle of the Roman world. In- 
 genious as this theory may be, it would hardly have 
 formed the basis of a new gospel of national freedom 
 and deeply affected historical interpretation, had it 
 not been for Hegel's extraordinary discovery that it 
 was his own dear German nation in which it had 
 pleased the "Weltgeist" to assume its highest form. 
 '^The German Spirit is the Spirit of the new world," 
 Hegel proclaims; "its aim is the realization of abso- 
 lute truth, as the unlimited self-determination of 
 Freedom. ... The destiny of the German peoples 
 IS to be the bearers of the Christian principle." 
 
 The supreme role assigned by Hegel to his own 
 countrymen filled them with justifiable pride. And 
 was not this assumption amply borne out by the 
 glories of "Deutschthum" in the Middle Ages, which 
 
42 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the Romanticists were singing : and, much more re- 
 cently, by the successful expulsion of the French 
 tyrant ? That all this should combine to give a dis- 
 tinct national and patriotic trend to historic research 
 and writing was inevitable. The great collection of 
 the sources for the German Middle Ages, — the '^Mon- 
 umenta Germanic Historica " — which was to become 
 a model for other nations, began to be issued in 1826, 
 and for the first time the Germans became leaders in 
 the historical field as in so many others. Ranke, 
 Dahn, Giesebrecht, Waitz, Droysen, and dozens of 
 others who began to devote themselves to German 
 history, were all filled with a warm patriotism and en- 
 thusiasm very different from the cosmopoKtan spirit 
 of the preceding century. Throughout Europe, his- 
 tory tended to become distinctly national, and an ex- 
 traordinary impetus was given to the publication of 
 vast collections of material. 
 
 It was natural that this national spirit and the po- 
 litical and constitutional questions of the nineteenth 
 century should serve to perpetuate the older interest 
 in political history. This is the most ancient, most 
 obvious, and easiest kind of history, for the poKcy of 
 kings, the laws they issued and the wars they fought, 
 have always been the matters which were Hkeliest to 
 be recorded. Then the State is the most imposing 
 and important of man's social creations, and histo- 
 rians have commonly felt that what was best worth 
 knowing in the past could be directly or indirectly 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 43 
 
 associated with its history. Ranke, Droysen, Mauren- 
 brecher, Freeman, and many others deemed political 
 history to be history in its most unmistakable form. / 
 
 We have now reviewed the chief motives which 
 appear to have influenced the greater number of his- 
 torical writers from Thucydides to Macaulay and 
 Ranke. They all agreed in examining more or less 
 conscientiously and critically the records of past 
 events and conditions with a view to amusing, edify- 
 ing, or comforting the reader. But none of the main 
 interests of which I have so far spoken can be regarded 
 as scientific. To scan the past with the hope of dis- 
 covering recipes for the making of statesmen and 
 warriors, of discrediting the pagan gods, of showing 
 that Catholic or Protestant is right, of exhibiting 
 the stages of self-realization of the Weltgeist, or demon- 
 strating that Liberty emerged from the forests of 
 Germany never to return thither, — none of these 
 motives are scientific, although they may go hand in 
 hand with much sound scholarship. But by the 
 middle of the nineteenth century the Muse of History 
 — semper mutahile — began to fall under the potent 
 spell of natural science. She was no longer satis- 
 fied to celebrate the deeds of heroes and nations with 
 the lyre and shrill flute on the breeze-swept slopes of 
 Helicon; she no longer durst attempt to vindicate 
 
44 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the ways of God to man. She came to recognize 
 that she was ill-prepared for her undertakings, and 
 began to spend her mornings in the library, collating 
 manuscripts and making out lists of variant readings. 
 She aspired to do even more, and began to talk of 
 raising her chaotic mass of information to the rank 
 of a science. 
 
 The results of history's new ambition to become 
 scientific are of the greatest importance. In the first 
 place the sources of information in regard to the past 
 began to be viewed with critical suspicion, f So long as 
 historians continued to present to the reader such 
 conspicuous events as they thought might enlist his 
 interest, and commented on these with a view of 
 fortifying his virtue or patriotism or staying his faith 
 in God, it made little difference whether they took 
 pains to verify the facts or not. Indeed, the exact 
 truth, when we are lucky enough to get a glimpse of 
 it, is rarely so picturesque or so edifying as ^'what 
 might have been." But to-day a large part of the 
 historian's attention is directed to the character, 
 rehability, or defects of his sources. The data upon 
 which history rests have been subjected to the most 
 searching scrutiny. Much that was formerly relied 
 upon has either been partially rejected or thrown out 
 altogether ; but much has also been added by scru- 
 pulous search and systematic cataloguing. 
 
 Moreover, the historian now realizes clearly that 
 all his sources of information are inferior, in their very 
 
 I 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 45 
 
 nature, to data available in the various fields of natural 
 science. He can almost never have any direct expe- 
 rience of the phenomena which he describes. He only 
 knows the facts of the past by the imperfect traces 
 they have left, whether in books, documents, inscrip- 
 tions, or in the remains of buildings and other archae- 
 ological survivals. The traces he finds in books — 
 upon which he has been wont to rely chiefly — are 
 usually only the reports of some one who commonly 
 did not himself have any direct experience of the facts 
 and who did not even take the trouble to tell us where 
 he got his alleged information. This is true of almost 
 all the ancient and medieval historians and annalists. 
 So it comes about that ''the immense majority of the 
 sources of information which furnish the historian 
 with startling points for his reasoning are nothing 
 else than traces of psychological operations" rather 
 than direct traces of facts. As a French scholar has 
 remarked, the historian is in the position of a chemist 
 who should be forced to rely for his knowledge of a 
 series of experiments upon what his laboratory boy 
 tells him. 
 
 To take a single example from among thousands 
 which might be cited: Gibbon tells us that after the 
 death of Alaric in 410 ''the ferocious character of 
 the Barbarians was displayed in the funeral of the 
 hero, whose valor and fortune they celebrated with 
 mournful applause. By the labor of a captive multi- 
 tude they forcibly diverted the course of the Busen- 
 
46 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 tinus, a small river that washes the walls of Consentia. 
 The royal sepulcher, adorned with the splendid spoils 
 and trophies of Rome, was constructed in the vacant 
 bed; the waters were then restored to their natural 
 channel, and the secret spot where the remains of 
 Alaric had been deposited, was forever concealed by 
 the inhuman massacre of the prisoners who had been 
 employed to execute the work." The basis of this 
 account is the illiterate History of the Goths written 
 by an ignorant person, Jordanes, about a hundred 
 and forty years after the occurrence of the supposed 
 events. We know that Jordanes copied freely from 
 a work of his better-instructed contemporary, Cas- 
 siodorus, which has been lost. This is absolutely 
 all we know about the sources of our information. 
 
 Shall we believe this story, which has found its way 
 into so many of our textbooks ? Gibbon did not 
 witness the burial of Alaric, nor did Jordanes, upon 
 whose tale Gibbon greatly improves, nor did Cassi- 
 odorus, who was not born until some eighty years after 
 the death of the Gothic king. We can control the 
 *^ psychological operation" represented in Gibbon's 
 text, for he says he got the tale from Jordanes, but, 
 aside from our suspicion that Jordanes took the story 
 from the lost book by Cassiodorus, we have no means of 
 controlling the various psychological operations which 
 separate the tale as we have it from the real circum- 
 stances. We have other reasons than Jordanes' 
 authority for supposing that Alaric is dead ; as for the 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 47 
 
 circumstances of his burial we can only say they may 
 have been as described but we have only the shghtest 
 reason for supposing that they were. 
 
 VI 
 
 A second general result of the scientific spirit may be 
 detected in Ranke's proud boast that he proposed to 
 tell the truth, — wie es eigenilich gewesen. This 
 modest ambition appears to have needed some apology 
 in the middle of the nineteenth century. Previous 
 historians, as has been explained, often had other 
 dominating motives, and history was expected to 
 support, or at least not run counter to, prevailing 
 patriotic and religious prejudices. A conscious re- 
 solve, therefore, to state the facts as he found them has 
 certainly placed the historian on a far higher plane 
 than he formerly occupied, and has been revolutionary 
 in its effects. For example, a wide range of rehgious 
 phenomena has been subjected to really scientific ex- 
 amination during the past fifty years, with the most 
 startling results. 
 
 But to resolve to test one's sources carefully and 
 to state only what seems to be supported by adequate 
 evidence are, after all, only the bare preliminaries 
 of scientific historiography. The quantity of facts 
 about the past of man which are susceptible of satis- 
 factory verification not only far exceeds the compass 
 of any possible single presentation, but they are so 
 
48 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 heterogeneous in their character as to invite a great 
 variety of interpretations. In what ways, we may 
 accordingly ask next, has the potent influence of 
 natural science affected historical writers in the 
 choice of facts to put before the reader and in the 
 explanations and interpretations which they tender 
 him? 
 
 First, what are the most striking traits of modern 
 scientific method? It may be confidently replied 
 that an appreciation of the overwhelming significance 
 of the small, the common, and the obscure, and an un- 
 hesitating rejection of all theological, supernatural, and 
 anthropocentric explanations, estabhsh the brother- 
 hood of all scientific workers, whatever their fields 
 of research. Then there is the search for natural 
 laws and their multiform applications which has 
 proved fruitful beyond the wildest expectations of 
 the most sanguine. Minute and patient investiga- 
 tion, the discovery of natural explanations and of 
 natural laws, constitute, then, the most sahent fea- 
 tures of modern scientific research. 
 
 History has so long been concealed behind a mask 
 which served either to enhance the charm of her 
 homely features beyond all recognition, or to render 
 her famiHar and commonplace form monstrous and 
 repulsive, that it is httle wonder that historians only 
 slowly adjust themselves to the scientific point of 
 view. The older historians had Httle inclination 
 to describe familiar conditions and the common rou- 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 49 
 
 tine of daily life. It was the startling and exceptional 
 that caught their attention and which they found 
 recorded in the sources on which they depended. 
 They were like a geologist who should deal only with 
 earthquakes and volcanoes, or, better still, a zoologist 
 who should have no use for anything smaller than 
 an elephant or less romantic in its habits than a 
 phoenix or a basilisk. The modernizing of history has 
 taken place much more slowly and much more re- 
 cently than the disentangling of chemistry from 
 alchemy and of astronomy from the dreams of the 
 astrologer. Perhaps Buckle was right when he de- 
 clared that the historians have been, on the whole, 
 inferior in point of intellect to thinkers in other fields, 
 but it should not be forgotten that their task is beset 
 with pecuHar and well-nigh insurmountable difficulties, 
 when compared with the problems of chemistry or 
 geology. It is no wonder that the historian's grad- 
 ual escape from ancient misapprehensions is largely 
 attributable not to his own efforts, but to the general 
 influence of natural science and to the specific influ- 
 ence of the various social sciences which have made 
 their appearance from time to time.^ 
 
 The first social science greatly to affect the selec- 
 tion of historical facts and their interpretation was, 
 not unnaturally, Pohtical Economy, which developed 
 during the eighteenth century. It was not a pro- 
 
 1 The relation of history to these newer social sciences is the subject 
 of the essay wliich follows this. 
 
50 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 fessional student of history, but an economist, who 
 first suggested a new and wonderful series of questions 
 which the historian might properly ask about the past, 
 and, moreover, furnished him with a scientific explana- 
 tion of many matters hitherto ill-understood. 
 
 As early as 1845, Karl Marx denounced those who 
 discover the birthplace of history in the shifting clouds 
 of heaven instead of in the hard, daily work on earth. 
 He maintained that the only sound and ever valid 
 explanation of the past must be economic. The his- 
 tory of society depends, he held, upon the methods 
 by which its members produce their means of support 
 and exchange the products of industry among them- 
 selves. The methods of production and transporta- 
 tion determine the methods of exchange, the distri- 
 bution of products, the division of society into classes, 
 the relations of the several classes, the existence of 
 the State, the character of its laws, and all that it 
 means for mankind. 
 
 We are not concerned here with the complicated 
 genesis of this idea, nor with the precise degree of 
 originality to be attributed to Marx's presentation of 
 it. Nor is there time to explain the manner in which 
 Marx's theory was misused by himself and his fol- 
 lowers. Few, if any, historians would agree that 
 everything can be explained economically, as many of 
 the socialists and some economists of good standing 
 would have us believe. But in the sobered and 
 chastened form in which most economists now accept 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 
 
 51 
 
 the doctrine, it serves to explain far more of the 
 phenomena of the past than any other single expla- 
 nation ever offered. In any case, it is the economist 
 who has opened up the most fruitful new fields of 
 research by emphasizing the importance of those en- 
 during but often inconspicuous factors which almost 
 entirely escaped historians before the middle of the 
 nineteenth century. The essential interest and impor- 
 tance of the normal and homely elements in human 
 life have become apparent. The scientific historian 
 no longer dwells by preference on the heroic, spectac- 
 ular, and romantic episodes, but strives to recon- 
 struct past conditions. This last point is so signifi- 
 cant that we must stop over it a moment. 
 
 History is not infrequently still defined as a record 
 of past events, and the public still expect from the 
 historian a story of the past. But the conscientious 
 historian has come to realize that he cannot aspire 
 to be a good story-teller for the simple reason that, if 
 he tells no more than he has good reason for believ- 
 ing to be true, his tale is usually very fragmentary 
 and vague. Fiction and drama are perfectly free 
 to conceive and adjust detail so as to meet the 
 demands of art, but the historian should always be 
 conscious of the rigid limitations placed upon him. 
 If he confines himself to an honest and critical state- 
 ment of a series of events as described in his sources, 
 it is usually too deficient in vivid authentic detail to 
 make a satisfactory story. 
 
52 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 The historian is coming to see that his task is essen- 
 tially different from that of the man of letters, and 
 that his place is rather among the scientists. He is 
 at Kberty to use only his scientific imagmation, which 
 is quite different from a literary imagination. It is 
 his business to make those contributions to our general 
 understanding of mankind in the past which his train- 
 ing in the investigation of the records of past human 
 events especially fit him to make. He esteems the 
 events he finds recorded, not*for their dramatic in- 
 terest, but for the light that they cast on the normal 
 and generally prevalent conditions which gave rise to 
 them. It makes no difference how dry a chronicle 
 may be if the occurrences that it reports can be 
 brought into some assignable relation with the more 
 or less permanent habits and environment of a partic- 
 ular people or person. If it be the chief function 
 of history to show how things come about, — and 
 something has already been said of this matter,^ — 
 then events become for the historian, first and fore- 
 most, evidence of general conditions and of changes 
 affecting considerable numbers of people. In this 
 respect history is only following the example set by 
 the older natural sciences: Zoology, for instance, 
 dwells on general principles, not on exceptional and 
 startling creatures or on the lessons which their 
 habits suggest for man ; Mathematics no longer 
 lingers over the mystic qualities of numbers, nor 
 
 1 See above, pp. i8 sqq. 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 
 
 53 
 
 does the astronomer seek to read our individual fate 
 in the positions of the planets. But scientific truth has 
 shown itself able to compete with fiction, and there 
 is endless fascination for the modern mind in the con- 
 templation of what former ages would have regarded 
 as the most vulgar and tiresome commonplace. 
 
 It was inevitable that attempts would be made to 
 reduce history to a science by seeking for its laws and 
 by reconstructing it upon the lines suggested by the 
 natural sciences. The most celebrated instance of 
 this is Buckle's uncompleted History of Civilization, 
 the first volume of which appeared in 1857. It seemed 
 to him that while the historical material which had 
 been collected, when looked at in the aggregate, 
 had ''a rich and imposing appearance,'' the real prob- 
 lem of the historian had hardly been suspected, let 
 alone solved. ''For all the higher purposes of human 
 thought," he declares, ''history is still miserably 
 deficient, and presents that confused and anarchical 
 appearance natural to a subject of which the laws are 
 unknown and even the foundations unsettled." He 
 accordingly hoped, he tells us, to "accomphsh for 
 the history of man something equivalent, or at all 
 events analogous, to what has been effected by other 
 inquirers for the different branches of natural science. 
 In regard to nature, events apparently the most 
 irregular and capricious have been explained, and have 
 been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed 
 and universal laws. This has been done because men 
 
54 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 of ability, and, above all, men of patient, untiring 
 thought, have studied natural events with the view 
 of discovering their regularity; and if human events 
 were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every 
 right to expect similar results." Buckle proposed 
 to discover the laws, physical and mental, which 
 govern the workings of mankind, and then trace their 
 operations in the general development of civilization. 
 Unlike Marx, Buckle beheved that physical laws 
 tended to become well-nigh inoperative in so highly 
 developed a civilization as that of Europe, and that, 
 consequently, moral and intellectual laws should 
 constitute the main object of the historian's search. 
 
 Fifty years have elapsed since Buckle's book ap- 
 peared, and I know of no historian who would venture 
 to maintain that we had made any considerable 
 advance toward the goal he set for himself. A sys- 
 tematic prosecution of the various branches of social 
 science, especially political economy, sociology, anthro- 
 pology, and psychology, is succeeding in explaining 
 many things ; but history must always remain, from 
 the standpoint of the astronomer, physicist, or chemist, 
 a highly inexact and fragmentary body of knowledge. 
 This is due mainly to the fact that it concerns itself 
 with man, his devious ways and wandering desires, 
 which it seems hopeless at present to bring within the 
 compass of clearly defined laws of any kind. Then 
 our historical knowledge, as we have seen, must for- 
 ever rest upon scattered and highly precarious data, 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 
 
 55 
 
 the truth of which we have often no means of 
 testing. History can no doubt be pursued in a strictly 
 scientific spirit, but the data we possess in regard to 
 the past of mankind are not of a nature to lend 
 themselves to organization into an exact science, 
 although, as we shall see, they may yield truths of 
 vital importance. 
 
 The modern historical student is well aware of the 
 treacherous nature of his materials and their woeful 
 inadequacy, but even conscientious scholars have been 
 accustomed, in writing for the public, to disguise 
 their doubts and uncertainties. The exigencies of 
 effective literary prese,ntation have forced them to 
 conceal their pitiful ignorance and yield to the tempta- 
 tion to ignore yawning chasms of nescience at whose 
 brink heavy-footed History is forced to halt, although 
 Literature is able to transcend them at a leap. It is 
 largely an exaggerated and altogether false notion of 
 the extent of our knowledge that has encouraged the 
 reckless ventures of those who, like Buckle and Draper, 
 have dreamed of reducing history to an exact science. 
 
 Fifty years ago it was generally believed that we 
 knew something about man from the very beginning. 
 Of his abrupt appearance on the freshly created earth 
 and his early conduct, there appeared to be a brief 
 but exceptionally authoritative account. To-day 
 we are beginning to recognize the immense antiquity 
 of man. There are paleolithic implements which 
 there is some reason for supposing may have been 
 
56 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 made a hundred or two hundred thousand years ago ; 
 the eoKthic remains recently discovered may perhaps 
 antedate the paleoHthic by an equally long period. 
 These are mere guesses and impressions, of course, — ■ 
 this assignment of millenniums, which appear to 
 have been preceded by some hundreds of thousands of 
 years during which an animal was developing with "a 
 relatively enormous brain case, a skillful hand, and an 
 inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish sticks," 
 and in general, as Ray Lankester expresses it, "to 
 defeat aggression and satisfy his natural appetites 
 by the use of his wits rather than by strength alone." 
 There may still be historians who would argue that 
 all this has nothing to do with history, — that it is 
 "prehistoric." But "prehistoric" is a word that must 
 go the way of " preadamite," which we used to hear. 
 They both indicate a suspicion that we are in some way 
 gaining illicit information about what happened be- 
 fore the footlights were turned on and the curtain rose 
 on the great human drama. Of the so-called "prehis- 
 toric" period we, of course, know as yet very little in- 
 deed, but the bare fact that there was such a period 
 constitutes in itself the most momentous of historical 
 discoveries. The earliest traces of an elaborate and 
 advanced stage of human civilization — found in the 
 Nile valley — can hardly be placed earlier than six 
 thousand years ago. It is quite gratuitous, however, 
 to assume that this was the first time that man had 
 risen to such a stage of culture. 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 57 
 
 Let US suppose that there has been something worth 
 saying about the deeds and progress of mankind during 
 the past three hundred thousand years at least; let 
 us suppose that we were fortunate enough to have the 
 merest outline of such changes as have overtaken our 
 race during that period, and that a single page were 
 devoted to each thousand years. Of the three hun- 
 dred pages of our little manual the closing six or seven 
 only would be allotted to the whole period for which 
 records, in the ordinary sense of the word, exist, even 
 in the scantiest and most fragmentary form. Or, to 
 take another illustration, let us imagine history under 
 the semblance of a vast lake into whose rather turbid 
 depths we eagerly peer. We have reason to think it 
 at least twenty-five feet deep, perhaps fifty or a hun- 
 dred. We detect the very scantiest indications of life, 
 rara et disjecta, four or five feet beneath the surface; 
 six or seven inches down, these are abundant, but at 
 that depth we can detect, so to speak, no movements 
 of animate things, which are scarcely perceptible 
 below three or four inches. If we are frank with 
 ourselves, we shall have to admit that we can have no 
 clear and adequate notion of anything happening 
 more than an inch — indeed, scarce more than half 
 an inch — below the surface. 
 
 From this point of view the historian's gaze, instead 
 of sweeping back into remote ages when the earth 
 was young, seems to be confined to his own epoch; 
 Rameses II, Tiglath-Pileser, and Solomon appear 
 
58 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 practically coeval with Caesar, Constantine, Charle-' 
 magne, St. Louis, Charles V, and Victoria; Bacon, 
 Newton, and Darwin are but the younger contempo- 
 raries of Thales, Plato, and Aristotle. Let those pause 
 who would attempt to determine the laws of human 
 progress or decay. It is like trying to determine, by 
 observing the conduct of a man of forty for a week, 
 whether he be developing or not. Anything approach- 
 ing an adequate record of events does not reach back 
 for more than three thousand years, and even this 
 remains distressingly imperfect and unreliable for more 
 than two millenniums. We have a few, often highly 
 fragmentary, literary histories covering Greek and 
 Roman times, also a good many inscriptions and some 
 important archaeological remains ; but these leave us 
 in the dark upon many vital matters. The sources 
 for the Roman Empire are so very bad that Mommsen 
 refused to attempt to write its history. Only in the 
 twelfth and thirteenth centuries do the medieval 
 annals and chronicles begin to be supplemented by 
 miscellaneous documents which bring us more directly 
 into contact with the life of the time. 
 
 Yet the reader of history must often get the impres- 
 sion that the sources of our knowledge are, so to speak, 
 of a uniform volume and depth, at least for the last 
 two or three thousand years. When he beholds a 
 voluminous account of the early Church, or of the 
 Roman Empire, or observes Dahn's or Hodgkin's 
 many stately volumes on the Barbarian invasions, 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 59 
 
 he is to be pardoned for assuming that the writers 
 have spent years in painfully condensing and giving 
 literary form to the abundant material which they 
 have turned up in the course of their prolonged re- 
 searches. Too few suspect that it has been the busi- 
 ness of the historian in the past not to condense but, 
 on the contrary, skillfully to inflate his thin film of 
 knowledge until the bubble should reach such propor- 
 tions that its bright hues would attract the attention 
 and elicit the admiration of even the most careless 
 observer. One volume of Hodgkin's rather old-fash- 
 ioned Italy and her Invaders, had the scanty material 
 been judiciously compressed, might have held all that 
 we can be said to even half know about the matters to 
 which the author has seen fit to devote eight volumes. 
 But one should not jump to the conclusion that the 
 historical writer is a sinner above all men. In the 
 first place, it should never be forgotten that he is by 
 long tradition a man of letters, and that that is not, 
 after all, such a bad thing to be. In the second place, 
 he experiences the same strong temptation that every 
 one else does to accept at their face value the plaus- 
 ible statements which he finds, unless they conflict 
 with other accounts of the same events, or appear to 
 be inherently improbable. Lastly, he is, like his fellow 
 primates, the victim of what Nietzsche has called 
 ^Mream logic." I am sure that we do not reckon con- 
 stantly enough with this inveterate tendency of even 
 a highly cultivated mind instinctively to elaborate 
 
6o THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 and amplify mere hints and suggestions into complete 
 and vivid pictures. 
 
 To take an illustration of Nietzsche's, the vague 
 feeling, as we lie in bed, that the soles of our feet 
 are free from the usual pressure to which we are ac- 
 customed in our waking hours demands an explana- 
 tion. Our dream explanation is that we are flying. 
 Not satisfied to leave its work half done, dream logic 
 fabricates a room or landscape in which we make our 
 aerial experiments. Moreover, just as we are going 
 to sleep or awaking we can often actually observe 
 how a flash of light, such as sometimes appears on the 
 retina of our closed eyes, will be involuntarily inter- 
 preted as a vision of some human figure or other 
 object, clear as a stereopticon sHde. Now any one 
 can demonstrate to himself that neither dream logic 
 nor the ''mind's-eye faculty," as it has been called, 
 deserts us when we are awake. Indeed they may well 
 be, as Nietzsche suspects, a portion of the inheritance 
 bequeathed to us, along with some other inconven- 
 iences, by our brutish forebears. At any rate they are 
 forms of aberration against which the historian, with 
 his literary traditions, needs specially to be on his 
 guard. There are rumors that even the student of 
 natural science sometimes keeps his ''mind's eye" too 
 wide open, but he is by no means so likely as the his- 
 torian to be misled by dream logic. This is not to be 
 ascribed necessarily to the superior self-restraint of 
 the scientist, but rather to the greater simplicity of 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 6l 
 
 his task and the palpableness of much of his knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 It is essential, as has been pointed out, for every one 
 dealing with the past of mankind to understand that 
 history can never become a science in the sense that 
 physics, chemistry, physiology, or even anthropology, 
 is a science. The complexity of the phenomena is 
 appalling, and we have no way of observing them di- 
 rectly, to say nothing of artificially analyzing and 
 experimenting with our facts. We know absolutely 
 nothing of the occurrences in the history of mankind 
 during a great part of his existence on the earth, and 
 only since the invention of printing do our sources be- 
 come in any sense abundant. Writers trained in the 
 natural sciences, who have attempted to show histo- 
 rians how to use their material, have commonly quite 
 misunderstood the situation and the conditions under 
 which the historian has necessarily to work.^ 
 
 1 For example, Dr. Draper, in his well-known Intellectual Develop- 
 ment of Europe, undertook to prove two great truths which he believed 
 had escaped the historians : that " social advancement is as completely 
 under the control of natural law as is bodily growth," and that "the 
 life of an individual is a miniature of the hfe of a nation." Nowhere 
 does he suggest that he exercised the least care in collecting the evi- 
 dence for these hazardous propositions ; nowhere in his volumes does 
 he allude to any sources of information in regard to a past which he 
 claims to interpret in its scientific relations. Not long ago a Boston 
 physician published a work on heredity in which he denounces the utter 
 superficiality of historians and then proceeds to build up a theory of 
 royal heredity based on the data found in that ancient household 
 convenience, Thomas's Biographical Dictionary. 
 
62 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 VII 
 
 But history, in order to become scientific, had first 
 to become historical. Singularly enough, what we 
 now regard as the strictly historical interest was 
 almost missed by historians before the nineteenth 
 century. They narrated such past events as they 
 believed would interest the reader; they commented 
 on these with a view of instructing him. They took 
 some pains to find out how things really were — wie es 
 eigentlich gewesen. To this extent they were scientific, 
 although their motives were mainly literary, moral, or 
 religious. They did not, however, in general try to 
 determine how things had come about— me es 
 eigentlich geworden. History has remained for two or 
 three thousand years mainly a record of past events, 
 and this definition satisfies the thoughtless still. But 
 it is one thing to describe what once was ; it is still 
 another to attempt to determine how it came about. 
 
 It is impossible here to trace the causes and gradual 
 development of this genetic interest. The main reason 
 for its present strength lies probably in our modern 
 lively consciousness of the reahty and inevitabihty of 
 change, examples of which are continually forcing them- 
 selves upon our attention. The Greek historians had 
 little or no background for their narratives. It is 
 amazing to note the contemptuous manner in which 
 Thucydides rejects all accounts of even the immedi- 
 ately preceding generations, as mere uncertain tradi- 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 63 
 
 tions. Polybius set himself the task of tracing the 
 gradual extension of the Roman dominion, but there 
 is no indication that he had any clear idea of the con- 
 tinuity of history. In the Middle Ages there was un- 
 doubtedly a notion that the earth was the scene of a 
 divine drama which was to have its denouement in the 
 dcfmitive separation of the wheat from the tares ; but 
 this supernatural unity of history was not scientific 
 but theological. In earthly matters the medieval man 
 could hardly have understood the meaning of the 
 word " anachronism" ; the painters of the Renaissance 
 did not hesitate to place a crucifix over the manger of 
 the divine infant, and there appears to have been 
 nothing incongruous in this to their contemporaries. 
 
 Not until the eighteenth century did the possibility 
 of indefinite human progress become the exhilarating 
 doctrine of reformers, a class which had previously 
 attacked existing abuses in the name of the ''good 
 old times." No discovery could be more momentous 
 and fundamental than that reform should seek its 
 sanction in the future, not in the past ; in advance, 
 not in reaction.^ It became clearer and clearer that 
 the world did change, and by the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century the continuity of history began to 
 be accepted by the more thoughtful students of the 
 past, and began to affect, as never before, their motives 
 and methods of research. 
 
 1 Sec the final essay in this volume, on " The Spirit of Conserva- 
 tism in the Light of History." 
 
64 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 I 
 
 The doctrine of the continuity of history is based 
 upon the observed fact that every human institution, 
 every generally accepted idea, every important in- 
 vention, is but the summation of long lines of progress, 
 reaching back as far as we have the patience or 
 means to follow them. The jury, the drama, the 
 Gatling gun, the papacy, the letter S, the doctrine of 
 stare decisis, each owes its present form to ante- 
 cedents which can be scientifically traced. But 
 no human interest is isolated from innumerable con- 
 current interests and conditioning circumstances. 
 This brings us to the broader conception of the con- 
 tinuity of change which is attributable to the com- 
 plexity of men's affairs. A somewhat abrupt change 
 may take place in some single institution or habit, 
 but a sudden general change is almost inconceivable. 
 An individual may, through some modification of 
 his environment, through bereavement or malignant 
 disease, be quickly and fundamentally metamor- 
 phosed, but even such cases are rare. If all the habits 
 and interests of the individual are considered, it will 
 be found that only in the most exceptional cases are 
 any great number of these altered in the twinkling 
 of an eye. And society for obvious reasons is in- 
 finitely more conservative than the individual. 
 Now — and this cannot be too strongly emphasized 
 — the continuity of history is a scientific truth, the 
 attempt to trace the slow process of change is a scien- 
 tific problem, and one of the most fascinating in its 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 65 
 
 nature./ It is the discovery and application of this 
 law which has served to differentiate history from 
 literature and morals, and which has raised it, in one 
 sense, to the dignity of a science. 
 
 VIII 
 
 The rapidly developing specialization in history, 
 which is the result of more exacting scientific stand- 
 ards, forces upon the historical student a new and 
 fundamental question. If all departments of knowl- 
 edge have now become historical, what need is there 
 of history in general ? If poKtics, war, art, law, reli- 
 gion, science, literature, be dealt with genetically, will 
 not history tend inevitably to disintegrate into its 
 organic elements? Professor Seeley of the Univer- 
 sity of Cambridge beheved that it would. , Twenty 
 years ago he declared that history^was after all but 
 the name of '' a residuum which has been left when one 
 group of facts after another has been taken possession 
 of by some science ; that residuum which now exists 
 must go the way of the rest, and that time is not very 
 distant when a science will take possession of the facts 
 which are still the undisputed property of the his- 
 torian." 
 
 Now the last question that I have to discuss is 
 whether history, after gaining the whole world, is 
 destined to lose her own soul. Let us assume that 
 historical specialization has done its perfect work, 
 
66 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 that every distinct phase of man's past, every insti- 
 tution, sentiment, conception, discovery, achieve- 
 ment, or defeat which is recorded has found its place 
 in the historical treatment of the particular branch of 
 research to which it has been assigned according to the 
 prevailing classification of the sciences. This process 
 of specialization would serve to rectify history in a 
 thousand ways, and to broaden and deepen its opera- 
 tions, but, instead of destroying it, it would rather 
 tend, on the contrary, to demonstrate with perfect 
 clearness its absolute indispensability. Human affairs 
 and human changes do not lend themselves to an 
 exhaustive treatment through a series of monographs 
 upon the ecclesiastical or military organization of 
 particular societies, their legal procedure, agrarian 
 system, their art, domestic habits, or views on higher 
 education. Many vital matters would prove highly 
 recalcitrant when one attempted to force them into 
 a neat, scientific cubby-hole. Physical, moral, and 
 intellectual phenomena are mysteriously interacting 
 in that process of hfe and change which it falls to 
 the historian to study and describe. 
 
 Man is far more than the sum of his scientifically 
 classifiable operations. Water is composed of hydro- 
 gen and oxygen, but it is not like either of them. 
 Nothing could be more artificial than the scientific 
 separation of man's religious, aesthetic, economic, 
 political, intellectual, and belHcose properties. These 
 may be studied, each by itself, with advantage, but 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 67 
 
 specialization would lead to the most absurd results 
 if there were not some one to study the process as a 
 whole ; and that some one is the historian. Imagine 
 the devotees of the various social sciences each en- 
 gaged in describing his particular interest in the 
 Crusades, or the Protestant Revolt, or the French 
 Revolution. When they had finished, would not the 
 historian have to retell the story, utilizing all that 
 they had accomplished, including what they had all 
 omitted, and rectifying the errors into which each 
 of the specialists had fallen on account of his igno- 
 rance of the general situation ? 
 
 It would seem at first sight as if those most familiar 
 with each special subject of research — such as con- 
 stitutional law, botany, theology, philology, painting, 
 chemistry, economics, medicine — would be the only 
 properly quaHfied persons to trace its history; but 
 the scientific speciahst is likely to suffer from two dis- 
 advantages. In the first place, his very famiharity 
 with the principles of his particular branch of knowl- 
 edge makes it difficult for him to conceive remote and 
 unfamihar conditions which historically lie back of 
 the conceptions which he entertains. In the second 
 place, the discovery, use, and interpretation of his- 
 torical material seem to require a somewhat prolonged 
 and special training, which only the professional his- 
 torical student is hkely to possess. He is constantly 
 shocked by a certain awkwardness which those inex- 
 perienced in historical research are almost sure to 
 
68 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 betray. They make mistakes which he would not 
 make, in spite of their greater knowledge of the sub- 
 ject with which they are dealing. This doubtless 
 accounts for the fact that we have as yet no tolerably 
 satisfactory history of natural science, or even of its 
 special branches. There are, moreover, certain im- 
 portant phases of human thought and endeavor where 
 the trained historian will have no particular difficulty 
 in mastering the technical detail sufficiently to deal 
 satisfactorily with them. Indeed, even the most 
 subtle of the modern sciences, not excluding mathe- 
 matics, were sufficiently simple two hundred years 
 ago to enable a well-equipped historical student, with 
 some taste for a particular human interest, to trace its 
 development down until very recent times. So it may 
 fall out, as time goes on, that historical students will 
 tend to specialize more and more, and will supply the 
 deficiency which students of contemporary branches 
 of science are not ordinarily in a position to satisfy, 
 — but more will be said on this subject, especially 
 in regard to intellectual history, in a later essay. 
 
 I have frankly revealed the historian's ignorance ; 
 he recognizes this in all humility, and is making every 
 effort to remedy it by the application of highly scien- 
 tific methods. He shares it, moreover, with the repre- 
 sentatives of all the social sciences who attempt to 
 carry their work back into the past. The historian 
 will become more and more interested, I beheve, in 
 explaining the immediate present, and fortunately 
 
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY 69 
 
 his sources for the last two or three centuries are in- 
 finitely more abundant and satisfactory than for the 
 whole earher history of the world. He is criticizing 
 and indexing his sources and rendering them available 
 to an extent which would astonish a layman unf amihar 
 with the tremendous amount that has been accom- 
 phshed in this respect during the past fifty years. 
 
 We have now seethed the kid in its mother's milk. 
 We have explained history by means of history. 
 The historian, from a narrow, scientific point of view, 
 is a httle higher than a man of letters and a good deal 
 lower than an astronomer or a biologist. He need not, 
 however, repudiate his hterary associations, for they 
 are eminently respectable, but he will aspire hereafter 
 to find out, not only exactly how things have been, but 
 how they have come about. He will remain the 
 critic and guide of the social sciences whose results he 
 must synthesize and test by the actual fife of mankind 
 as it appears in the past. His task is so fascinating 
 and so comprehensive that it will doubtless gradually 
 absorb his whole energies and wean him in time from 
 literature, for no poet or dramatist ever set before 
 himself a nobler or a more inspiring ideal, or one 
 making more demands upon the imagination and 
 resources of expression, than the destiny which is 
 becoming clearer and clearer to the historian. 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 
 
 That history must from time to time be rewritten 
 is an oft-repeated commonplace. Why is this ? The 
 past, as ordinarily conceived, seems fixed and settled 
 enough. No theologian has ever conceded to omnipo- 
 tence itself the power to change it. Why may it 
 not then be described for good and all by any one who 
 has the available information at his disposal? The 
 historian would answer that more and more is being 
 learned about the past as time goes on, that old errors 
 are constantly being detected and rectified and new 
 points of view discovered, so that the older accounts 
 of events and conditions tend to be superseded by 
 better and more accurate ones. This is obvious; 
 but granting that each new generation of historians 
 do their duty in correcting the mistakes of their 
 predecessors, is that all that is necessary ? Is there 
 not danger that they will allow themselves to be too 
 largely guided in the choice of their material and in 
 their judgments of it by the examples set by preceding 
 writers ? Are historians now adjusting themselves as 
 promptly as they should to the unprecedented amount 
 of new knowledge in regard to mankind in general 
 
 70 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 71 
 
 which has been accumulating during the past genera- 
 tion, and to the fundamental change of attitude that 
 is taking place in our views of man and society ? 
 
 The usual training which a historical student re- 
 ceives has a tendency to give him the impression that 
 history is a far more fixed and definite thing than it 
 really is. He is aware that various elaborate attempts 
 have been made to establish the Begrijff und Wesen 
 of history, that its methodology has been the theme 
 of a number of treatises, and that its supposed bound- 
 aries have been jealously defended from the dreaded 
 encroachments of rival sciences. Moreover, he finds 
 the general spirit and content of historical works 
 pretty uniform, and he is to be forgiven for inferring 
 that he has to do with a tolerably well-defined sub- 
 ject matter which may be investigated according to 
 a clear and prescribed set of rules. I am incKned, 
 however, to think that this attitude of mind is the 
 result of a serious misapprehension which stands in 
 the way of the proper development of historical study. 
 Before proceeding we must therefore stop a moment 
 to consider the vague meaning of the term '^history." 
 
 In the first place, history has itself a long and varied 
 history, which was sketched briefly in the preceding 
 essay. Its subject matter, its purposes, and its 
 methods have exhibited in the past a wide range of 
 variation which suggest many future possibihties 
 when we once perceive the underlying causes of these 
 changes. It has, as we have seen, somewhat reluc- 
 
72 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 tantly and partially adapted itself to the general out- 
 look of successive periods, and as times changed, it 
 has changed. In the second place, the scope of his- 
 torical investigation, as actually carried on at the 
 present day by those who deem themselves historians, 
 is so wide as to preclude the possibility of bringing 
 it into any clearly defined category. The historian 
 may choose, for example, like Gibbon, to extract 
 from Procopius's ^' improbable story " of Alaric's 
 capture of Rome the circumstances which have an 
 air of probability. He may seek to determine the 
 prevalence of malaria in ancient Greece, or to decide 
 whether the humidity of Asia Minor has altered since 
 the days of Croesus, or to trace the effects of the issue 
 of some forty billions of francs of paper money in 
 France between 1789 and 1800. As for method, a 
 peculiar training is essential to determine the diver- 
 gence between a so-called " eolith " and an ordinary 
 chip of flint which does not owe its form to human 
 adaptation ; and another kind of training is required 
 to edit a satisfactory edition of Roger Bacon's Opus 
 Majus. A judicious verdict on the originality of 
 Luther's interpretation of the words justitia dei, 
 in Romans, i. 17, demands antecedent studies which 
 would be inappropriate if one were seeking the motives 
 for Bismarck's interest in insurance for the aged and 
 incapacitated. I think that one may find solace and 
 intellectual repose in surrendering all attempts to 
 define history, and in conceding that it is the business 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 73 
 
 of the historian to find out anything about mankind 
 in the past which he believes to be interesting or 
 important and about which there are sources of 
 information. 
 
 Furthermore, history's chances of getting ahead 
 and of doing good are dependent on its refraining 
 from setting itself off as a separate discipline and 
 undertaking to defend itself from the encroachments 
 of seemingly hostile sciences which now and then 
 appear within its territory. To do this is to mis- 
 apprehend the conditions of scientific advance. No 
 set of investigators can any longer claim exclusive 
 jurisdiction in even the tiniest scientific field, and 
 nothing indeed would be more fatal to them than the 
 successful defense of any such claim. The bounds of 
 all departments of human research and speculation 
 are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating ; 
 moreover, the lines of demarcation are hopelessly 
 interlaced, for real men and the real universe in which 
 they live are so intricate as to defy all attempts even 
 of the most patient and subtle German to establish 
 satisfactorily and permanently the Begriff und Wesen 
 of any artificially delimited set of natural phenom- 
 ena, whether words, thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, 
 plants, or stars. Each so-called science or discipline 
 is ever and always dependent on other sciences and 
 disciplines. It draws its Hfe from them, and to them 
 it owes, consciously or unconsciously, a great part of 
 its chances of progress. 
 
74 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 As Professor J. F. Kemp has so graciously said of his 
 own subject, geology, it could not have matured with- 
 out the aid of those sister sciences which necessarily 
 preceded it. ''The great, round world in its entirety 
 cannot be grasped otherwise than with the assistance 
 of physics, mechanics, astronomy, chemistry, zoology, 
 and botany." Not only was geology in its earlier 
 growth ''based upon the sister sciences, but now 
 progresses with them, leans largely upon them for 
 support, and in return repays its debt by the contri- 
 butions which it makes to each. " The historical 
 student should take a similar attitude toward his own 
 vast field of research. If history is to reach its high- 
 est development it must surrender all individualistic 
 aspirations and recognize that it is but one of several 
 ways of studying mankind. It must confess that, 
 like geology, biology, and most other sciences, it is 
 based on sister sciences, that it can only progress 
 with them, must lean largely on them for support, 
 and in return should repay its debt by the contribu- 
 tions which it makes to our general understanding of 
 our species. Whatever history may or may not be, 
 it always concerns itself with man. Would it not 
 then be the height of folly and arrogance for the his- 
 torian to neglect the various discoveries made about 
 man by those who study him in ways different from 
 those of the traditional student of the past ? 
 
 In order to understand the present plight of the 
 historian we must go back to the middle of the nine- 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 75 
 
 teenth century, when for the first time history began 
 clearly to come under the influence of the modern 
 scientific spirit. Previously, as we have seen, it had 
 been a branch of literature with distinctly literary 
 aims, — when it was not suborned in the interest of 
 theological theories or called upon to stimulate patri- 
 otic pride and emulation. But about sixty years ago 
 a new era in historical investigation opened which has 
 witnessed achievements of a character to justify in a 
 measure the complacency in which historians now and 
 then indulge. The most obvious of these achieve- 
 ments seem to me to be four in number, and the his- 
 torian owes all of them, if I am not mistaken, largely 
 to the example and influence of natural science. He 
 undertook, in the first place, to test and examine his 
 sources of information far more critically than ever 
 before, and rejected partially or wholly many authori- 
 ties upon which his predecessors had relied implicitly. 
 Secondly, he resolved to tell the truth Hke a man, 
 regardless of whose feeHngs it might hurt. Thirdly, 
 he began to realize the overwhelming importance of 
 the inconspicuous, the common, and often obscure 
 elements in the past; the homely, everyday, and 
 normal as over against the rare, spectacular, and 
 romantic, which had engaged the attention of most 
 earHer writers. Fourthly, he began to spurn super- 
 natural, theological, and anthropocentric explanations, 
 which had been the stock-in-trade of the philosophers 
 of history. I do not propose to dwell upon these 
 
76 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 achievements, for no one will be inclined to question 
 their fundamental character. They have cost a tre- 
 mendous amount of labor, and they were the essential 
 preliminaries to any satisfactory progress. Are they, 
 however, more than essential preliminaries ? Do 
 they not, on examination, prove to be rather negative 
 in character? To resolve to tell the truth about 
 what you have taken pains to verify according to 
 your best abiHty; to reckon with the regular and 
 normal rather than with the exceptional and sensa- 
 tional; and to give up appeahng to God and the devil 
 as historical explanations, are but preparations for 
 the rewriting of history. They furnish the necessary 
 conditions rather than the program of progress. 
 Moreover, they are by no means all of the necessary 
 conditions. Still further preparations are essential 
 before the historian can hope to understand the past. 
 Professor William I. Thomas well says: — 
 
 The general acceptance of an evolutionary point of view of 
 life and the world has already deeply affected psychology, phi- 
 losophy, morality, education, sociology, and all the sciences deal- 
 ing with man. This view involves a recognition of the fact that 
 not a single situation in life can be completely understood in its 
 immediate aspects alone. Everything is to be regarded as 
 having an origin and a development, and we cannot afford to 
 overlook the genesis and stages of change. For instance, the 
 psychologist or the neurologist does not at present attempt to 
 understand the working and structure of the human brain 
 through the adult brain alone. He supplements his studies of 
 the adult brain by observations on the workings of the infant 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 77 
 
 mind, or by an examination of the structure of the infant brain. 
 And he goes farther than this from the immediate aspects of 
 the problem — he examines the mental Hfe and the brain of the 
 monkey, the dog, the rat, the fish, the frog, and of every form 
 of life possessing a nervous system, down to those having only 
 a single cell, and at every point he has a chance of catching a 
 suggestion of the meaning of the brain structure and of mind. 
 In the lower orders of brain the structure and meaning are writ 
 large, and by working up from the simpler to the more complex 
 types, and noting the modification of structure and function 
 point by point, the student is finally able to understand the 
 frightfully intricate human organ, or has the best chance of 
 doing so. 
 
 It would seem as if this discovery of the incalculable 
 value of genetic reasoning should have come from the 
 historians, but, curiously enough, instead of being the 
 first to appreciate the full significance of historical- 
 mindedness, they left it to be brought forward by 
 the zoologists, botanists, and geologists. Worse yet, 
 it is safe to say that, although the natural scientists 
 have fully developed it, the historian has hitherto 
 made only occasional use of the discovery, and history 
 is still less rigidly historical than comparative anatomy 
 or social psychology. Even in recent historical works 
 one finds descriptions of events and conditions, which 
 make it clear that the writer has failed to perceive 
 that all things have an origin and a development, 
 that we cannot afford to overlook their genesis and 
 stages of change, *'that not a single situation in life 
 can be completely understood in its immediate as- 
 
78 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 pects alone." Of course the historian has long talked 
 of the ''rise" and ''fall" of empires, the "growth" 
 and "decay" of institutions; he has of late devoted 
 much attention to the development of institutions, 
 and to this extent he adopts a genetic treatment; 
 but none the less there lies back of all his work the 
 long tradition of what we may call the episodal treat- 
 ment of the past. He is still discovered making the 
 futile attempt to describe wie es eigentlich gewesen 
 without knowing wie es eigentlich geworden. The 
 popular misunderstanding of the French Revolution, 
 for instance, is due to the anxiety of the historian to 
 depict the striking events from 1789 onward rather 
 than to interpret them in the light of their antecedents, 
 which are commonly dispatched in an introductory 
 chapter which furnishes no sufficient clue to what 
 follows. The "Renaissance" has been pretty com- 
 pletely misconceived, owing to the ignorance of 
 Burckhardt and Symonds in regard to the previous 
 period. The culture of the Middle Ages in turn re- 
 mains a mystery to one who has not scrupulously 
 studied the Weltanschauung of the fourth century. 
 
 The historian still puts himself in the position of 
 one who should wake up in a strange bed and hope 
 to comprehend his situation by taking a careful in- 
 ventory of the furniture of his room. The strange- 
 ness can only be dispelled and the situation under- 
 stood by falling back on the past — in this case a 
 simple historical consideration such as that one had, 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 79 
 
 on his way from Chicago to San Francisco, been de- 
 layed and obliged to spend the night in Ogden. 
 Should the historian give us, for instance, the most 
 minute description of the conditions in the village of 
 Salem in the year 1692, telling us just where Goody 
 Bishop's cellar walls stood in which the fatal '' pop- 
 pets" were found, and pointing out the spot where 
 Nehemiah Abbot's ox met an untimely and sus- 
 picious end by choking on a turnip, we should still 
 fail to grasp this lamentable crisis in the affairs of 
 New England, for the really vital question is, Why 
 did our godly ancestors hang old women for alleged 
 commerce with the devil? Only some knowledge 
 of comparative religions and of the history of the 
 Christian church can make that plain. Cotton 
 Mather was the victim of a complex of squahd super- 
 stitions which the Protestant reformers had done 
 nothing whatever to reduce or attenuate.^ He is not 
 to be understood by even the most prayerful study 
 of his immediate surroundings. 
 
 The modern historical student's tendency to special- 
 ization, his aspiration to master some single field, 
 often stands in the way of his really understanding 
 even what he seems to know most about. The 
 difference between the best historical writing, which 
 is rare enough, and the ordinary run of histories, lies 
 in the historical-mindedness of the author. This is 
 susceptible of far greater development than it has 
 
 * See below, pp. 117 sqq. 
 
8o THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 hitherto received/ for it should ultimately permeate 
 all historical treatises that pretend to be both con- 
 structive and instructive and do not merely confine 
 themselves to the accumulation of the raw material 
 of history. 
 
 Historical-mindedness is by no means the only great 
 debt that historians owe to workers in fields seemingly 
 remote from theirs. Two historical facts of tran- 
 scendent importance were discovered in the latter half 
 of the nineteenth century. Neither of them was in 
 any way attributable to historians. It was the zool- 
 ogist who proved that man is sprung from the lower 
 animals, and it was an EngHsh geologist who first 
 clearly and systematically brought together the evi- 
 dence that man has been sojourning on the earth, 
 not for six thousand years only, but mayhap for six 
 hundred thousand. The methods and outlook of 
 the historian prevented him from making these dis- 
 coveries. He may exonerate himself for his failure 
 to suspect these truths on the ground that the data 
 used to establish man's animal ancestry and his vast 
 antiquity are wholly unfamiHar to him. Granting 
 
 1 An interesting paper could be written on the common view enter- 
 tained by historians that it is impossible to write the history of our 
 own times ; that historical methods cannot be applied to recent events. 
 Those who at one moment proclaim this doctrine at the next will 
 freely acknowledge Thucydides, who confined himself to his own time, 
 to be the greatest of all historians ! It is most essential that we should 
 understand our own time ; we can only do so through history, and it 
 is the obvious duty of the historian to meet this, his chief obligation. 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 8l 
 
 the propriety of this excuse, it may be asked whether 
 he has seriously reckoned with these two momentous 
 facts after they were pointed out to him by Darwin, 
 Lyell, and others. He has certainly been slow to do 
 so. They were new to the last generation of histo- 
 rians, and they would have seemed quite irrelevant 
 to Ranke or Bancroft in their undertakings. Even 
 to-day I find that members of the guild are some of 
 them inclined to deny that man's descent from the 
 lower animals is, strictly speaking, an historical fact, 
 although they would concede that Henry II's descent 
 from William the Conqueror is such. 
 
 What is more important, most historical students 
 would frankly confess that they saw no way in which 
 man's descent or his long sojourn on the earth could 
 be brought into any obvious relation with the prob- 
 lems on which they were engaged. In this they would 
 be quite right. It is certainly true that most histori- 
 cal investigation can be carried on mthout reference 
 to man's origin. If one is endeavoring to determine 
 whether Charles the Fat was in Ingelheim or Lustnau 
 on July I, 887, it makes Kttle difference whether the 
 emperor's ancestors talked with their Creator in the 
 cool of the evening or went on all fours and slept in 
 a tree. If one is locating the sites of French forts 
 on the Ohio River or describing the causes of Marie 
 Antoinette's repugnance for Mirabeau, the jaw of the 
 Heidelberg man may safely be neglected. Whole 
 fields of historical research can be cultivated not only 
 
82 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 without any regard to man's origin, but without any 
 attempt to understand man as such. But there are 
 many other, and perhaps even more important, fields, 
 as I trust may become apparent later, in which it is 
 essential that the investigator should know everything 
 that is being found out about man, unless he is willing 
 to run the risk of superficiahty and error. ^ 
 
 1 In order to avoid the suspicion that I am misrepresenting the 
 position of what may be called the orthodox historical student I beg to 
 call the reader's attention to an address delivered by Professor George 
 Burton Adams of Yale before the American Historical Association, 
 December 29, 1908. He describes what, for convenience, he calls five 
 hostile movements directed against the methods, results, and ideals 
 of the established political historian. These "attacks" proceed from 
 political science, geography, political economy, sociology, and "folk- 
 psychology." "For more than fifty years," he says, "the historian 
 has had possession of the field and has deemed it his sufficient mission 
 to determine what the fact was, including the immediate conditions 
 that gave it shape. Now he finds himself confronted with numerous 
 groups of aggressive and confident workers in the same field who ask 
 not what was the fact — many of them seem to be comparatively little 
 interested in that — but their constant question is what is the ulti- 
 mate explanation of history, or, more modestly, what are the forces 
 that determine human events and according to what laws do they 
 act ? This is nothing else than a new flaming up of interest in the 
 philosophy, or the science, of history. . . . The emphatic assertion 
 which they all make is that history is the orderly progression of man- 
 kind toward a definite end, and that we may know and state the laws 
 which control the actions of men in organized society. This is the one 
 common characteristic of all the groups I have described ; and it is of 
 each of them the one most prominent characteristic" (American His- 
 torical Review, January, 1909). It is the aim of the present essay to 
 put the whole situation in a different light from that in which Profes- 
 sor Adams presents it. 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 83 
 
 II 
 
 While, then, the historian has been busy doing his 
 best to render history scientific, he has, as we have 
 seen, left the students of nature to illustrate to the 
 full the advantages of historical-mindedness and to 
 make two discoveries about mankind infinitely more 
 revolutionary than all that Giesebrecht, Waitz, 
 Martin, or Hodgkin ever found out about the 
 past. To-day, he has obviously not only to adjust 
 himself as fast as he can to these new elements in the 
 general intellectual situation, but he must decide 
 what shall be his attitude toward a considerable num- 
 ber of newer sciences of man which, by freely applying 
 the evolutionary theory, have progressed marvelously 
 and are now in a position to rectify many of the com- 
 monly accepted conclusions of the historian and to 
 disabuse his mind of many ancient misapprehensions. 
 By the newer sciences of man I mean, first and fore- 
 most. Anthropology, in a comprehensive sense. Pre- 
 historic archaeology, Social and Animal psychology, 
 and the Comparative study of reHgions. PoHtical 
 economy has already had its effects on history, and 
 as for Sociology, it seems to me a highly important 
 point of view rather than a body of discoveries about 
 mankind. These newer social sciences, each studying 
 man in its own particular way, have entirely changed 
 the meaning of many terms which the historian has 
 been accustomed to use in senses now discredited — 
 
84 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 such words as "race," "religion/' "progress," "the 
 ancients," "culture," and "human nature." They 
 have vitiated many of the cherished conclusions of 
 mere historians and have served to explain historical 
 phenomena which the historian could by no possibil- 
 ity have rightly interpreted with the means at his dis- 
 posal. Let us begin with prehistoric archseology. 
 
 The conservative historian might be tempted to 
 object at the start that however important the develop- 
 ment of man would seem to be before the opening of 
 history, we can unfortunately know practically noth- 
 ing about it, owing to the almost total lack of docu- 
 ments and records. Archaeology has, of course, he 
 would admit, revealed a few examples of man's handi- 
 work which may greatly antedate the earliest finds 
 in Egyptian tombs ; some skulls and bones and even 
 skeletons have been found, and no one famihar with the 
 facts doubts that man was hving on the earth thou- 
 sands of years before the Egyptian civilization devel- 
 oped. But what can be known about him, except the 
 shape of his jaw and the nature of his stone and bone 
 utensils, which alone survive from remote periods? 
 If we feel ill-informed about the time of Diocletian or 
 Clovis, how baseless must be our conjectures in regard 
 to the habits of the cave man ! 
 
 It is certainly true that the home hfe of the cave 
 man is still veiled in obscurity and is likely to remain 
 so. Nevertheless, the mass of information in regard to 
 mankind before the appearance of the earliest sur- 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 85 
 
 viving inscriptions has already assumed imposing 
 proportions. Its importance is perhaps partially 
 disguised by the unfortunate old term "prehistoric." 
 The historian glances at case after case of flint eo- 
 liths, fist hatchets, arrow points, and scrapers, pic- 
 tures of animals scratched on bits of bone, fragments of 
 neolithic pottery and bronze ''celts," with emotions of 
 weariness tempered by some slight contempt for those 
 who see anything more in these things than the proofs 
 that there used to be savages long ago similar to those 
 that may still be found in regions remote from civiliza- 
 tion. Further reflection should, however, convince 
 him that the distinction between ''historic" and "pre- 
 historic" is after all an arbitrary one. "Prehistoric" 
 originally meant such information as we had about 
 man before his story was taken up by Moses and 
 Homer, when they were deemed the earliest surviving 
 written sources. 
 
 History, however, in the fullest sense of the term, 
 includes all that we know of the past of mankind, re- 
 gardless of the nature of our sources of information. 
 Archaeological sources, to which the student of the 
 earlier history of man is confined, are not only fre- 
 quently superior in authenticity to many written 
 documents, but they continue to have the greatest 
 importance after the appearance of inscriptions and 
 books. We now accept as historical a great many 
 things which are recorded neither in inscriptions nor in 
 books. It is an historical, not a prehistorical, fact that 
 
86 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the earliest well-defined and unmistakable human tool, 
 the fist hatchet, was used in southern Europe, in 
 Africa, India, Japan, and North America. This is 
 exactly as historical as the recorded word that Julius 
 Csesar first crossed the English Channel at the full of 
 the moon — and far more important. 
 
 Should the historical student still find himself in- 
 different to what has been called palethnolggy,^ let 
 him recollect that if, as it is not hazardous to assume, 
 the oldest fist hatchets were made by men living two 
 hundred thousand years ago, the so-called '' historical" 
 period of from five to seven thousand years has to do 
 with but a thirtieth or a fortieth of the time man has 
 been slowly and intermittently estabhshing the founda- 
 tions of our present civilization. But the fist hatchet 
 is, comparatively speaking, a highly perfected imple- 
 ment and is pretty well diffused over the globe, so that 
 it suggests a vista of antecedent progress which sepa- 
 rates man's speechless and toolless ancestors from the 
 makers of the fist hatchets. It must be clear that if 
 one ignores palethnology, one runs the risk of missing 
 the whole perspective of modern change. We have out- 
 grown the scale which served for Archbishop Usher, 
 
 1 The term " prehistoric " and some such term as palethnology (sug- 
 gested by de Mortillet) are still convenient, since the attempt to trace 
 the stages of development of man previous to the appearance of the 
 higher, and really very recent, forms of civilization which first meet 
 us in Egypt and Babylonia involves a particular technical equipment, 
 including, for instance, some acquaintance with geology and paleon- 
 tology. 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 87 
 
 who maintained that man and all the terrestrial ani- 
 mals were created on Friday, October 28, 4004 b.c, 
 and which has led to a great deal of shallow talk about 
 our relation to 'Hhe ancients" who are in reahty our 
 contemporaries. 
 
 It seems quite possible — to suggest a single re- 
 flection—that human mental capacity has neither 
 increased nor declined during the trifling period which 
 separates us from Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, could 
 we imagine a colony of infants from the first famihes of 
 Athens in the fifth century b.c, and another the off- 
 spring of the most intellectual classes of to-day, com- 
 pletely isolated from civilization and suckled by wolves 
 or fed by ravens, both groups would start in a stage 
 of decivilization suggesting that of the chimpanzee. 
 No one can tell how long it would take the supreme 
 geniuses which such colonies might from time to time 
 produce, to frame a sentence, build a fire, or chip a 
 nodule of flint into a fist hatchet. Nor is there reason 
 to think that either colony would have an advantage 
 over the other in making the first steps in progress. 
 It is only education and social environment that 
 separate the best of us from a savagery far lower than 
 any to be observed on the earth to-day, lower prob- 
 ably than that of the lowest man of whom any traces 
 still exist. 
 
 Then there is the word ''race," which historical 
 writers have used and still use with great recklessness. 
 Most of the earlier theories of ''races " and of the oridn 
 
83 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 of man in western Asia were either consciously sug- 
 gested, or unconsciously reenforced, by the account in 
 Genesis of the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, and the 
 confounding of language during the construction of the 
 Tower of Babel. The Aryan theory set forth, for ex- 
 ample, by Mommsen in the opening chapter of his 
 Roman History, to-day appears well-nigh as naive and 
 grotesque as the earHer notion of the Tower of Babel. 
 Since the geological period when man may first have 
 made his appearance on the earth, there have been vast 
 changes in the distribution of land and water, in cH- 
 mate and fauna. These natural changes in physical 
 conditions must have caused all sorts of migrations 
 and fusions ; add to these, conquests and invasions, 
 slavery and miscellaneous sexual relations. These 
 have brought the most varied peoples together and 
 produced an inextricable confusion of morals, manners, 
 and tongues. In spite of this, one still finds historical 
 students talking of ''races" as if we could still beheve 
 Max Mailer's persuasive tale of the plain of Iran and 
 the dispersion of the Aryans. 
 
 These illustrations should be sufficient to substan- 
 tiate the importance of prehistoric archaeology for all 
 students of history, since they all run grave risks of 
 persisting in ancient error if they neglect its results. 
 We are, however, by no means confined to the remains 
 of man and his handiwork for our notions of what must 
 have lain back of the highly developed civilizations 
 which we meet when written records first become avail- 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 89 
 
 able. If, as Professor William Thomas has so happily 
 phrased it, '^tribal society is virtually delayed civiliza- 
 tion, and the savages are a sort of contemporaneous 
 ancestry," those investigators — namely, the anthro- 
 pologists — who deal with the habits, customs, insti- 
 tutions, languages, and beliefs of primitive man are in 
 a position to make the greatest contributions to the 
 real understanding of history. From the standpoint 
 of man's development, anthropology may be regarded 
 as a branch of history in the same sense that animal 
 psychology or comparative anatomy are branches of 
 human psychology and human anatomy. 
 
 At least one historian of repute has recognized the 
 truth of this. Professor Eduard Meyer prefaces 
 the second greatly revised edition of his History of 
 Antiquity with a whole volume of 250 pages on the 
 '^Elements of Anthropology." He says: ^'To have 
 prefaced my work with such an introduction would 
 formerly have excited the surprise and encountered 
 the criticism of many of my judges at a time when the 
 interests of most historians were entirely alien to such 
 questions. Now, when such matters are the order of 
 the day, no apology is necessary. . . . Indeed, such 
 an introduction is absolutely essential for a scientific 
 and consistently conceived history of antiquity." 
 
 The helpfulness of anthropology for the historical 
 student is, however, still much obscured, owing partly 
 to his indifference to the whole question of human 
 development, and partly to a more or less justifiable 
 
go 
 
 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 suspicion on his part that there is grave danger of being 
 misled in our attempt to interpret past events and 
 conditions by anthropological theories and schematism. 
 It is one thing, however, to reject a tool because we 
 are too stupid to see its use, and another to be on our 
 guard against cutting ourselves. Even the historical 
 student who is stoHdly and complacently engaged in 
 determining past facts (except when he puts on the 
 armor of the Lord to defend the lawful frontiers of 
 history against invaders) would surely find the study 
 of anthropology of value. It would tend to give him 
 poise and insight, preeminently in all matters having 
 to do with religion or religious sanction, or the under- 
 lying forces of conservatism, — and with these subjects 
 he is constantly engaged in one form or another. No 
 branch of modern research, indeed, has so upset older 
 historical conceptions as the comparative study of 
 religions, a science which is quasi-historical and quasi- 
 anthropological in its sources and methods. The 
 older historians failed to see very deeply into reli- 
 gious phenomena; manifestations of that class were 
 commonly taken for granted, and their origins excited 
 little curiosity. Yet few phases of human develop- 
 ment have proved to be more expHcable than the reli- 
 gious. The complex syncretism which resulted in 
 orthodox Christianity has been laid bare, as well as 
 the very ancient and primitive superstitions which 
 were incorporated into the theology of the church 
 fathers. 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 91 
 
 I have been told by M. Solomon Reinach, the dis- 
 tinguished director of the Museum of St. Germain-en- 
 Laye, that when Mommsen visited the collections 
 some years ago, he had never heard either of the ice 
 age or of totemism ! He appeared to think that the 
 terms might be the ingenious discoveries of M. 
 Reinach himself. Now, Mommsen is properly ranked 
 among the most extraordinary historians of modern 
 times. The mass of his work and its quality are 
 famiHar to us all. Nevertheless, his ignorance of 
 two of the commonplaces of prehistoric archaeology 
 and anthropology prevented him from seeing the 
 Roman civilization in its proper perspective and from 
 thoroughly grasping its religious, and perhaps even 
 the legal, phenomena. Man, as Henry Adams has so 
 neatly expressed it, is now viewed as a ''function" of 
 the ice age during a very long period. As for totem- 
 ism, it has been called upon to explain such different 
 phenomena as the frescoes in the dark caves of the 
 Magdalenien period, the abhorrence of the Jew for 
 pork, and the esteem of a baseball team for its mas- 
 cot. Many beliefs and practices of the Christian 
 church are now seen to go back by direct or devious 
 ways to totemism, animism, and the mana. 
 
 The historical student who realizes this will hasten 
 to acquaint himself, if he has not already done so, with 
 some of the most suggestive works in this field of 
 anthropology and comparative religion. He will be 
 a very dull person indeed if he does not find his con- 
 
92 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 captions of the past fundamentally changing as he 
 reads, let us say, the extracts which Professor Thomas 
 has so conveniently brought together in his Source 
 Book for Social Origins^ or the fascinating Folkways, 
 of the late Professor Sumner; or Solomon Reinach's 
 Orpheus, Conybeare's Myth, Magic, and Morals, or De 
 Morgan's Les premieres civilisations, — to mention only 
 the more obvious examples of this class of literature. 
 
 Ill 
 
 So it has come about that the older notions of our 
 relations to the so-called ''ancients," of religion in gen- 
 eral and Christianity in particular, and of ''race," are 
 being gravely modified by the investigations of those 
 who are not commonly classed as historians. These 
 latter have demonstrated the superficial character of 
 the older historians' reasoning and pointed the way 
 to new and truer interpretations of past events and 
 conditions. Other terms which historians have used 
 without any adequate understanding of them are 
 "progress" and "decline," "human nature," "histori- 
 cal continuity," and "civilization." Even a slight 
 tincture of anthropology, reenforced by the elements 
 of the newer allied branches of social and animal 
 psychology, will do much to deepen and rectify the 
 sense in which we use these terms. ,. 
 
 Social psychology, as yet in an inchoate condition, 
 is based on the conviction that we owe our own ego 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 93 
 
 to our association with others ; it is a social product. 
 Without others we should never be ourselves. As 
 Professor George H. Mead expresses it: ''Whatever 
 may be the metaphysical impossibilities or possi- 
 bilities of solipsism, psychologically it is non-existent. 
 There must be other selves if one's own is to exist. 
 Psychological analysis, retrospection, and the study 
 of children and primitive people give no inkhng of 
 situations in which self could have existed in conscious- 
 ness except as the counterpart of other selves." 
 
 It may at first sight seem a far cry from the origin 
 of the ego and its dependence on the socius to such his- 
 torical questions as the dates of Sargon's reign, the 
 meaning of the Renaissance, or Napoleon's views of 
 the feasibility of invading England. There are, how- 
 ever, plenty of matters of still more vital importance 
 on which the judgments of historical students are 
 likely to be gravely affected by some acquaintance 
 with the recent discussions in regard to the laws of 
 imitation^ with which Tarde's name is especially asso- 
 ciated, and with the relation of our reason to the more 
 primitive instincts which we inherit from our animal 
 ancestors. Indeed, the great and fundamental ques- 
 tion of how mankind learns and disseminates his dis- 
 coveries and misapprehensions — in short, the whole 
 rationale of human civilization as distinguished from 
 the Hfe of the anthropoids — will never be understood 
 without social psychology; and social psychology 
 will never be understood without animal psychology ; 
 
94 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 these studies alone can serve to explain the real nature 
 of progress and retrogression — matters to which no 
 historical student can afford to remain indifferent. 
 There is obviously no possibility of explaining ade- 
 quately in a brief essay this rather perturbing proposi- 
 tion, but its importance seems to me so great that I am 
 going to venture to present the situation very briefly. 
 In the first place, is it not clear that we still permit 
 ourselves, as is not at all unnatural, to be victimized 
 by the old anthropocentric conception of things? 
 This has been so long accepted by the western world 
 that in spite of the discoveries of the past sixty years 
 we find many unrevised notions from the past still lurk- 
 ing in the corners of our judgment. We are constantly 
 forgetting, I fear, that man was not created, male and 
 female, in a day, as Mark Hopkins and those of his 
 generation commonly believed. We did not begin our 
 human existence with pure and holy aspirations, a 
 well-developed language, and a knowledge of agricul- 
 ture, but are descended from a long line of brute an- 
 cestors, unable either to talk or to cultivate the soil. 
 All animals that now live or ever have lived on the 
 earth, including man, ^'are mayhap united together 
 by blood relationship of varying nearness or remote- 
 ness." Every one of us has a pedigree stretching back 
 not merely a couple of hundred generations, but 
 through all geologic time since Hfe first commenced on 
 the globe. Man's bodily resemblance to the anthro- 
 poid apes has long been a subject of comment. Ennius 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 95 
 
 gave expression over two thousand years ago to the 
 disconcerting discovery : — 
 
 Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis ? 
 
 With the modern development of zoology and com- 
 parative anatomy more intimate structural similarities 
 were brought to light; Darwin sketched a portrait 
 of the turpissima bestia, our hairy ancestor, with his 
 tail, prehensile foot, and great canine teeth. This 
 hypothesis has since been substantiated by the dis- 
 covery of numerous vestigial muscles and organs, ata- 
 vistic reversions, and pathological conditions which 
 can be readily explained only on evolutionary grounds. 
 But if our bodies and their functions so closely re- 
 semble those of our nearest relatives among the ani- 
 mals, what shall we say of our minds? Are these 
 altogether different from the animal minds from which 
 they have gradually developed, or do they perpetuate, 
 like our bodies, all the old that is still available and 
 perhaps not a few traits that now merely hamper us 
 or tend to beget serious disorders? May not the 
 minds of our remote ancestors, who had not yet learned 
 to talk, still serve us not only in infancy and when senile 
 dementia overtakes us, but may they not be our nor- 
 mal guides in the simpler exigencies of Hfe ? I think 
 that it is not hazardous to affirm that the perpetuation 
 in man of psychological processes to be observed in the 
 other primates would be acknowledged by all students 
 of animal psychology. If this be true, may we not look 
 
96 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 to the study of animal psychology, as it develops, for 
 information which will enable us to discover and ap- 
 preciate for the first time what really goes to make 
 up a human being as distinguished from his humbler 
 relatives ? 
 
 Comparative, or animal, psychology has only re- 
 cently found a place in some of our universities. 
 Professor E. L. Thorndike was perhaps the first, some 
 twelve years ago, to attempt to put the subject on a 
 modem experimental basis. Since then much has been 
 done, especially in the United States. We can hardly 
 hope to know very clearly what an ape is thinking 
 about as he looks out from under his wrinkled brow. 
 "Les animaux ne nous font pas des confidences," 
 as Reinach has truly observed. But scientific ob- 
 servation and experimentation are throwing light on 
 the educability of apes and other animals and on the 
 ways in which they appear to learn. They have al- 
 ready proved that the chimpanzee can readily master 
 a vast number of acts over and above anything that 
 his ancestors have ever known in the jungle. He is 
 marvelously teachable. He appears to learn by ^^ trial 
 and error" and by a process which we may term 
 ''trick psychology," stimulated by rewards and pun- 
 ishments. The exact nature and role of ''imitation" 
 is not yet very clear, but I think that no one can 
 doubt its importance. Now the obvious question 
 forces itself on us, Do we not all learn, for the most 
 part, much as the chimpanzee learns, by trial and 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 97 
 
 error and by mastering tricks, stimulated by rewards 
 and punishments, and by "imitation" ? The answer 
 will be, I am convinced, that almost all our education 
 is based on modified simian principles. To a believer 
 in the continuity of history that should be a cheering 
 discovery, humiliating as it is in other respects. 
 
 I am aware that to most students of history the 
 results of comparative psychology will seem at first 
 sight too remote to have any assignable bearing on the 
 problems that face them. This impression is, however, 
 erroneous, at least where questions of the character 
 and transmission of culture are involved. We can- 
 not understand the nature of culture, as distinguished 
 from our merely animal heritage, without some notion 
 of animal psychology. It seems probable that the 
 historical student will deal far more inteUigently with 
 the changes of thought, the development of institu- 
 tions, the progress of invention, and almost all reli- 
 gious phenomena when he learns to distinguish 
 between the higher and rarer manifestations of pecul- 
 iarly human psychology and the current and funda- 
 mental simian mental modes upon which we still 
 rely so constantly with the assurance of ancestral 
 habit. 
 
 I will give but a single illustration from this field of 
 speculation. Gabriel Tarde has emphasized the fact 
 that every minutest element in civilization, every 
 atom of culture that we have, over and above our 
 animal outfit, must either be handed on from one 
 
98 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 generation to the next, or else be rediscovered, or 
 lost. Now it should be part of the historian's busi- 
 ness, and no unimportant part, to follow out the 
 actual historical workings of this rule. Civilization 
 is not innate, but transmitted by ^'imitation" in the 
 large sense of the word. A word, or a particular 
 form of tool, or a book, will die out as surely as an 
 organism unless it is propagated and regenerated. 
 Let us apply this law in a single case. How little 
 addition to the general disorder and to the chronic 
 discouragements of learning is necessary to account 
 for the fatal disappearance of Greek books in the 
 West after the dissolution of the Roman Empire ! 
 Suppose only half as many people in Gaul read 
 Greek in the time of Gregory of Tours as had known it 
 in Constantine's time. How greatly would this in- 
 crease the chances of the complete disappearance of 
 Xenophon's Cyropcedia or Euripides's Elektra ? 
 
 In concluding these reflections I am painfully con- 
 scious that they may suggest serious dangers to some 
 thoughtful readers. The historical student may be 
 ready to grant that he has neglected the influence that 
 discoveries in other fields should have on his own con- 
 clusions; but how, he will ask, is he to find time to 
 acquaint himself with all the branches of anthropol- 
 ogy, of sociology, political economy, comparative 
 rehgion, social psychology, animal psychology, physi- 
 cal geography, climatology, and the rest ? It is hard 
 for him even to keep up with the new names, and he 
 
THE NEW ALLIES OF HISTORY 99 
 
 has a not unnatural distrust of those who tender him 
 easy explanations for things that they still know so 
 little about. Some of the more exuberant represen- 
 tatives of the newer social sciences remind the his- 
 torian disagreeably of the now nearly extinct tribe of 
 philosophers of history, who flattered themselves that 
 their penetrating intellects had been able to discover 
 the wherefore of man's past without the trouble of 
 learning much about it. 
 
 But the historical student who classes the modem 
 social sciences with the old and discredited philosophy 
 of history is making a serious mistake. The philos- 
 ophers of history sought to justify man's past in order 
 to satisfy some sentimental craving, and their ex- 
 planations were, in the last analysis, usually begotten 
 of some theological or national prejudice. The con- 
 temporaneous student of society, on the contrary, 
 offers very real and valuable, if obviously partial, ex- 
 planations of the past. It is true that he sometimes 
 forgets what Hume calls the " vast variety which 
 nature has affected in her operations," and tries to 
 explain more than his favorite cause will account for, 
 but this ought not to blind us to his usefulness. 
 
 It is obvious that, like the geologist, the physiolo- 
 gist, and the biologist, the historian is forced to make 
 use of pertinent information furnished by workers in 
 other fields, even if he has no time to master more than 
 the elements of the sciences most nearly alHed to his 
 own. He may use anthropological and psychological 
 
100 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 discoveries and information without becoming either 
 an anthropologist or a psychologist. These discov- 
 eries and this information will inevitably suggest new 
 points of view and new interpretations to the his- 
 torian, and will help to rectify the old misapprehensions 
 and dispel the innumerable ancient illusions which 
 still permeate our historical treatises. Above all, let 
 the historical student become unreservedly historical- 
 minded, avail himself of the genetic explanation of 
 human experience, and free himself from the suspi- 
 cion that, in spite of his name and assumptions, he 
 is as yet the least historical, in his attitude and 
 methods, of all those who to-day are so eagerly 
 attempting to explain mankind. 
 
 It may well be that speculation in the newer fields 
 has often far outrun the data accumulated, and the 
 historical student has not infrequently been offered 
 explanations of the past which he has done well to 
 reject. The sociologist, anthropologist, and economist 
 have doubtless often thought too fast and too reck- 
 lessly, and this has engendered an excessive reserve 
 in the historian, who has sometimes flattered himself 
 on not thinking at all. But there is, in the long run, 
 more risk in thinking too little than too much, and the 
 kind of thought suggested by the new allies of his- 
 tory should serve, if judiciously practiced, greatly to 
 strengthen and deepen the whole range of historical 
 study and render its results far more valuable than 
 they have hitherto been. 
 
I03 
 
 SOME REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL 
 HISTORY 
 
 Lord Bacon, in his Advancement oj Learning, says : 
 ''No man hath propounded to himself the general 
 state of learning to be described and represented 
 from age to age, as many have done the works of 
 nature and the State civil and ecclesiastical ; without 
 which the history of the world seemeth to me to be as 
 the statue of Polyphemus with his eye out ; that part 
 being wanting which doth most show the spirit and 
 life of the person. And yet I am not ignorant that in 
 divers particular sciences, as of the jurisconsults, the 
 mathematicians, the rhetoricians, the philosophers, 
 there are set down some small memorials of the schools, 
 authors, and books ; and so likewise some barren rela- 
 tions touching the invention of arts or usages. But a 
 just story of learning, containing the antiquities and 
 originals of knowledges and their sects ; their inven- 
 tions, their traditions ; their diverse administrations 
 and managings ; their flourishings, their oppositions, 
 decays, depressions, oblivions, removes ; with the 
 causes and occasions of them, and all other events 
 concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world ; 
 I may truly affirm to be wanting." 
 
 lOI 
 
T102 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 Three centuries have passed since Bacon wrote 
 these lines, but the deficiency which he points out has 
 not yet been remedied. We have as yet no ''just 
 story of learning." It is true that we have histories 
 of certain kinds of thought, especially of philosophy and 
 theology, but these confine themselves in the main to 
 the systems of distinguished thinkers, — the Platos, 
 Aristotles, Kants, and Kegels, the Pauls, Augustines, 
 Aquinases, Luthers, and Jonathan Edwardses, — 
 rather than to the conceptions that were current among 
 their thoughtful contemporaries. Only the simpler 
 and easier portions of a philosophic system can be 
 thoroughly digested by intelligent laymen so as to 
 influence the history of opinion. When we speak of 
 Angus tinianism, HegeHanism, or Marxism, we do not 
 mean the complete philosophic systems of these writers, 
 but such particularly impressive discoveries, few in 
 number, as stand out in relief against the mass of 
 subtleties with which only the expert will be tempted 
 to reckon. A member of the intellectual class to-day, 
 looking back and asking himself whence come those 
 ideas which he himself accepts and which he sees ac- 
 cepted by others about him, will for the most part look 
 in vain in histories of philosophy for answers to his 
 questions. Bacon's reproach is still merited, for no 
 one has as yet, so far as I know, ever clearly conceived 
 of a general history of the chief opinions of the intellec- 
 tual class. 
 
 Yet what more vital has the past to teach us than '; 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 103 
 
 the manner in which our convictions on large ques- y i 
 tions have arisen, developed and changed? We do ' 
 not, assuredly, owe most of them to painful personal 
 excogitation, but inherit them, along with the in- 
 stitutions and social habits of the land in which we 
 live. The content of a well-stocked mind is the 
 product of tens of thousands of years of accumu- 
 lation. Many widespread notions could by no possi- 
 bility have originated in modern times, but have arisen 
 in conditions quite alien to those of the present. We 
 have too often, in consequence, an outworn intellec- 
 tual equipment for new and unheard-of tasks. Only a 
 study of the vicissitudes of human opinion can make us 
 fully aware of this and enable us to readjust our views 
 so as to adapt them to our present environment. If 
 it be true, as was maintained in an earher essay, that 
 opinion tends, in the dynamic age in which we Hve, 
 to lag far behind our changing environment, how can j 
 we better discover the anachronisms in our views and 
 in our attitude toward the world than by studying . 
 their origin ? Is not Bacon right in accusing the his- 
 torian of presenting us mth an image of the past with- 
 out its great cyclopean eye, which alone reveals its 
 spirit and life? 
 
 The eager interest of the public in this neglected 
 field is shown by the long-continued popularity of Dr. 
 Draper's Intellectual Developme^it. This work has for 
 years enjoyed a reputation far exceeding its merits. 
 From a modern standpoint the book is deficient in 
 
I04 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 almost every respect, except its effective style and the 
 assurance of its author. Dr. Draper has not seen fit 
 at any point to give the reader the slightest clue to the 
 sources of his information, but it is clear to the critical 
 reader that his impressions were derived from such mis- 
 cellaneous works as were available in the early sixties, 
 and that his conclusions do not at any point rest upon 
 a conscientious study of first-hand material. His 
 object, he frankly tells us, was to prove two laws, 
 which no one nowadays would believe to be laws at 
 all.i 
 
 About the same time that Draper's work appeared, 
 Lecky published his Rise and Influence of Rationalism 
 in Europe. This is on a very different plane from 
 Draper's volumes. It is the result of careful investi- 
 gation, and exhibits the characteristic prudence and 
 intellectual poise of the writer. Unhappily, however, 
 it confines itself in the main to the last three centuries 
 of European development, with only such background 
 as seemed essential to make the tale clear. 
 
 A third work which has attracted much attention 
 is Andrew D. White's Warfare of Science and Theology. 
 This is written with a polemical eagerness begotten 
 perhaps of Ex-President White's own effective par- 
 ticipation in the battle. He was aided in his work by 
 scholars who supplied him with a large amount of evi- 
 dence, which he used with the utmost effect in routing 
 the theologians; but the avowed object of the book 
 1 See above, p. 64, note. 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 105 
 
 IS to reveal the absurdities of patristic and medieval 
 tradition rather than to present impartially the ele- 
 ments of intellectual history. 
 
 Leslie Stephen, in his English Thought in the Eight- 
 eenth Century, has done much to supplement the his- 
 tories of eighteenth-century philosophy and literature. 
 A. W. Benn, in his English Rationalism in the Nineteenth 
 Century, has traced the growing discontent with that 
 class of opinions which had received a religious sanc- 
 tion. Merz's History of European Thought in the Nine- 
 teenth Century is perhaps the most scholarly and signal 
 contribution to a general history of the intellectual class 
 that has yet appeared. Some of his chapters furnish 
 excellent illustrations of the profitable character of 
 this hne of historical investigation. More recently 
 Henry Osborn Taylor has given us a masterly picture of 
 The Mediceval Mind, which is at once sympathetic and 
 critical, and is based upon an assiduous intercourse with 
 the sources. All of these, whatever their merits, are, 
 however, confined to particular periods, if we except 
 Draper's now obsolete volumes, and in none of them 
 would the reader find a general summary of the chief 
 phases through which the European intellect has passed. 
 
 Any effort to ''propound to one's self the general 
 state of learning to be described from age to age " might 
 seem destined to failure in view of the intricate prob- 
 lems offered by each particular period. Nevertheless 
 it would not be impossible, could one emancipate him- 
 self from the traditional presentation of the past, to 
 
I06 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 present in an orderly way the development of the chief 
 concomitants of our own particular intellectual heri- 
 tage, always keeping before one the attitude of mind 
 and range of knowledge of the intellectual class at 
 large, rather than that of special investigators and 
 scholars : its convictions on certain large -questions, 
 its methods of reasoning, its powers of criticism, its 
 authorities, the sources of information that it has 
 from time to time cherished, whether human or divine, 
 the range of its knowledge, and the depth of its igno- 
 rance, as judged by what had gone before and what 
 came after. Special emphasis should naturally be laid 
 throughout on the modes of attaining and transmitting 
 knowledge — or what was mistaken for such — and its 
 application to the welfare and improvement of man's 
 estate in this world or the next. 
 
 II 
 
 One who attempted to trace the general history of 
 thought to-day would have to take into consideration 
 certain vital discoveries which could not have influ- 
 enced Lecky and Draper. We are now tolerably well 
 assured that could the human mind be followed back, 
 it would be found to merge into the animal mind, and 
 that consequently the recently developing study of ani- 
 mal or comparative psychology is likely to cast a great 
 deal of hght upon certain modes of thought. I do 
 not mean by this that there is any reason to suppose 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 107 
 
 that the animals exercise reason in the narrower sense 
 of that term, but that there is, at certain points, a 
 striking parallelism between the methods of learning 
 in the higher animals and in ourselves. In any case a 
 study of animal psychology brings out more clearly 
 than can otherwise be done the essential pecuHarities 
 of human psychology. Certain of the higher animals, 
 especially the apes, are remarkably educable and 
 show the possibiKties of learning, independently of 
 reason. This capacity for learning without the use of 
 reason we not only share with the animals, but we have 
 it in a far greater degree than they. The exact nature 
 of human culture and its method of transmission, as 
 well as of human reason as over against simian 
 mental processes, can only be made apparent by this 
 new science of animal psychology, which is now being 
 assiduously cultivated, especially in the United States. 
 The equally new branch of social psychology, as 
 was pointed out in the previous essay, ought in 
 time to make plainer the nature and extent of our 
 dependence on our fellow-men. In short, we not 
 only retain our animal mind, but, in addition, those 
 more primitive forms of reasoning, which anthropolog- 
 ical research is discovering to be common to all so- 
 called primitive peoples. Just as our animal mind 
 stands us in good stead in certain crises, so the more 
 primitive forms of reasoning are always present when 
 they are not submerged by accumulations of knowl- 
 edge and artificially developed criticism. 
 
Io8 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 Of the gradual clarification of man's psychology 
 through hundreds of thousands of years, we can only 
 judge from the vestiges we have of human handiwork 
 supplemented by the inferences that may be made 
 from the reasoning of the savage and the progressive 
 unfolding of the infant's mind. Previous to the ap- 
 pearance of written records, we must judge of what 
 man knew, by the scanty vestiges of what he did; in 
 no other way can we discover the foundations of the 
 first historic culture of which we have any tolerable 
 knowledge, that of the Egyptians, dating back five or 
 six thousand years. 
 
 The Egyptians do not appear to have led an intel- 
 lectual Hfe in the later Greek sense of the term. They 
 elaborated an intricate theory of existence after death ; 
 they made many industrial discoveries, and observed 
 the heavens with such care as was necessary in order 
 best to utilize the rise and fall of the river upon which 
 they were dependent for subsistence. Western Europe 
 doubtless owed to the Egyptians more than can ever 
 be determined. It is, however, from the Babylonians 
 and Assyrians that we get our divisions of time, the 
 hours, minutes, and seconds, and the plan of dividing 
 the circle into 360 parts. The Greeks, and, later, 
 western Europe, derived their astrological enthusiasm 
 from these older civilizations. 
 
 Intellectual Hfe in the narrower sense of the term ap- 
 pears, as far as we can trace it, to have found its first 
 home among the Ionian Greeks, and especially in the 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 109 
 
 city of Miletus, some six or seven hundred years before 
 Christ. But underlying the speculations of Thales, 
 Anaximander, and other members of this group is the 
 vast substructure which has been touched upon above. 
 When the Ionian philosophers asked what was the 
 principle of all things, they asked a question which is 
 highly sophisticated and artificial and which repre- 
 sents a type of scientific abstraction which can only 
 come with great maturity of thought. There has been, 
 so to speak, a desperate struggle ever since the time 
 of Thales to maintain this scientific ambition, which 
 has constantly been threatened with destruction by 
 older and more primitive types of thought, that may i 
 be classified as practical, mystical, and romantic. -i 
 
 The Ionian philosophers and those of Eha appear 
 to have exercised their minds on highly metaphysical 
 questions, such as '' the one and the many," '' being and 
 not being," and the paradoxes which such conceptions 
 suggested. Suddenly, almost without warning, we 
 find the Sophists of Athens presenting a fullness and 
 I maturity of intellectual life which in many respects 
 can scarcely be paralleled to-day. Unhappily their 
 works are for the most part lost, and it may well have 
 been that much of their speculation was — like that 
 of Socrates — not written out, but was confined to 
 conversation and oral disputation. Our impressions 
 of what they talked about are derived chiefly from a 
 hostile Plato and from citations in Aristotle. 
 
 So abounding is the intellectual vitahty of these two 
 
no THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 writers, so inexhaustible the range of their speculations, 
 so profound their philosophical penetration, that one 
 who dedicates himself to the study of their works is 
 apt to feel that all intellectual history since their day 
 is only the record of a degeneration. It would become 
 necessary, therefore, in tracing the intellectual history 
 of Europe, to ask one's self not so much what Plato and 
 Aristotle themselves may have beHeved or discovered, 
 as what particular phases of their thought were gener- 
 ally current among the intellectual class in their 
 own or in later times. It was their fate to become, 
 above all other individual thinkers, the teachers of the 
 Europe from which we derive our intellectual heritage. 
 It must be remembered that, on the one hand, Cicero 
 and the new Academy traced its amiable skepticism 
 back to Plato, and that, on the other hand, Plotinus 
 and the Neoplatonists believed that they derived 
 their super-rational and ecstatic tenets from the same 
 source. As for Aristotle, while he fills the modern 
 critic, whether his interests be in letters, philosophy, 
 science, or poHtics, with astonishment and admiration, 
 it should not be forgotten that he was the idol of the 
 thirteenth-century scholastics, who made his vicious 
 theory of essences and final causes and his infertile 
 syllogistic reasoning the basis of their speculation. 
 
 The scholars of the Hellenistic period at Alexandria 
 and elsewhere appear in certain fields to have carried 
 on the Hellenic traditions in a profitable way, but their 
 additions to knowledge were more than counterbalanced 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY m 
 
 by a vast literature of comment, exegesis, and literary 
 criticism which made little appeal to thoughtful men 
 in the Roman period. The works of the Alexandrian 
 school were mainly permitted to perish, with the no- 
 table exception of EucHd and the geographical, astro- 
 nomical, and astrological compilations of Ptolemy, 
 which were taken up by the Arab scholars and reap- 
 peared in the thirteenth century in western Europe. 
 
 The melancholy decline of Hellenism in the later 
 Roman Empire was accompanied by the development 
 of new types of intellectual enthusiasm based upon 
 entirely different presuppositions in regard to man's 
 origin and chief business in Hf e. One of the great modern 
 historical discoveries is that what we term ''medieval " 
 thought was to all intents and purposes completely 
 elaborated in the later Roman Empire, before the Ger- 
 mans disrupted the western portions of the vast com- 
 monwealth organized by Augustus. An emotional 
 revolution had begun as early as Plutarch and had 
 gradually served to denature the traditions of the in- 
 tellectual life as they had come down from Athens. 
 Reason became an object of suspicion; its impotence 
 seemed to have been clearly proved ; the intellectual 
 class sought solace not so much in the restraints of 
 Stoicism as in the abandon of Neoplatonism, and the 
 vagaries of theurgy and of oriental mysticism. The 
 clarity and moderation which we associate with Hellen- 
 ism gave place to the deprecation of reason and a cor- 
 responding confidence in the supernatural. Plotinus 
 
112 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 maintained that only the meaner things of life come 
 within the scope of reason ; that the highest truth is 
 supernatural; that it is through intuition rather than 
 reason that we may hope to approach our highest 
 aspirations. 
 
 Harnack has well said that Neoplatonism, however 
 lofty and inspiring in some of its aspects, impKed 
 nothing less than intellectual bankruptcy. "The con- 
 tempt for reason and science (for these are contemned 
 when relegated to a second place) finally leads to 
 barbarism, because it results in crass superstition, and 
 is exposed to all manner of imposture. And, as a 
 matter of fact, barbarism succeeded the flourishing 
 period of Neoplatonism. . . . The masses grew up 
 in superstition, and the Christian Church, which en- 
 tered on the inheritance of Neoplatonism, was com- 
 pelled to reckon with this and come to terms with it. 
 Just when the bankruptcy of the ancient civilization 
 and its lapse into barbarism could not have failed to 
 reveal themselves, a kindly destiny placed on the stage 
 of European history certain barbarian nations, for 
 whom the work of a thousand years had as yet no 
 existence. Thus the fact is obscured, though it does 
 not escape the eye of one who looks below the 
 surface, that the ancient world must necessarily have 
 degenerated into barbarism of its own accord, because 
 of its renunciation of this world. There was no longer 
 any desire either to enjoy it, to master it, or to know 
 it as it really is. A new world had been disclosed for 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 113 
 
 which everything in this world was to be given up, and 
 men were ready to sacrifice insight and understanding, 
 in order to possess that other world with certainty. 
 In the light which radiated from the world to come, 
 that which in this world appeared absurd became 
 wisdom, and wisdom became folly." ^ 
 
 It was just at this period that historical Christianity 
 received its formulation in the works of the church 
 fathers. It is suggestive that the greatest of these, 
 Augustine, had been attracted both by the teachings 
 of the Persian, Manes, and by the seductions of Neo- 
 platonism. The '' Christian Epic," as Santayana has 
 happily termed it, formed the basis for a new intellec- 
 tual life which developed in an emotional milieu as 
 different as possible from that of Athens in the fifth 
 century before Christ. The new thought was able 
 to take up certain ideal and mystic elements which 
 may clearly be perceived in Plato, but it had no taste 
 for the promising contributions to an exact knowledge 
 of the world which had been made by Democritus and 
 the Epicureans, who accepted his mechanistic view of 
 the universe, by Aristotle in his recorded observations, 
 and by those scientists of the Alexandrian period, such 
 as Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Archimedes, who 
 might, had their spirit and methods prevailed, have 
 earHer developed that natural science which is the boast 
 of our own day. The intellectual life as it had been 
 lived in all its freshness by the contemporaries of 
 
 1 History of Dogma, Vol. I, pp. 3,2,7~2,2)^' 
 
 I 
 
114 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 Socrates was bound to result eventually in disappoint- 
 ment. It was too exclusively intellectual ; it sought 
 truth in purely intellectual operations and clarification. 
 It rarely touched concretely upon the social and eco- 
 nomic problems which oppress us to-day, and it failed 
 to recognize the significance of painstaking scientific 
 research or to perceive the possibility of applying the 
 resulting knowledge of the natural world, organic and 
 "inorganic, to practical ends. 
 
 In this respect the scholastic revival of the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries is characteristically Hellenic 
 in spirit. It is true that by that time authority was 
 assigned an overwhelming importance, whereas the 
 Athenians, previous to Aristotle's time, had been al- 
 most free from this embarrassment. Thomas Aquinas 
 operated with different materials from Plato and gave 
 his thought a different form, but the general intellec- 
 tual affinity between the two men is apparent enough. 
 
 By the end of the twelfth century the first univer- 
 sities were established. Theology became a subject 
 of systematic instruction based upon the convenient 
 outline of patristic opinion furnished by Peter Lom- 
 bard's Sentences. With the reintroduction of Aris- 
 totle's works in a defective Latin translation, the older 
 study of the Seven Liberal Arts in the meager epitomes 
 which had come down from earlier centuries was re- 
 placed by lectures on all the chief works of the most 
 masterly exponent of Greek thought. If we exclude 
 law and medicine, the two great preoccupations of 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 115 
 
 the intellectual class in west^xn Europe in the thir- 
 teenth century were, accordingly, the highly elaborated 
 Christian theology, in all its subtle ramifications, on 
 the one hand, and, on the other, Aristotle's logical 
 treatises, his Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, Be Anima, 
 and the minor works on natural phenomena, as they 
 were understood by the ecclesiastical commentators of 
 the time. With their own observations the schoolmen 
 combined those of the Arabic philosophers, who had 
 known and studied Aristotle, above all of Averroes. 
 The Arabs were, however, rather more remote from 
 the real Aristotle than Albertus Magnus and Thomas 
 Aquinas, for their Arabic translations had passed 
 through Syriac on the way from the Greek. So, as 
 Renan humorously says of Averroes' commentary, 
 the western universities prayerfully studied for cen- 
 turies a Latin translation, of a Hebrew translation, 
 of an Arabic commentator on an Arabic translation, 
 of a Syriac translation of a Greek philosopher. Even 
 supposing that the Latin translations of Aristotle were 
 as perfect as translations can be, there was little chance 
 that the thirteenth-century thinker could possibly 
 transcend all the obstacles that lay in the way of 
 understanding a Greek philosopher of the fourth 
 century before Christ. The revival of Aristotle, 
 instead of rectifying the deficient perspective of the 
 earlier Middle Ages and supplying knowledge which 
 would serve as a starting-point for further progress, 
 only added one more obstacle to a fundamental 
 
Il6 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 readjustment of thought. It enhanced rather than 
 weakened the respect for authority, discouraged rather 
 than promoted the search for fresh truth. 
 
 During the fifteenth century Greek was once more 
 revived in Italy. The language had nearly died 
 out in the West about the year 500, and Boethius had 
 made an unsuccessful attempt to perpetuate a knowl- 
 edge of the chief Greek writers by translating them into 
 Latin, since obviously all knowledge of Greek works 
 was bound to vanish so soon as the knowledge of the 
 language formerly possessed by educated Romans 
 disappeared. For several centuries before Chryso- 
 lorus began to teach Greek to a group of eager disciples 
 in Florence in 1396, we find few allusions to Greek 
 works. While the names of Homer and Plato were 
 not forgotten, the scholars of the twelfth century rarely 
 knew of the existence of ^schylus or Sophocles, of 
 Herodotus or Thucydides. The Humanists of the 
 fifteenth century devoted themselves to rediscovering 
 every vestige of Greek literature that could be found, 
 as well as such Latin writers as Tacitus and Lucretius, 
 who had been forgotten. They translated the Greek 
 books into Latin, and thus rendered current in intellec- 
 tual circles those works that still remain to us from 
 classical antiquity. 
 
 It is, however, a grave mistake to assume that this 
 renewed interest in the Greek and Roman authors be- 
 tokened a revival of Hellenism, as has commonly been 
 supposed. The libraries described by Vespasiano, a 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 117 
 
 Florentine bookseller of the fifteenth century, indi- 
 cate the least possible discrimination on the part of 
 his patrons. Ficino, the translator of Plato, was an 
 enthusiastic Neoplatonist, and to Pico della Mirandola 
 the Jewish Cabbala seemed to promise infinite enlight- 
 enment. In short, Plato was as incapable in the fif- 
 teenth century of producing an intellectual revolution 
 as Aristotle had been in the thirteenth. With the 
 exception of Valla, whose critical powers were perhaps 
 sHghtly stimulated by acquaintance with the classics, 
 it must be confessed that there was Httle in the so- 
 called '^New Learning" to generate any thing approach- 
 ing an era of criticism. It is difiicult, to be sure, to 
 imagine a MacchiavelH or an Erasmus in the thirteenth 
 century, but it is Hkewise difficult to determine the 
 numerous and subtle changes which made them pos- 
 sible at the opening of the sixteenth; and it is reckless 
 to assume that the Humanists were chiefly responsible 
 for these changes. 
 
 The defection of the Protestants from the Roman 
 Catholic Church is not connected with any decisive in- 
 tellectual revision. Such ardent emphasis has been 
 constantly placed upon the differences between Protes- 
 tantism and CathoHcism by representatives of both 
 parties that the close intellectual resemblance of the 
 two systems, indeed their identity in nine parts out of 
 ten, has tended to escape us. The early Protestants, of 
 course, accepted, as did the CathoHcs, the whole patris- 
 tic outlook on the world ; their historical perspective 
 
Il8 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the 
 Bible, with its types, prophecies, and miracles, of 
 heaven and hell, of demons and angels, are all identical. 
 To the early Protestants, as to Cathohcs, he who would 
 be saved must accept the doctrine of the triune God 
 and must be ever on his guard against the whisperings 
 of reason and the innovations suggested by scientific 
 advance. Luther and Melanchthon denounced Co- 
 pernicus in the name of the Bible. Melanchthon re- 
 edited, with enthusiastic approval, Ptolemy's astrology. 
 Luther made repeated and bitter attacks upon reason ; 
 in whose eyes he freely confessed the presuppositions 
 of Christianity to be absurd. Calvin gloried in man's 
 initial and inherent moral impotency; and the doc- 
 trine of predestination seemed calculated to paralyze 
 all human effort. 
 
 The Protestants did not know any more about nature 
 than their Catholic enemies ; they were just as com- 
 pletely victimized by the demonology of Witchcraft. 
 The Protestant Revolt was not begotten of added 
 scientific knowledge, nor did it owe its success to any 
 considerable confidence in criticism. As Gibbon 
 pointed out, the loss of one conspicuous mystery — 
 that of transubstantiation — "was amply compensated 
 by the stupendous doctrines of original sin, redemption, 
 faith, grace, and predestination" which the Protestants 
 strained from the epistles of St. Paul. Early Protes- 
 tantism is, from an intellectual standpoint, essentially 
 a phase of medieval religious history. 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 123 
 
 ceded even by the most intrepid Hellenic enthusiasts 
 that, as we compare our own with earUer periods, 
 there can be no doubt that there is a large element of 
 novelty in the present situation. Nobody questions 
 that in such matter as locomotives, sewing machines, 
 steam threshers, telephones, and arc hghts our age 
 is one unparalleled in the past. There is, however, 
 still a very common feeling, especially among men of 
 the highest degree of literary and artistic cultivation, 
 that our advance beyond the Greeks in art and litera- 
 ture is somewhat questionable, and with this goes the 
 suspicion that the Greeks exhibited practically all 
 the varieties of intellectual activity which we now 
 witness, that here and there they forecast almost all 
 of our fundamental scientific discoveries, and that 
 their ideals of the intellectual life w^ere equal, if not 
 superior, to anything to which man has since attained. 
 It seems to the writer that this suspicion is the re- 
 sult of a failure to realize certain fundamental novelties 
 which underKe the characteristic thought of our own 
 time. At least five such novelties appear to be rather 
 easily distinguishable. Two of them have already been 
 mentioned : (i) Experimental science, which engages 
 in a minute observation of natural phenomena aided 
 by instruments adapted to the purpose, and verified 
 by experimentation, is essentially a product of modern 
 times. The Greeks had no telescopes, nor microscopes, 
 nor thermometers, nor spectroscopes. Their knowl- 
 edge was at best the result of what would seem to us 
 
124 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 crude and haphazard observation which tended to i 
 take the form of accepted authority. Why, the Scho- 
 lastics would have asked, is it necessary to see whether 
 a heavy body falls more rapidly than a light one, since 
 Aristotle has told us that it does ? Then in the second 
 place, (2) our modern idea of progress through the con- 
 tinual discovery of new knowledge and the improve- 
 ment of man's condition is one that does not appear 
 clearly among the Greeks and Romans. 
 
 Into the thought of the nineteenth century, three 
 additional elements entered: — 
 
 (3) In some inexplicable way there has come a 
 respect for, and appreciation of, the common man, a 
 solicitude for his welfare, and a willingness to permit 
 him to share in the control of public affairs. These 
 together constitute what may be called the democratic 
 spirit. So long as slavery or serfdom existed, as they 
 did down until recent times, the democratic spirit was 
 impossible. It is this appreciation of the common 
 man which is reflected in our development of social 
 sciences, undreamed of by the Greeks, and in the 
 socializing of older subjects, such as psychology and 
 ethics. Political economy was born in the eighteenth 
 century; in the nineteenth anthropology developed 
 on a large scale, together with the comparative study 
 of religions, sociology, and social psychology. 
 
 (4) The tendency to occupy this social point of view 
 has been greatly increased by another new factor, the 
 Industrial Revolution, with all its attendant circum- 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 125 
 
 stances. By the Industrial Revolution is, of course, 
 meant the fundamental change in our methods of 
 economic production and organization due to the de- 
 velopment of machinery and the factory system. At 
 first sight these matters would seem remote from the 
 life of the intellect. Why should our general view of 
 the world be materially affected by new ways of spin- 
 ning and weaving and more efficient methods of 
 manufacturing boots and shoes ? Simply because it 
 suggests hitherto unsuspected possibilities of social re- 
 adjustment and the promotion of human happiness, — 
 two of the most engaging subjects of modern specu- 
 lation. As Robert Owen pointed out, our increased 
 capacity of production through machinery is equiva- 
 lent to vastly increasing the number of workers in the 
 world without any increase of the number of persons 
 to be cared for. If, in a manufacturing town of 
 twenty thousand inhabitants, modern machinery 
 permits an output which formerly would have re- 
 quired two hundred thousand workers, each individual 
 will have, on the average, nine helpers in providing 
 the necessities and material amenities of life. 
 Hitherto the Industrial Revolution has, from the 
 standpoint of the common man, been distinctly 
 disappointing in its results. For a variety of reasons, 
 which it is impossible to enumerate here, the work 
 done by his helpers appears to profit him very little. 
 Nevertheless, the intellect has perhaps never had a 
 more exhilarating problem set before it than the pos- 
 
126 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 sibilities of readjustment implied in the economic 
 revolution. 
 
 We owe, moreover, to the Industrial Revolution the 
 development of our cities, and city life has always been 
 closely associated with intellectual changes, so that we 
 are justified in assuming that the vast extension of 
 our urban interests must ultimately deeply affect our 
 speculations. Associated with these same economic 
 changes is the development of world-commerce and of 
 incredibly efficient means of communication, which 
 have brought mankind together throughout the whole 
 earth in a spirit of competition, emulation, and co- 
 operation. It will not be many years before every one 
 on the face of the globe can read and write and be in 
 a position through our means of intercommunication 
 to follow the course of events in every portion of the 
 earth. This astonishing condition of affairs suggests 
 boundless possibiHties of human brotherhood. A few 
 years ago, at an International Postal Congress, as I 
 recollect, a proposition was made that the charge for a 
 letter between almost any two points on the surface of 
 the globe be reduced to two cents. This was advocated 
 by Egypt, the United States, and New Zealand. This 
 proposition and those who supported it, representing 
 at once the land of the oldest civilization and, on the 
 opposite side of the globe, that of the newest, ought 
 sufficiently to free us from the idea that our specu- 
 lation can be limited to the bounds which circum- 
 scribed that of the Greeks. 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 127 
 
 (5) Reenforcing all these tendencies is the modern 
 evolutionary view. The discovery, known as evolu- 
 tion, that all things come about gradually and that 
 one thing grows out of another, has perhaps done 
 more than any other new element in our thought to dis- 
 credit the ways of thinking that prevailed in ancient 
 Greece and among the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages. 
 As Professor John Dewey has pointed out, the very 
 words *' Origin of Species " chosen by Darwin as the 
 title of his book, embody a general intellectual revolt 
 against the earlier assumptions, and a new intellectual 
 temper, the full significance of which has hitherto 
 scarcely been realized. The Greek thinkers were not 
 wholly oblivious to the development of the world, but 
 they knew little or nothing about the history of the 
 globe or of mankind, and in general beheved in fixed 
 kinds of things, — in distinct and immutable species, — 
 and this beHef received the religious sanction of Chris- 
 tian tliinkers. It carried with it as a natural corollary 
 *'the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and 
 final," and regarded ''change and origin as signs of 
 defect and unreality." ''In laying hands upon the 
 sacred ark of absolute permanency," Professor Dewey 
 continues, "in treating the forms that had been re- 
 garded as types of fixity and perfection as originating 
 and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a 
 mode of thinking that in the end was bound to trans- 
 form the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment 
 of morals, politics, and religion." Platonic ideas, 
 
128 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 Aristotelian essences, the Christian dogma of special 
 creation, and "eternal verities" in general are in- 
 volved in the debacle. ^ ' The human mind, deliberately 
 as it were, exhausted the logic of the changeless, the 
 final, and the transcendent, before it essayed adven- 
 ture on the pathless wastes of generation and trans- 
 formation." But now that it has engaged in this 
 novel adventure its interest inevitably shifts ''from 
 the wholesale essence back of special changes to the 
 question of how special changes serve and defeat con- 
 crete purposes ; shifts from an intelligence that shaped 
 things once for all to the particular intelligences which 
 things are even now shaping ; shifts from an ultimate 
 goal of good to the direct increments of justice and 
 happiness that inteUigent administration of existent 
 conditions may beget and that present carelessness 
 or stupidity will destroy or forego." ^ 
 
 This evolutionary way of thinking is the inevitable 
 result of the highly dynamic age in which we live. 
 Even if it had not been shown by paleontologists, 
 botanists, and zoologists that the now existing species 
 of plants and animals had developed from preexisting 
 species, the older philosophic concepts of the Greeks 
 and Schoolmen must have ultimately given way before 
 the general advance of scientific knowledge and the 
 Industrial Revolution. The botanists and zoologists 
 and the prehistoric archaeologists have furnished us 
 
 * Dewey, John, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other 
 Essays in Contemporaneous Thought, 1910, pp. 1-19. 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 
 
 129 
 
 with an astonishing and satisfying historical example 
 of an evolutionary process, but even without this, the 
 older philosophy based on fixed species and essences, 
 and relying upon Aristotelian logic as an efficient 
 method of attaining truth, was doomed. The dis- 
 covery of organic evolution was the culmination, not 
 the beginning, of a philosophical revolution. 
 
 In view of what has been said, is it not clear that 
 modern thought far transcends that of the Greeks in 
 the accumulation and precision of the data on which 
 it is founded, in the critical and historical methods of 
 treating and interpreting this data, in the rejection of 
 unsound philosophical assumptions and futile antith- 
 eses which have proved a serious obstacle in the path of 
 enlightenment, and, lastly, in the ingenious appHcation 
 of knowledge to human needs? It is true that the 
 Alexandrian Greeks received from Aristarchus the sug- 
 gestion that the earth revolved on its axis and about 
 the sun, from Archimedes and Hero illustrations of 
 important mechanisms, and they knew of the Epicu- 
 rean theory (later eloquently reproduced by Lucretius) 
 of man's slow development, hut they were incapable of 
 appreciating the importance of any of these suggestions. 
 As Professor Dewey says, they seemed pledged to ex- 
 haust the logic of the changeless, the final, and the 
 transcendent, and consequently their game was bound 
 to be played out sooner or later. But it seems as if 
 our game can scarcely be played to an end. There is 
 no reason to think that we are making more than the 
 
130 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 earliest discoveries and the crudest applications of 
 knowledge as yet. The possibiHties of fruitful research 
 seem unHmited and the influence of new knowledge 
 incalculable. 
 
 We have learned to think about a far wider range of 
 things than any generation which has preceded us; 
 we have learned to recognize that truth is not merely 
 relative, as was clearly enough perceived by an im- 
 portant school of Greek thought, but that this relativ- 
 ity is conditioned by our constant increase in knowl- 
 edge. Cicero declared that there was no possible view 
 that had not been held by some philosopher, and that 
 it was the part of the wise man to accept the opinion 
 that appeared to him at the moment the most plau- 
 sible. While there is much in Cicero's skepticism to 
 admire, we should now state our phght in quite differ- 
 ent terms. Our more carefully considered opinions 
 are based ultimately upon observed facts about man 
 and his environment. With our ever increasing 
 knowledge in regard to these facts, our opinions must 
 necessarily change. To what may be called the innate 
 relativity of things, perceived by the Greeks, we have 
 added a dynamic relativity which is the result of rap- 
 idly advancing scientific knowledge, which necessarily 
 renders all our conclusions provisional. 
 
 In the career of conscious social readjustment upon 
 which mankind is now embarked, it would seem as if 
 the history of thought should play a very important 
 part, for social changes must be accompanied by emo- 
 
REFLECTIONS ON INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 
 
 131 
 
 tional readjustments and determined by intellectual 
 guidance. The history of thought is one of the most/ 
 potent means of dissolving the bonds of prejudice and 
 the restraints of routine. It not only enables us to j 
 reach a clear perception of our duties and responsi- ( f 
 bihties by explaining the manner in which existing 
 problems have arisen, but it promotes that intellectual 
 liberty upon which progress fundamentally depends. 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 
 
 Should a student of the past be asked what he re- 
 garded as the most original and far-reaching discovery 
 of modern times, he might reply with some assurance 
 that it is our growing realization of the fundamental 
 importance and absorbing interest of common men 
 and common things. Our democracy, with all its 
 hopes and aspirations, is based on an appreciation of 
 common men ; our science, with all its achievements 
 and prospects, is based on the appreciation of common 
 things. It is impossible to pause here to show how 
 very true this is, nor is it needful to do so, for we all 
 seem to recognize its truth by our presence here to-day 
 to consider the particular problem before us.^ We 
 have come together with a view of adjusting our edu- 
 cation to this great discovery. It is our present busi- 
 ness to see what can be done for that very large class 
 of boys and girls who must take up the burden of life 
 prematurely and who must look forward to earning 
 
 * Read before the superintendents of schools of the larger cities at 
 the meeting of the National Educational Association at Indianapolis, 
 March 2, 1910. The general subject under consideration at this 
 meeting was Industrial Education. 
 
 132 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 133 
 
 their livelihood by the work of their hands. But edu- 
 cation has not been wont until recently to reckon 
 seriously with the common man who must do common 
 things. It has presupposed leisure and freedom from 
 the pressing cares of life. 
 
 This conception can be traced back to the Greeks, 
 who estabhshed the tradition that education should 
 be ''liberal " and based on ''liberal arts," by which they 
 meant those studies and that training which they be- 
 Heved appropriate for a freeman who was supported 
 by slaves and who had before him a Hfe of leisure. 
 When a particular study suggested in any way prac- 
 tical usefulness, it lost forthwith its "liberal " character, 
 for it could only be advantageous to a slave. It has 
 proved very difficult to get away from this long-cher- 
 ished conception of education, for we do not realize 
 vividly enough the changes which have taken place since 
 Aristotle painted his portrait of the "high-minded" 
 man. The Greeks had neither democracy in our sense 
 of the term, nor natural science as we understand it, 
 with its multiform applications to Hfe. Slavery has 
 disappeared, and the ancient occupations of the slave 
 have undergone such a revolution, have been so di- 
 versified and shown such possibihties of improvement 
 with the advance of scientific discovery, that modern 
 industry bears Httle resemblance to the simple handi- 
 crafts of earher times. Industry has become exceed- 
 ingly interesting and worthy. We have no right to 
 exclude it from our education as the Greeks did. We 
 
134 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 have no excuse for continuing to harbor their prejudice 
 against the practical, and must not permit ourselves 
 to be dominated any longer by their notion of ''hb- 
 eral" as something which must be kept carefully apart 
 from the ^^ useful.'' It is high time that we set to work 
 boldly and without any timid reservations to bring 
 our education into the closest possible relation with the 
 actual life and future duties of the great majority of 
 those who fill our public schools. 
 
 With this conviction firmly implanted in my mind, I 
 propose to point out the role that history may be 
 made to play in the education of boys and girls 
 who are being taught to manage machinery and carry 
 on other industrial operations with the immediate 
 end of supporting themselves. When I first began 
 teaching history, I must admit that I did not see its 
 uses very clearly. This was due largely to the fact 
 that I had a very inadequate notion of what the past 
 of mankind really means for us. I have gradually 
 come to realize how completely we are dependent on 
 the past for our knowledge and our ideals; how it 
 alone can explain why we are what we are, and why we 
 do as we do. History is what we know of the past. 
 We may question it as we question our memory of our 
 own personal acts and experiences. But those things 
 that we recall in our own past vary continually with 
 our moods and preoccupations. We adjust our recol- 
 lection to our needs and aspirations, and ask from 
 it light on the particular problems that face us. 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 137 
 
 subjects of discussion. This is a venerable tradition 
 established by the Greek and Roman historians, 
 Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus. Political his- 
 tory is the easiest kind of history to write ; it lends 
 itself to accurate chronological arrangement, just be- 
 cause it deals mainly with events rather than with 
 conditions. It must, moreover, have seemed more 
 important to readers when kings and courts were far 
 more conspicuous than they now are, and when fight- 
 ing was regarded as the one unmistakably genteel 
 pursuit of the leisure classes. Some writers justified 
 it on the ground that this kind of history served as a 
 guide to generals and statesmen who, by studying the 
 past, might learn better to conduct an army to victory 
 or guide the ship of state in the dangerous waters of 
 civil commotion or foreign aggression. 
 
 It is clear that our interests are changing, and conse- 
 quently the kind of questions that we ask the past to 
 answer. Our most recent manuals venture to leave 
 out some of the traditional facts least appropriate for 
 an elementary review of the past and endeavor to 
 bring their narrative into relation, here and there, 
 with modern needs and demands. But I think that 
 this process of eliminating the old and substituting 
 the new might be carried much farther ; that our best 
 manuals are still crowded with facts that are not worth 
 while bringing to the attention of our boys and girls 
 and that they still omit in large measure those things 
 that are best worth telhng. 
 
138 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 In order to make the situation quite clear, let us 
 imagine that some broad-minded and sympathetic 
 spirit, deeply impressed with the tasks that face us 
 to-day, — like Maeterlinck himself, for instance, — 
 had managed to learn a great deal about the past of 
 mankind without ever looking into a standard history 
 or an historical manual great or small ; that he had 
 been guided miraculously to the real sources of his- 
 torical knowledge and had familiarized himself with 
 all the vestiges of the past thought and activities of 
 mankind, not only the written records, but the re- 
 mains of buildings, pictures, clothing, tools, and orna- 
 ments. Let us suppose, then, that he undertook to 
 prepare a book for children, in which he proposed to 
 tell them what he believed would be most interesting 
 to them, and most illuminating, as they grew up and 
 began to play their respective parts in social Hfe. 
 Would he dream of including the battle of ^gospotami, 
 the Samnite wars, the siege of Numantia by the Ro- 
 mans, the crimes of Nero, the Italian campaigns of 
 Frederick Barbarossa, the six wives of Henry VIII, or 
 the battles of the Thirty Years' War ? It is toler- 
 ably safe to say that none of these things, which our 
 manuals always include, would even occur to him as he 
 thought over all that man had done and thought and 
 suffered and dreamed through thousands of years. 
 
 Our writer, not being especially interested in battles 
 and sieges or the conduct of kings, and having no idea 
 of teaching his readers how to be good generals and 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 
 
 139 
 
 statesmen, would in all probability select some other 
 : thread for his narrative than the old political one. He 
 might decide that what men knew of the world, or 
 what they believed to be their duty, or what they made 
 with their hands, or the nature and style of their build- 
 ings, whether private or public, were far more sug- 
 gestive to us than their rulers at particular times or 
 the wars that they waged. So in considering the place 
 to be assigned to history in industrial education, I have 
 no intention, as I have already said, of advocating 
 what has hitherto commonly passed for an outline of 
 history. On the contrary, I suggest that we take up 
 the whole problem afresh, freed for the moment from 
 i our impressions of *' history" vulgarly so-called, 
 i Let us begm by asking ourselves what, considering 
 •. the needs, capacity, interests, and future career of the 
 boys and girls in industrial schools, is it most necessary 
 for them to know of the past in order to be as intelli- 
 ! gent, efficient, and happy as possible in the life they 
 ! must lead and the work they must do ? In order to 
 I answer this question intelligently, we must first de- 
 ' ^ermine the position in which the pupils are placed, 
 and the nature of the demands which their special kind 
 of education imposes. Secondly, I propose to give 
 some illustrations of those things in the social memory 
 of mankind which are most essential for them to know 
 and recall from time to time, and which I venture to 
 think will prove more enlightening than any other 
 } information that can be given them. 
 
140 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 II 
 
 Industrial education is, of course, a form of technical 
 education. Its most obvious immediate aim is to 
 prepare boys and girls, thirteen to sixteen years old, 
 to become skillful operatives as promptly as may be. 
 With this technical training we are not here con- 
 cerned. But industrial training may aspire to do 
 much more than turn out efficient artisans who will 
 satisfy their employers, and who will command 
 higher wages and be eligible to a more rapid promo- 
 tion than the untrained — fundamental as all this is. 
 The industrial class is a very large one indeed, and it 
 is obviously of the greatest moment to society that 
 this class should be recruited from those who have 
 been taught to see the significance of their humble 
 part in carrying on the world's work, to appreciate the 
 possibilities of their position, and to view it in as hope- 
 ful a light as circumstances will permit. 
 
 Now it must be admitted that the circumstances 
 in which a boy or girl begins and continues work in a 
 modern factory are far from cheerful. They are usu- 
 ally very depressing, physically and mentally. A mo- 
 notonous repetition of a series of motions continued 
 hour after hour and day after day and year after year, 
 in dingy and noisy surroundings, would seem on the 
 surface to be all that there is of it. As Wyckoff has 
 so truly said, the workmen carry on each his particular 
 process without in the least knowing what it really 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 141 
 
 means; consequently, they can have ''no personal 
 pride in its progress, and no community of interest 
 with their employer. There is none of the joy of 
 responsibility, none of the sense of achievement, only 
 the dull monotony of grinding toil, with the longing 
 for the signal to quit work, and for their wages at the 
 end." If this be true, how can the workers be ex- 
 pected to have the least appreciation of the social and 
 industrial value of their labor? How can they be 
 expected to take an intelligent view of their responsi- 
 biHties, or conceive rational plans for bettering their 
 condition ? This is the general situation which those 
 who organize industrial schools must face, fairly and 
 squarely. 
 
 In their endeavors to offset the existing e\als, I am 
 convinced that they will be forced to summon history 
 to their aid — not the history now to be found in our 
 textbooks, but those phases of past human experience 
 and achievement which serve to explain our indus- 
 trial life and make its import clear. History alone can 
 explain the existence of the machine which the opera- 
 tive must tend. It is the very last hnk in a chain of 
 marvelous discoveries reaching back hundreds 01 
 thousands of years to the bits of flint which were among 
 man's earhest implements and which may have started 
 him on his long career of mechanical invention and 
 social development. The operative will learn from 
 history how the present division of labor, of which he 
 seems to be the helpless victim, has come about ; he 
 
142 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 will perceive its vast social significance and will com- 
 prehend the rather hard terms on which things get 
 made rapidly, cheaply, and in great quantities. An 
 understanding of this may suggest ways in which as 
 he grows older, he can become influential in bettering 
 the lot of himself and his fellows without seriously 
 diminishing the output, and conciliate economic effi- 
 ciency with the welfare of the workmen, — which is, 
 after all, as important a problem as exists in industrial 
 life. 
 
 For example, it seems to an outsider as stupid as it 
 is disastrous that, with the simplification of processes 
 through the division of labor, there has not been a 
 countervailing tendency to enable the workman to 
 carry on in succession a series of contributions to the 
 completed product. The grinding monotony might 
 be relieved, from time to time, by a reasonable alter- 
 nation of duties so as to bring into play a new set of 
 muscles and of mental adjustments. There are, 
 assuredly, a considerable number of disadvantages in 
 prevailing practices which a more intelHgent, sym- 
 pathetic, and alert set of workmen could cooperate in 
 aboHshing or alleviating without serious economic 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Besides giving the artisan an idea of social progress 
 and its possibihties, history will furnish him a back- 
 ground of incidental information which he can utilize 
 in his daily surroundings, and which will arouse and 
 foster his imagination by carrying him, in thought, 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 143 
 
 far beyond the narrow confines of his factory. It is 
 impossible to do more than enumerate a few of the 
 most conspicuous and impressive facts in man's devel- 
 opment, which would arouse the attention of the boys 
 and girls, and might, as the years went on, give them 
 an outlook on Hfe that they would get in no other 
 way. We might begin with the well-known fact that 
 man is by no means the only artisan in our world. 
 Without his tools, he would be unable to compete with 
 the spider, the bee, or the wasp. Certain birds con- 
 struct very elaborate dweUings for themselves and 
 their families, but man's ancestors, to judge from his 
 nearest relatives which exist to-day, could do no more 
 than make a rude platform of boughs. When our dis- 
 tant forebears began to walk firmly on their hind legs 
 and thus found their hands free, then it was that their 
 good, big brains began to undergo those changes that 
 make them so superior to those of the highest apes. 
 In this long process we may assume that two factors 
 have been specially potent in developing the peculiarly 
 human heritage of culture, as distinguished from the 
 instinctive and often marvelous skill of other animals : 
 these are language and the invention of tools. 
 
 In the beginning, man was a far more clumsy and 
 inefficient artisan than the wasp ; but he had the great 
 advantage, if he happened to be particularly clever, 
 of being able, not only to do something from time to 
 time that his ancestors had never done, but to trans- 
 mit this improvement to succeeding generations. How 
 
144 '^^^^ N^W HISTORY 
 
 the wasp developed its skill we do not know ; but, as 
 it now is, so it remains — it neither increases nor de- 
 clines, as does human culture, for the simple reason 
 that it does not have to be taught to each generation 
 by the last. Could we imagine a child to-day grow- 
 ing up absolutely untaught and unaffected by the 
 example of those around him, he would, in all probabil- 
 ity, be little superior in point of civilization to a ba- 
 boon. In short, our achievements are not innate, — 
 we owe practically all of them to past generations. 
 The accumulation of culture and its transmission by 
 education in the widest sense of the word is the 
 chief distinction and duty of our species. A great 
 part of our development, and a great part of the 
 heritage that has been transmitted to us from age 
 to age, is associated with our implements. By his 
 tools man can be traced back through hundreds of 
 thousands of years. Indeed, only the stones and bits 
 of flint that he modified to his uses survive from the 
 very remote periods. The French anthropologists 
 have established a succession of eras in the history 
 of the old stone men, based on the variety and finish 
 of their implements. The history of man, then, 
 begins with his industries; and I am not sure that 
 his industries, in a broad sense of the term, have not 
 always constituted as good a single test of his general 
 civihzation and as satisfactory a clue to its vicissi- 
 tudes as can be found. 
 After the last advance of the ice sheet in Europe, 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 145 
 
 and perhaps not more than seven to ten thousand years 
 ago, the so-called '^ neolithic '^ phase of civilization 
 clearly emerges, with its ground stone implements, 
 its pottery, agriculture, and domestic animals. This 
 stage, before the gradual introduction of metals, 
 seems to have prevailed very generally in both the old 
 world and the new. It Hes back of the civilization 
 of Egypt and Babylonia; it was the condition in 
 which the Europeans found the peoples of America, 
 four centuries ago ; and it may still be studied in 
 various parts of the earth where it continues to exist. 
 There should be no difficulty in explaining vividly 
 to a child this intermediate grade of civilization, — so 
 compHcated from the standpoint of the chimpanzee, 
 so simple from the standpoint of that of Greece or 
 Rome. 
 
 The recent discoveries in Egypt indicate that some 
 four thousand years before Christ a marked advance 
 beyond the neolithic age had already taken place 
 there. A rapid and graceful system of writing had 
 been developed, copper was beginning to be used for 
 vessels, and, when properly hardened, it became avail- 
 able for tools. The ancient Egyptian seems to have 
 been an ever industrious and practical person, to 
 whom business made a strong appeal. The book- 
 keeper is a conspicuous figure in the paintings which 
 have come down to us. The Egyptian's art was 
 closely associated with his pecuKar environment and 
 his industries. As Breasted has well said: "The 
 
146 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 lotus blossomed on the handle of his spoon, and his 
 wine sparkled in the deep blue calix of the same 
 flower ; the muscular Hmb of the ox in carved ivory 
 upheld the couch on which he slept ; the ceiHng over- 
 head was a starry heaven resting on palm trunk 
 columns, each crowned with its graceful tuft of droop- 
 ing foliage." 
 
 The range of Greek manufactures might also easily 
 be brought into instructive relation with both their 
 art and their conceptions of Hfe, in such a way as to 
 give a far more adequate notion of this extraordinary 
 people than one is likely to derive from the textbooks 
 that tell of their political assemblies and constant 
 wars. We still have many examples of their lovely 
 vases and cups and platters, their bracelets, earrings, 
 and mirrors. We can form an excellent idea of their 
 furniture as well as of their temples and theaters. 
 
 While the Greeks prized beautiful things as no other 
 people before them, so far as we know, manual labor 
 was viewed with contempt by the leisure class. This 
 could not be otherwise at a time when almost all in- 
 dustrial operations were carried on by slaves, a class 
 constantly recruited by captives, and sufficiently 
 large to manufacture all the necessary commodities. 
 Aristotle, in a famous chapter of his Politics, de- 
 clares slavery to be in accordance with nature, since 
 there is always a considerable class of persons fit 
 for nothing else; although he admits that many 
 become slaves through ill fortune who ought properly 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 147 
 
 to be free, and that many others are free who have 
 all the natural traits of slaves. The higher branches 
 of science did not aim at usefulness, and owed their 
 dignity to that fact. They could only be carried on 
 by those who did not use their hands and who de- 
 voted themselves to a leisurely, contemplative life. 
 Seneca repudiates with warmth the idea that the 
 practical arts were invented by men of exceptional 
 genius. He declares that, on the contrary, they are 
 vulgar devices of the lowest of humanity, and should 
 be left to slaves. Moreover, Aristotle, in his Meta- 
 physics, speaks as if all possible practical inventions 
 had long ago been made. So the philosophers and 
 the institution of slavery combined in ancient Greece 
 to discredit industry. Thus it came about that the 
 use of one's hands and head in the making of useful 
 articles was condemned as degrading; and the more 
 completely one could free himself from such useful 
 employment, the more prospect he had of rising to 
 the full dignity of a man and a philosopher. 
 
 The Romans took over the Greek industries that 
 suited their purposes, and these were transmitted to 
 medieval Europe, with such modifications as change 
 of taste and alterations in the general habits of Hfe 
 called for. The growth of the towns in the twelfth 
 century was accompanied by interesting developments 
 of craft guilds, and the master workmen in the various 
 trades began to play a far more important and digni- 
 fied r61e in pubHc affairs than ever before. More- 
 
148 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 over, the common artisan ceased to be a slave, or 
 even a serf, so that one of the gravest disadvantages 
 attaching to manual labor in Greece and Rome dis- 
 appeared in western Europe five or six centuries ago. 
 The beginning of this rehabilitation of industry is, 
 perhaps, reflected in the prevalence of surnames 
 derived from homely occupations. The time came 
 when no one was ashamed to be called Taylor, Turner, 
 Weaver, Smith, Fuller, Cooper, Brewster, Hooper, 
 Chandler, Fletcher, Potter, Horner, or Currier. 
 
 From the thirteenth century on, there began to be 
 premonitions that industry might sometime be revolu- 
 tionized by new discoveries. A method of melting 
 iron was discovered, for instance, so that it could be 
 cast, instead of forged, after merely softening, as pre- 
 viously. The alchemist, in his search for an elixir 
 which would turn copper into gold, and lead into 
 silver, and prolong life indefinitely, came upon hitherto 
 unsuspected properties in the substances he experi- 
 mented with, and so laid the foundations for what 
 was to become apphed chemistry. Yet no very strik- 
 ing changes in industry occurred before the eighteenth 
 century. In the days of Louis XIV, when inventors 
 were already becoming rather common, the people 
 of western Europe still continued to spin and weave 
 with very simple devices. Merchandise was still 
 carried about on slow carts, and letters were as long 
 in getting from London to Rome as in the time of 
 Constantino. 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON T^IAN 149 
 
 But two great truths were gradually dawning on 
 the more thoughtful. One was the importance of the 
 seemingly homely, common, and inconspicuous things 
 about them ; the other was the possibility of making 
 use of our knowledge of common things to promote 
 the general welfare. Neither the ancient nor the 
 medieval thinkers had paid much attention to the 
 material world. They withdrew themselves from 
 nature, and, as Lord Bacon said, they ^'tumbled up 
 and down in their own reason and conceits," and 
 sought the truth in their own Httle heads and not in 
 the great common world about them. When men of 
 first-rate ability turned from a consideration of the 
 good, the true, and the beautiful, and of the precise 
 relation of the three members of the Trinity to one 
 another, and began to wonder what makes milk sour 
 quicker in hot weather than in cool, and why an 
 object seen through a glass bottle is magnified, they 
 had already made the transitions from the old to the 
 new attitude of mind. 
 
 Patient observation, experimentation, and calcula- 
 tion, in the spirit of modern research, did not begin 
 to be carried on in Europe, on a large scale, before 
 the opening of the seventeenth century; and since 
 that time the progress in accumulating knowledge 
 and applying it to the relief of man's estate has been 
 absolutely without precedent in the history of the 
 globe. The story of modern invention and of its 
 revolutionary effects on our Hfe and our ideals of 
 
ISO 
 
 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 progress cannot be even sketched out here. But it 
 is infinitely more absorbing and vital than the record 
 of kings, conquests, and treaties, and of the delibera- 
 tions and decrees of public assemblies, which have so 
 long been regarded as constituting orthodox history. 
 Moreover, what child could fail to follow eagerly, 
 if the matter were but clearly put to him, the marvel- 
 'Ous doings of the steam engine, which has shown itself 
 •/far more potent to alter man's ways than all the edicts 
 of all the kings and parliaments that have ever 
 existed. In 1704, an Englishman, Newcomen, devised 
 an awkward form of steam engine, which would work 
 a pump — a lumbering, slow, inefficient, unpromising 
 contrivance, which was destined, nevertheless, to 
 grow into the most rapidly revolutionizing force in 
 the history of the world. The pump enabled the 
 miners to keep under control the water that would 
 otherwise have impeded them in extracting both coal 
 and iron. By the use of the iron, new machines 
 could be made, and with the coal, they could be run. 
 So, with iron and coal and steam both old and new 
 kinds of products could be turned out in unprece- 
 dented quantities; and with iron, coal, and steam 
 they could be dispatched to all parts of the earth. 
 Factories equipped with the new machinery grew up, 
 and cities centered around the factories. So it has 
 come about that the tool has again come into its own 
 as the agent and symbol of man's progress, and that 
 the past one hundred and fifty years have seen vastly 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 151 
 
 greater changes than the whole five thousand years 
 that elapsed between the reign of King Menes I of 
 Egypt and that of George III of England. Just as 
 the use of a stick and a piece of flint began the in- 
 tellectual development which slowly raised man above 
 the ape in his habits of life, so a new method of 
 operating his tools — the steam engine — ushered in 
 an expansion of his activities, interests, and social 
 and moral problems, the end of which is not yet. 
 
 As we are all keenly and sadly aware, the Industrial 
 Revolution, while greatly adding to our comforts and 
 to the range of our experiences by bringing the whole 
 world together and rendering it in a certain sense 
 accessible to all of us through easy and rapid inter- 
 communication, has left the mass of workers whose 
 lives are passed in factories in almost a worse plight 
 than that of the Greek and Roman slaves. It was 
 evidently too much to expect of our western world 
 that it should effect such an absolutely unprecedented 
 metamorphosis of the material conditions of life, and 
 at the same time guard against all the evils to which 
 the tremendous changes involved might give rise. 
 Long hours of monotonous mechanical work in tend- 
 ing a tireless machine or in repeating some minute 
 operation in the highly efficient but often inhuman 
 division of labor on which our modern industrial sys- 
 tem rests, together with insufficient and precarious 
 wages and demoralizing concomitant conditions, form 
 at present the debit side of the balance sheet. 
 
152 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 As an offset, promising speedy betterment, we have 
 a growing sense of social justice, a higher appreciation 
 of economic and social expediency, and an enthusiasm 
 for democratic education. The unthinking charity 
 of the Middle Ages has become the organized social 
 work of to-day, which is begotten and fostered by a 
 union of human sympathy and exacting scientific 
 research. If the machine has produced a new form 
 of slavery, it has also produced its antidote. It 
 holds out the possibiKty of abolishing poverty alto- 
 gether, in the sense of suffering from hunger, cold, 
 and nakedness. For there is now energy enough at 
 man's disposal, in steam and electricity, to* supply 
 him with the necessities of life in such abundance that, 
 if properly distributed, no one need be in physical 
 want. What is still more fundamental, with the 
 Industrial Revolution has come a respect, not to 
 say veneration, for labor, which Aristotle would hardly 
 have comprehended. Instead of dreaming of a per- 
 fect existence, free from all participation in the task 
 of supplying our material needs, Tolstoi and many 
 others see the ideal life in a happy combination of 
 useful manual labor and leisure. The effect on body, 
 mind, and temper of productive manual work, carried 
 on intelligently, under suitable conditions, and for 
 periods adjusted to the strength of the worker and 
 to his other duties in life, would unquestionably be 
 most salutary. And while we have not yet arrived 
 at this happy adjustment, except in rare cases, we 
 
HISTORY FOR THE COMMON MAN 153 
 
 at least no longer scorn manual labor as such, nor 
 do we deem it inherently degrading. 
 
 Let us return now to the question of the relation 
 of all this to industrial education, which is in itself 
 but the latest product of the long historic process 
 which we have been tracing. To me it seems obvious 
 that just the sort of facts that we have been reviewing 
 are precisely those which we should be particularly 
 anxious that the boys and girls in the industrial 
 school should be aware of and should lay to heart, in 
 order to gain that attitude of mind which not only 
 would make them the best kind of artisans, but 
 would give them an intelligent appreciation of their 
 work and enable them to cooperate in the process 
 of eliminating the evils from which they suffer. And 
 how can these facts be so easily, so permanently, 
 and so naturally impressed on the pupil's mind as by 
 the kind of historical study which has been outlined 
 in this brief summary of the long story of manual 
 labor? Such study will not only meet the special 
 needs of those whose education we are discussing, 
 but it will furnish at the same time the best, perhaps 
 the only, means of cultivating that breadth of view, 
 moral and intellectual perspective, and enthusiasm 
 for progress which must always come with a percep- 
 tion of the relation of the present to the past. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 
 
 A HISTORICAL writer is always puzzled as to where 
 to begin and end his story. For his own conven- 
 ience and that of the reader he is accustomed to di- 
 vide the past into epochs or periods. Having selected 
 a terminus a quo and a terminus ad quern, as the Scho- 
 lastics were wont to say, he proceeds to justify his 
 boundaries as best he may. He knows well enough, 
 particularly if he be a modern historian, that his 
 divisions are highly artificial; he generally confesses 
 this, but then does the best he can to obscure the fact 
 in his endeavors to defend the divisions he adopts. 
 This, indeed, is the regular procedure of the histo- 
 rian, who has to reconcile the inexorable continuity of 
 man's experiences with the demands of clear literary 
 presentation, and, unhappily, he is usually all too skill- 
 ful in concealing the violence he does to historic truth. 
 The older historians may be forgiven on the ground 
 that our conception of the continuity of history is 
 essentially a modern one — a product of the nine- 
 teenth century. Formerly it was believed that heroic 
 men, decisive conflicts, or the intervention of God him- 
 self broke here and there somewhat sharply the trend 
 
 154 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" l^^ 
 
 I of human affairs. This view could be maintained 
 only so long as merely the conspicuous events of the 
 past attracted the attention of the historian. So 
 soon, however, as he began to concern himself with a 
 wide range of human interests, with the relatively 
 permanent rather than with the episodic and tran- 
 sient, he perceived that general changes are necessarily 
 slow — very slow. 
 
 This, as has been pointed out in a former essay, is 
 due to two circumstances. The first is the intricacy of 
 all the higher civilizations. If we consider the whole 
 range of man's interests in the fifth or the tenth 
 or the eighteenth century, we see that no single man 
 or battle or treaty could possibly alter at once the 
 prevailing religious, intellectual, artistic, scientific, 
 Hnguistic, industrial, mercantile, legal, miHtary, and 
 pohtical ideas and habits. A battle or treaty may 
 change a people's ruler, a great pestilence may affect 
 their economic situation, but there is no instance of 
 any single circumstance producing an abrupt change 
 in more than a small portion of human habits, cus- 
 toms, and institutions. 
 
 The second fundamental element in the continuity 
 of history is inertia and lack of imagination. These 
 two mental characteristics explain why even where 
 there has been an abrupt change in a single field of 
 interest a great part of the old has still been carried 
 over into the new. A well-known example of this is 
 ,the perpetuation after the French Revolution of many 
 
J ^5 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 of those governmental peculiarities which were char- 
 acteristic of France in the eighteenth century. ^ i 
 
 In view of these facts we can but look with the 
 utmost suspicion on all the traditional '^ periods" 
 which are generally accepted in historical Hterature; 
 because they appealed to our predecessors there is 
 not the least reason for supposing that they can be 
 defended now. 
 
 Most of us were doubtless reared upon the idea that 
 after the Fall of Rome the Middle Ages set in, and 
 that then, after a long period of darkness, humanity 
 was awakened from its winter sleep by the recovery 
 of the long-lost writings of the Greeks and Romans. 
 This escape from the Middle Ages, which is known as 
 the Renaissance, prepared the way — such, at least, is 
 the popular view of Protestants — for a great spiritual 
 awakening which unmistakably ushered in modern 
 times. The next crisis to attract general attention is 
 the French Revolution. Our textbooks and our col- 
 lege courses still adjust themselves to this series of 
 
 epochs. 
 
 Of course, every serious-minded historical student 
 sees clearly the deficiencies of these divisions; he 
 knows very well the difhculties of establishing the 
 points at which the Middle Ages began and left off. 
 It is especially difficult to tell where to place the be- 
 ginning of modern times ; and as for the " Revolution,' 
 we still seem to be in the midst of that. Historians 
 do not, however, always perceive the positively mis- 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" I^y 
 
 chievous results of classifying our notions of the past 
 under these headings. The "periods" spoken of 
 above are not merely subject to criticism, they per- 
 petuate a wholly wrong perspective of the past. 
 
 It is becoming clear to the modem historical student 
 that in the whole history of western Europe there is 
 perhaps no sharper break than that which separates 
 the earlier from the later Middle Ages. In the 
 twelfth century there was an awakening of intellectual 
 interest which created the universities, the revival of 
 the Roman law, the codification of the canon law, 
 the systematizing of the patristic theology; then, 
 too, came the growth of urban hfe, the extension of 
 commerce, the blossoming of Gothic architecture, and 
 the development of Hteratures of great beauty in the 
 vernacular languages. 
 
 ^ By the opening of the thirteenth century the atten- 
 tion of mtellectual Europe was becoming centered on 
 the greatest of the ancient philosophers, and his works 
 were once more spread out before the eager eyes of 
 western students. The so-called Renaissance offers 
 nothing comparable to the achievements of the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries. It is true that in the four- 
 teenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian towns 
 developed an interesting civihzation and a marvelous 
 art different from that which went before. These 
 have perhaps blinded us to the relatively slight 
 contributions of the period to general change. To 
 one who is intent upon establishing the continuity of 
 
158 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 history the men of letters, the philosophers, and even 
 the artists of the Renaissance, exhibit an extraor- 
 dinary intellectual conservatism. They transcended 
 relatively few of the ancient superstitions, contributed 
 but Kttle to the knowledge of the world, and readily 
 yielded to the fascination of Neoplatonic mysticism, 
 as is illustrated by Ficino, Pico, and ReuchHn. 
 
 As has been said elsewhere,^ it was quite possible 
 to read the classics without becoming forthwith 
 Hellenic in one's attitude of mind. It may be safely 
 said that as one's acquaintance with the Middle Ages, 
 as well as his appreciation of our own time, increases, 
 the Renaissance seems to grow more and more 
 shadowy as a distinctive period ; and yet many writers 
 use the term as if the Renaissance were a bright 
 spirit, hovering over Europe, touching this writer and 
 that painter or architect, and passing by others who 
 were in consequence left in medieval darkness. 
 
 To those seeking to fix a date for the beginning of 
 modern times, three events have suggested them- 
 selves as plausible points of departure: the fall of 
 Constantinople into the hands of the Turks in 1453, 
 the discovery of America in 1492, and the posting 
 of Luther's theses in 151 7. But none of these events 
 appear to possess the importance commonly assigned 
 to them. The assumption that the fall of Constanti- 
 nople forced Greek scholars to earn an honest Hveli- 
 hood by inculcating the rudiments of their classical 
 1 See above, pp. 116 sqq. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 1 59 
 
 tongue among those western peoples who availed 
 themselves of their services, and that in this way the 
 knowledge of the ancient learning was once more re- 
 vived, with all its accompanying enHghtenment, will 
 of course not bear careful scrutiny. The revival of 
 Greek learning had been going on in Italy for fifty 
 years before the Turks took Constantinople. Aurispa 
 and Filelfo had brought over large quantities of Greek 
 manuscripts, and the Italian humanists were already 
 busy translating them. It is true that certain Greek 
 scholars settled in the West after the fall of Constanti- 
 nople, but there is no indication that the trend of 
 humanism was perceptibly affected by them ; so that 
 the importance of this event, from an intellectual and 
 literary standpoint, is probably negligible. 
 
 As for the discovery of America, it should be re- 
 membered that America was not discovered in the 
 proper sense of the word in 1492 ; for Columbus died 
 beHeving that he had merely reached India by a water 
 route. Even as late as 16 10 Henry Hudson had hopes 
 of reaching the Pacific by sailing up the Hudson. It 
 may seem to us now as if the discovery of a new hemi- 
 sphere must have produced a decisive widening of 
 outlook, but the significance of the discovery dawned 
 so slowly on the European mind that the effect was 
 scarcely perceptible for decades. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to consider the old assumption 
 that Luther's scholastic disputation in regard to the 
 meaning and implications of pcenitentia opened a new 
 
l6o THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 epoch in the world's history. It is true that within 
 fifteen or twenty years a certain number of northern 
 European states had seceded from the Holy Roman 
 Apostolic Church and had definitely rejected the head- 
 ship of the pope. While the posting of the theses was 
 not a wholly negligible factor in the situation, it cer- 
 tainly had no direct bearing on affairs in Switzerland, 
 England, or France. 
 
 II 
 
 Among the historical breaks that have been made 
 famiHar to us by our textbooks and standard histories 
 none is more impressive than the '' Fall of Rome." 
 Here, if anywhere, one might be excused for expecting 
 the opening of a new era. The German barbarians 
 overwhelm the Empire, and the long line of imperial 
 rulers beginning with Augustus is extinguished in 
 Italy in the fatal year 476. It has been assumed that 
 the dissolution of the Empire in the West was the 
 beginning of a series of vital changes in Europe, — q 
 yet this assumption, natural as it is, is to a great 
 extent a mistaken one. The invasions of the Ger- 
 mans doubtless produced in the long run important 
 results, but these came about very gradually. In 
 one sense there was really Httle novel in the early 
 Middle Ages. Much was lost, but little was found. 
 A great part of those things that we think of as char- 
 acteristically medieval, — monks and saints and mir- 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" l6l 
 
 acles ; allegory and symbolism ; the seven liberal 
 arts ; the Roman Catholic Church with its privileges 
 and its peculiar relations to the civil government, — 
 these were all well developed before Alaric took 
 Rome in 410. The ''Fall of Rome," therefore, is, at 
 best, a specious division which upon closer examina- 
 tion ceases to have those impressive and decisive 
 quahties which have so long been ascribed to it. 
 The elements of continuity are more striking than 
 the changes. The following somewhat careful re- 
 consideration of what was happening in the fifth 
 century will serve to illustrate the dangers we run 
 in taking the traditional historical divisions seriously. 
 
 The Roman Empire was still intact when Theo- 
 dosius the Great died in 395. It was governed by a 
 vast and elaborate bureaucracy of which we have an 
 impressive picture in the official list of offices, which 
 has come down to us, the so-called Notitia Dignitatum. 
 A century later the western portion of the Empire was 
 in a state of disintegration. We find kings of the 
 Franks, Alemanni, Burgundians, West Goths, East 
 Goths, and Vandals, each ruling over a more or less 
 well-defined portion of the ancient Roman Empire. 
 
 It is no longer possible to trace the process of dis- 
 solution in detail ; indeed, the changes were so compli- 
 cated, so varied, and so gradual that even if we were 
 as well informed about the fifth century as we are in 
 regard to the nineteenth, it would probably be impos- 
 sible to give a clear account of the revolution, simply 
 
l62 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 because it was inherently irregular and obscure. In 
 spite, however, of our ignorance respecting even the 
 most conspicuous and startling external and public 
 events, and in spite of the essential vagueness of the 
 situation, writers like Gibbon and Hodgkin have ven- 
 tured to give us very precise and plausible details 
 about many of the men and events. They, and other 
 writers, have also hazarded many explanations for the 
 so-called ''fall" of the Empire. A friend of mine 
 recently amused himself by making a collection of the 
 reasons assigned in our historical manuals for the dis- 
 aster, and found no less than fifty. And all of them are 
 mere guesses. Even those most commonly accepted, 
 such as the declining population of the Empire and the 
 strength and vigor of the Germans, have been alleged 
 by Fustel de Coulanges to be quite baseless. 
 
 The aims of this essay are, first, to review very 
 briefly the general character of the sources of informa- 
 tion for the fifth century (all of which, such as they are, 
 are readily available in our best American libraries) ; 
 then to illustrate in a general way the external process 
 of the disruption as it appears in the writers of the 
 time. I shall speak especially of the alleged division 
 of the Empire between the sons of Theodosius in 395, 
 of the events preceding the capture of Rome by Alaric 
 in 410, and lastly, of exactly what appears to have 
 taken place upon the supposed ''fall of the Western 
 Empire" in the year 476. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 163 
 
 III 
 
 First, then, as to the sources, by far the most 
 authentic are, of course, the laws and governmental 
 orders which are preserved in the Theodosian Code 
 and its supplements, the so-called NovellcE, and in the 
 Justinian Code. No inconsiderable part of these 
 edicts were issued in the fifth century, and they 
 help to illustrate the organization of the Empire 
 and the abuses which had developed in it ; they often 
 give the names of officials, and sometimes even 
 mention events. Unfortunately they are drafted in 
 a pompous, oratorical style, and only become intel- 
 ligible after some little study. 
 
 We have no competent contemporaneous writer for 
 the fifth century such as we have in that worthy re- 
 tired soldier, Ammianus Marcellinus, who fought 
 under the emperor JuHan, and whose admirable 
 history closes with the defeat of Valens at Adrianople 
 in 378. Over a century and a half elapsed after 
 Ammianus laid down his pen before Procopius, the 
 next capable writer whose histories have escaped de- 
 struction, set to work to describe the campaigns of 
 Justinian against the Goths, Vandals, and Persians. 
 That there were histories written during this in- 
 terval is clear enough, but only those which dealt 
 especially with the church have come down to us in 
 a complete form. After Ammianus deserts us we 
 have to depend for the next generation upon Zosimus. 
 
1 64 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 He was a government official (Count) in the eastern 
 part of the Empire and appears to have written in the 
 latter — possibly the earlier — half of the fifth century. 
 The closing portion of his work is lost, and the 
 narrative breaks off with the events immediately 
 preceding Alaric's capture of Rome. He was bitterly 
 opposed to the Christians and ascribes the mis- 
 fortunes of the time to the desertion of the old gods 
 who had so long protected the commonwealth. 
 
 Fragments of other, and possibly better, Greek his- 
 torians have been preserved, especially by Photius, a 
 scholarly prelate of Constantinople who lived in the 
 latter part of the ninth century. He employed the 
 leisure of a very troubled life in writing out brief 
 analyses of the books in his library. In this way, an 
 outline, at least, of some of the lost works has been 
 saved; for example, the history of Olympiodorus, who 
 treated the period immediately following the death of 
 Theodosius the Great, and upon whom Zosimus relied. 
 Another of the medieval excerpt-mongers, the erudite 
 emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (died 959), 
 ordered a vast collection to be made of all that was 
 deemed best worth preserving in the works of the older 
 historians. This material was classified in fifty-three 
 books. Of the little that is still extant of this extraor- 
 dinary undertaking, the two books containing accounts 
 of the chief embassies are important. For instance, 
 we owe to the emperor's enthusiasm for learning the 
 preservation of a fragment from perhaps the best of 
 
THE FALL OF ROME 
 
 I6S 
 
 the fifth-century historians, — the account which 
 Priscus gives of his visit to Attila, the king of the 
 Huns. We also owe to him an extract from Malchus, 
 a writer of the succeeding century, telling about the 
 embassy which Odovacar sent to Constantinople in 
 476. 
 
 Among the church historians there are several who 
 have been well known all through the Middle Ages 
 and down to the present day. The most popular 
 was Orosius, a young man who, under the inspiration 
 of Augustine, prepared a general history of the world, 
 with a view of discomfiting the heathen country peo- 
 ple, pagani. His object was, he tells us, to ransack the 
 annals of the past for horrors and disasters of every 
 kind, — wars, pestilence, famine, earthquakes, inun- 
 dations, and noteworthy crimes, — setting them forth 
 in an orderly fashion with a view to demonstrating 
 that the world had been no happier when the pagan 
 gods were revered than it had been since the introduc- 
 tion of Christianity. The last dozen pages of this 
 Seven Books of History against the Pagans relate to the 
 first eighteen years of the fifth century. He is recall- 
 ing events which he assumes are known to everybody, 
 and his only object is to show that those prospered 
 who feared the Lord, while those who clung to the old 
 gods met speedy destruction. It is evident, therefore, 
 that Orosius can easily be taken more seriously than 
 he in any way deserves. The most reckless and sensa- 
 tional sermon of a professional revivalist of the present 
 
1 66 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 day would be as reliable a source of objective truth 
 as he. 
 
 Covering the first third of the fifth century we have 
 the Greek ecclesiastical writers, Socrates, Sozomenus, 
 and Theodoret. All of these are specially interested 
 in heresies, monks, and miracles, and give far less in- 
 formation than might be hoped for in regard to the 
 trend of events. Indeed, very little can be had from 
 them respecting the political history of the time. 
 
 In the annalists we occasionally find brief accounts of 
 events, although the compilers of annals were chiefly 
 interested in giving a correct list of the successive 
 consuls, and often skip a number of years with- 
 out inserting a single occurrence. Some hints may, 
 however, be derived from Prosper, who lived in 
 the fifth century, and brought his annals down to 454 ; 
 from Count MarcelHnus, who probably wrote under 
 Justinian ; and from the vestiges of a supposed Ital- 
 ian chronicle, which have been carefully collected by 
 Mommsen. It would, however, be hard to exaggerate 
 the vagueness and scrappiness of this class of sources. 
 
 The lives of the saints occasionally refer to contem- 
 poraneous events, although not very commonly. 
 Some fight may be derived from the life of Bishop 
 Epiphanius of Pavia, written by his successor, Enno- 
 dius, about the year 505, in which there are allusions 
 to Ricimer, Orestes, Odovacar, and to the troubles of 
 the times. The scantiness of material leads the his- 
 torical student to make the most of every hint ; even 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 167 
 
 the poets have to be utilized, especially the panegyrists. 
 At the opening of the century there was Claudian, 
 an ardent admirer of Stilicho, who sung his praises 
 in very good hexameters. Claudian was, however, 
 not only a warm partisan, but any anxiety that he 
 may have had to tell the truth must have been dis- 
 couraged by the exigencies of an exacting prosody. 
 The assertion that Alaric was given an office by the 
 Roman government after his return £rom devastat- 
 ing Greece is derived from a vague allusion to the 
 matter in two of Claudian's lines. 
 
 In the second half of the fifth century we have 
 another well-known writer, Apolhnaris Sidonius. He 
 lauds several emperors in turn, the first being his 
 father-in-law, Avitus. His allusions are not more 
 clear or rdiable than Claudian's; indeed, they are 
 not so simple and direct. We have, however, a con- 
 siderable body of letters from the pen of Sidonius, 
 which indicate plainly enough that one might live in 
 France in the latter part of the fifth century, with 
 Burgundians, Gauls, and Franks all about, and still 
 carry on one's hterary pursuits and escape the sum- 
 mer heats in a delightful and perfectly appointed 
 villa. Besides the letters of Sidonius we have those 
 of a few other important men of the time, of Leo the 
 Great, for instance, and of Ennodius, mentioned above.i 
 
 » The sources for this period have been brought together and trans- 
 lated into Enghsh by Prof. C. H. Hayes, An Introduction to the 
 Sources relating to the Germanic Invasions (1909). 
 
J 68 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 IV 
 
 Let us turn now to the disruption of the Empire. 
 It is commonly asserted that the State was divided 
 into two distinct parts upon the death of Theodosius 
 (in 395), who left an Eastern Empire to his elder son 
 Arcadius, and a Western Empire to Honorius. This 
 notion is so inveterate and so commonly repeated with 
 more or less elaboration in our manuals that it scarcely 
 needs to be illustrated. I take the following state- 
 ments from two much-used textbooks, not because 
 they are more wrong than the others, but because 
 they present conveniently and clearly what seems 
 to be an erroneous conception of the facts. 
 
 On the death of Theodosius the Empire was again divided 
 between his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius. This marks 
 the final separation in fact of the East from the West; after 
 this it is proper to speak of tm Roman Empires. The eastern 
 lasted for over a thousand years ; the western began to crumble 
 almost at once and had disappeared as an empire within a cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Under the caption "Final Division of the Empire," 
 in decisive, heavy-faced type, another writer says : — 
 The Roman world was united for the last time under Theo- 
 ' dosius the Great ; from a.d. 39. to 395 he -"led as sole emperor 
 Just before his death Theodosius divided the Empire between 
 his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, assigning the former, who 
 was eighteen years of age, the govermnent of the East and giving 
 the latter, a mere child of eleven, the sovereignty of the West. 
 This was the final partition of the Roman Empire, - the issue 
 
 i 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 1 69 
 
 of that growing tendency which we have observed in its immod- 
 erately extended dominions to break apart. The separate his- 
 tory of the East and West now begins. 
 
 Three, at least, of the chief assertions made above 
 are wholly erroneous. The Roman Empire was not 
 divided but remained one ; Theodosius had never been 
 sole emperor; and in no sense does the separate his- 
 tory of the East and West begin with the death of 
 Theodosius. A contemporary would have seen noth- 
 ing epoch-making in the fact that Arcadius and Hono- 
 rius succeeded their father, for Arcadius had been 
 emperor as one of his father's colleagues for eleven years 
 and Honorius for three. In the codes a number of 
 laws are preserved, duly issued in the names of both 
 father and sons. The fullest account, perhaps, that 
 we have of this alleged division is in Orosius, who says 
 quite simply, "In the year of the City 1149 Emperor 
 Arcadius, whose son Theodosius [II] now rules the 
 East, and Emperor Honorius, his brother, upon whom 
 the Commonwealth still rests, began to exercise their 
 common control over the realm, only with separate 
 capitals " {Commune imperium diuersis tantum sedihiis 
 tenere coeperunt, Bk. VII, 36). Zosimus is still 
 more concise: ''The Emperor Theodosius, having 
 consigned Italy, Spain, Celtica, and Lybia to his son 
 Honorius, died of a disease upon his journey towards 
 Constantinople." 
 
 Orosius describes the conditions with perfect accu- 
 racy as they are illustrated by the habits of the period 
 
I70 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 and by the laws in the Theodosian and Justinian codes. 
 From the time of Marcus Aurelius, who chose Verus 
 as his colleague in the year i6i, down to Diocletian, 
 the laws of the Empire were not uncommonly issued 
 in the name of two or more emperors. The plurality 
 of emperors became the general rule after Diocletian, 
 and most of the edicts are issued in the name of two, 
 three, or even four Augusti. 
 
 The existence at the same time of two or more per- 
 sons who enjoyed the supreme prerogatives of Roman 
 emperor seems to us nowadays a contradiction in 
 terms. It did not seem so to the Romans, who had 
 been accustomed, under their consuls and tribunes, 
 from a very early time to the spectacle of two or more 
 officials possessing exactly the same high prerogatives 
 throughout the whole territory of the State, with only 
 such informal division of responsibility as might be 
 agreed upon between them. The relations between 
 two or more emperors, all of whom were supreme, was 
 determined in the same informal fashion : a son would 
 naturally be subordinate to his father; the younger 
 and less distinguished colleague to the older and better 
 known one. 
 
 The whole situation becomes quite clear when we 
 refer to the accounts which Ammianus MarcelHnus 
 has given us of imperial elections in his day. Julian, 
 it should be remembered, had been killed near Babylon 
 in 363 ; his successor, Jovian, died almost immediately 
 after his election. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 171 
 
 The fatal course of events having culminated thus mourn- 
 fully in the death of two emperors within such a brief interval, 
 the army, having paid the last honors to the dead body of Jovian, 
 which was sent to Constantinople to be interred among the other 
 emperors, advanced toward Nicaea, where the chief civil and 
 military authorities devoted themselves to an anxious considera- 
 tion of the serious situation, and, as some of them harbored 
 vain hopes, it was deemed necessary to seek for a ruler of dignity 
 and proved wisdom. 
 
 It was first rumored that a few persons were whispering the 
 name of Equitius, who was at that time tribune of the first divi- 
 sion of the Scutarii, but he was disapproved by the more in- 
 fluential leaders as being too rough and boorish ; and their in- 
 clination rather tended towards Januarius, a kinsman of Jovian, 
 who was chief commissary of the camp of Illyricum. However, 
 he also was rejected because he was at a distance, and Valen- 
 tinian, since he was both well qualified and accessible, was 
 elected by unanimous consent of all men and the manifest favor 
 of the Deity. He was a tribune of the second division of the 
 Scutarii, and had been left at Ancyra, it having been arranged 
 that he should follow afterwards. And because no one denied 
 that this choice was for the advantage of the Empire, messen- 
 gers were sent to beg him to come with all speed ; but for ten 
 days the Commonwealth was without a ruler. 
 
 Upon Valentinian's arrival he was clothed with the 
 imperial robes and crowned and saluted as Augustus. 
 But as he attempted to speak, the soldiers raised an 
 uproar, urging that a second emperor be immediately 
 elected ; to this Valentinian replied : — 
 
 I neither doubt nor question that there are many and ex- 
 cellent reasons why in all serious emergencies a colleague should 
 be chosen to share the imperial power ; and, as a mere man, I 
 
172 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 myself do fear the great accumulation of cares which must be 
 mine and the various events which may occur. . •. . Fortune 
 will, I trust, aid me while I diligently search for a wise and tem- 
 perate partner. 
 
 On reaching Constantinople, Valentinian, pondering 
 upon the burden of urgent responsibilities which threat- 
 ened to overwhelm him, decided to delay no longer, 
 and accordingly led his brother Valens into a suburb 
 
 where with the consent of all men — and indeed no one dared to 
 object — he declared him emperor ; had him clothed in imperial 
 robes and crowned with a diadem, and then brought him back 
 in the same carriage with himself as the legitimate partner of 
 his power, though, in fact, he was more like an obedient servant, 
 as the remainder of my narrative wiU show. 
 
 At this time the trumpet, as it were, gave the signal for war 
 throughout the whole Roman world, and the barbarian tribes 
 on our frontier were moved to make invasions into the territory 
 lying nearest. The Allemani laid waste Gaul and Rhaetia ; at 
 the same time the Sarmatae and Quadi ravaged Pannonia ; the 
 Picts, Saxons, Scots, and Attacotti brought incessant woes upon 
 the Britons ; the Austoriani and other Moorish tribes attacked 
 Africa with more than usual violence ; predatory bands of the 
 Goths plundered Thrace. 
 
 After the winter had passed away 
 
 the two emperors, in perfect harmony, one having been duly 
 raised to power, the other having been, in appearance at least, 
 associated in his honors, having traversed Thrace, arrived at 
 Naessus, where they divided the counts [i.e. miltary command- 
 ers] between them as if they were going to separate. . . . After 
 this when the two brothers entered Sermium they divided the 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 173 
 
 court [palatium] also, and Valentinian as chief proceeded to 
 Milan, while Valens retired to Constantinople. 
 
 Later, Valentinian during his campaign in Gaul fell 
 ill, and a certain Rusticus Julianus, a government 
 official, was proposed for future emperor; but others 
 advocated Severus, an infantry captain. 
 
 But all these plans were formed to no purpose, for in the 
 meantime the emperor, through the variety of remedies applied, 
 recovered and, realizing that he had been snatched from the 
 jaws of death, proposed to invest his son Gratian, who was now 
 on the point of arriving at manhood, with the ensigns of imperial 
 authority; everything was accordingly prepared and the sol- 
 diers made "solid" [milite firmato]. Immediately upon the ar- 
 rival of Gratian, Valentinian, in order that all men might will- 
 ingly accept the new emperor, advanced into the open space, 
 mounted the tribune, and, surrounded by a brilliant circle of 
 nobles and officers, took the boy by the hand and in a speech 
 introduced their future sovereign to the army. 
 
 When, seven years later, Valentinian died, 
 
 it was decided, upon careful consideration, that the son of the 
 deceased emperor, — also Valentinian by name, — who was then 
 a boy four years old, should succeed to the imperial power. He 
 was at that time one hundred miles off, living with his mother, 
 Justina, in a small town called Murocinta. This decision was 
 ratified by the unanimous consent of all parties, and Cercales, his 
 uncle, was sent with speed to Murocinta, where he placed the 
 royal child on a litter and so brought him to the capital. On 
 the sixth day after his father's death he was declared lawful 
 emperor and saluted as Augustus, with the usual solemnities. 
 And at the time many persons thought that Gratian would be 
 indignant that any one else had been appointed emperor without 
 
174 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 his permission ; yet afterwards, when all fear and anxiety were ,, 
 allayed, they Hved in greater security because he, wise and kind- H 
 hearted man as he was, loved his young relative with exceeding 
 affection and reared him with great care. 
 
 These passages ^ illustrate very clearly the informal 
 methods of electing and multiplying emperors. There 
 was, it will be noted, no attempt to divide the realm 
 among them ; if there were several emperors, all were 
 supposed to busy themselves with the common welfare 
 of the whole Empire. 
 
 The conditions under which Theodosius and his two 
 sons ruled were precisely similar. No one thought 
 of disrupting the Empire ; there was but one Common- 
 wealth {res publico), although there had been two 
 capitals since the founding of New Rome by Con- 
 stantine. There were two senates, two completely 
 organized imperial courts, but the Empire, whatever 
 might be the number of rulers, was a single state. A 
 new emperor, when elected, regularly requested his 
 colleague or colleagues to accept him, and after the 
 time of Theodosius one emperor regularly chose one 
 of the annual consuls and the other one the other ; all 
 laws were issued in the name and with the consent of 
 all the Augusti who happened to be reigning. 
 
 Viewed then from the standpoint of custom, there 
 was nothing exceptional in the arrangement made 
 after the death of Theodosius; the Empire was not 
 
 1 They are taken from Bk. XXVI, ch. i, 3-5, ch. ii, 8, ch. iv, 3-5, 
 ch. V, I, 4; Bk. XXVII, ch. vi, 1-5 ; Bk. XXX, ch. x, 4-6. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 175 
 
 divided except for administrative purposes, and there 
 was little, if anything, that was novel in that. No 
 ''Western Empire" was created, and consequently 
 there was no ''Western Empire" to fall in 476. 
 
 On the death of Theodosius we find three miHtary 
 politicians of German, or semi- German, extraction in 
 charge of the forces of the Empire, — Stilicho, the 
 Vandal, Gainas, a Goth, and Alaric, also a Goth, who 
 had been assisting Theodosius in his last campaign. 
 The only way to understand the peculiar position of 
 these leaders is by noting their conduct in such detail 
 as it is described to us by Zosimus, who gives us the 
 fullest account of the years immediately following the 
 death of Theodosius. We have no reason to sup- 
 pose that his report of the necessarily dark and uncer- 
 tain intrigues which were carried on is absolutely 
 correct; yet the general spirit of the situation is 
 clear, and he certainly says enough to rectify many 
 current misapprehensions in regard to the relations 
 of the barbarians and the Romans. 
 
 It must always be remembered that there was no 
 sharp line of demarcation between the heterogeneous 
 inhabitants of the Roman Empire and the Germans, 
 or even the Huns. Probably no questions were asked 
 about a man's origin so long as he fitted fairly 
 into the place that he affected to fill. The situation 
 
176 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 for several hundred years before the time of Theo- 
 dosius had been similar to that which now exists 
 in the United States, especially in the city of New 
 York. A foreigner, as foreigner, is at no disadvantage 
 here ; there are no artificial obstacles put in his way ; 
 and so, in the time of Theodosius, the Germans drifted 
 into the Empire in much the same way that the various 
 foreign nations are drifting into the United States. 
 They mingled with the Roman citizens in the same man- 
 ner that aHens mingle to-day with our people, anxious 
 to be reckoned American citizens as speedily as pos- 
 sible. There was no lining up of Roman against 
 barbarian ; the barbarian gladly fought for the Roman 
 against his own people and exhibited very few traces 
 of national feeling. We have little or no information 
 in regard to intermarriage among the lower ranks of 
 society, but it is obvious that in the highest rank 
 there was no prejudice against mixed alliances. To 
 cite only a few examples : we find Theodosius giving 
 his favorite niece in marriage to Stilicho, and Stilicho 
 both his daughters in succession to Honorius. Arca- 
 dius married Eudoxia, the fair daughter of the Prank- 
 ish leader, Bauto, and in due time Theodosius's daugh- 
 ter, Placidia, alHed herself with Alaric's brother-in- 
 law and successor, Athaulf (or Adolphus). 
 
 Zosimus tells us that Theodosius the Great, imme- 
 diately after his accession, began to conciliate the 
 more important barbarian leaders, whom he treated 
 with distinguished consideration, and even invited 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 177 
 
 to his own table. He was known as the friend of the 
 Goths, with whom he Hved on happy terms, naming 
 Alaric and Gainas as his commanders and settHng a 
 considerable number of the East Goths in the fertile 
 lands of Phrygia. It must be observed, too, that 
 there was absolutely nothing novel in this procedure, 
 which was entirely in accord with the habits of the 
 Empire for centuries. Perhaps the whole situation 
 is best illustrated by the conditions which led to the 
 capture of Rome by Alaric in the year 410. 
 
 There had been for some years an active rivalry 
 between the various barbarian commanders, who 
 played the same important role in the politics of the 
 time that our ahen poKticians do in our municipal 
 affairs at the present day. Stilicho, Gainas, and 
 Alaric had each been working for his own advantage. 
 Alaric, almost immediately after the death of Theo- 
 dosius, had made an incursion into Greece, where 
 he had been weakly opposed by Stilicho; he had 
 returned to the north and received some definite 
 appointment in the Roman army. Just what this 
 appointment was we cannot be sure, since Claudian 
 only speaks vaguely of Alaric's having charge of the 
 armories. StiHcho was very active and ambitious; 
 he defeated Radagaisus and his army of barbarians, 
 but in carrying out his later plans he appears to have 
 encouraged the Vandals and Suevi to cross the Rhine 
 into Gaul. As for Alaric, his first attempt to invade 
 Italy in 402 was repelled by one of Stilicho's barbarian 
 
178 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 lieutenants, Saulus, but the court party, a few years 
 later (in 408), induced Honorius to execute Stilicho. 
 Zosimus tells us that after the execution of Stilicho 
 many of the barbarians in Rome were killed, where- 
 upon the survivors organized an army of thirty 
 thousand men and invited Alaric to join them. 
 
 Alaric was not, however, anxious for war ; he wanted 
 some sort of an office, with a due amount of power and 
 comfortable emoluments. He was ready upon very 
 moderate terms to retire with his followers into Pan- 
 nonia. The emperor Honorius failed, however, to 
 come to terms, showing a culpable indecision, where- 
 upon Alaric summoned his wife's brother, Athaulf, 
 from upper Pannonia, where he had a considerable 
 army of Goths and Huns. He then moved down to- 
 ward Rome, to which he laid siege. But the city 
 bought itself off with 5000 pounds of gold, 30,000 
 pounds of silver, 4000 silk robes, 3000 scarlet fleeces, 
 and 3000 pounds of pepper. Alaric once more de- 
 clared himself ready to enter into an alliance with the 
 emperor and the city of Rome against all their ene- 
 mies. The barbarians then withdrew from Rome, 
 but as they retired they were joined by almost all the 
 slaves of the city to the number of forty thousand. 
 This is suggestive of the highly miscellaneous char- 
 acter of the persons who composed the alleged ''Ger- 
 manic peoples," within the Roman Empire. 
 
 Honorius refused to conclude a definite peace with 
 Alaric, but his judicious prefect of the court, Jovius, 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME 
 
 179 
 
 resolved to send ambassadors to Alaric to request him to come 
 to Ravenna, and told him they would conclude peace. Alaric, 
 being prevailed upon by letters he received from both the em- 
 peror and Jovius, advanced as far as Ariminimi, thirty miles from 
 Ravenna. Jovius, who had been a friend and intimate acquaint- 
 ance of Alaric in Epirus, hastened thence to treat with him. 
 The demands of Alaric were a certain quantity of gold each year, 
 a supply of grain, and permission for him and the barbarians 
 who were with him to inhabit both the Venetias, Noricum, and 
 Dalmatia. Jovius, having written down these demands in the 
 presence of Alaric, sent them to the Emperor with other letters 
 which he privately dispatched to him, advising him to appoint 
 Alaric" commander of both the cavalry and infantry, by which 
 means he might be induced to reduce his demands and make 
 peace on moderate terms. 
 
 Honorius, however, still refused to ratify the pro- 
 posed terms. Alaric, irritated by his failure to get 
 a more advantageous position in the Roman service, 
 proposed to march once more on Rome. The news, 
 however, that Honorius had called to his aid ten 
 thousand Huns, led Alaric to repent his haste, and he 
 sent the bishops of the various towns which he had 
 been occupying to expostulate with Honorius, 
 
 to say that the barbarians cared for no offices, that they would 
 settle in the Noricums, which were harassed by continual in- 
 vasions, and that they would accept such annual allowance of 
 grain as the emperor might think fit, and would remit the gold. 
 Moreover, that a friendship or alliance should subsist between 
 himself and the Romans against every one who should rise up 
 against the Empire. 
 
l8o THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 These terms Zosimus declares to have been very 
 reasonable, and he deplores the want of wisdom on 
 the part of Honorius in rejecting them. 
 
 The reader, familiar only with the ordinary ac- 
 counts of the "wanderings of the nations," will natu- 
 rally be surprised to learn that the Romans had thus 
 early begun to employ the Huns as mercenaries, and 
 will also be surprised at the courteous and deliberate 
 negotiations carried on by Alaric through the clergy. 
 Alaric, of course, had probably lived a great part of 
 his life in the Roman Empire and was no more of a 
 barbarian than hundreds of the Roman military and 
 civil officers of the time. He evidently would have 
 been satisfied could he have occupied a position similar 
 to that which Stilicho had enjoyed under Theodosius. 
 
 Insulted by the refusal of Honorius to meet his 
 advances, Alaric once more laid siege to Rome. He 
 cut off its supplies from Africa and demanded that 
 the city join him against the emperor, who had fled 
 to Ravenna. 
 
 The whole senate [Zosimus says], having therefore assembled 
 and having deliberated about what course they should follow, 
 complied with all of Alaric 's demands. . . . They received his 
 embassy and invited him to their city, and, as he commanded, 
 placed Attains, the prefect of the city, on an imperial throne in 
 a purple robe and crown. Attains then appointed Lampadius 
 prefect of palaces, Marcianus prefect of the city, and gave the 
 command to Alaric and a certain Valens, who formerly com- 
 manded the Dalmatian legions, distributing the other offices 
 in a proper fashion. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" l8l 
 
 Attalus promised arrogantly to subdue the whole 
 world. This so delighted the Romans that they were 
 ^'full of joy, having not only acquired new magistrates 
 well acquainted with the management of affairs, 
 but likewise TertuUus, with whose promotion to the 
 consulship they were exceedingly gratified." But 
 the inefficiency of Attalus in maintaining communica- 
 tion with Africa, from whence the supplies for Rome 
 came, led to his speedy deposition by Alaric. He 
 took Attalus to the city of Ariminum, where he then 
 resided, and stripping him of diadem and purple robe, 
 sent them to the emperor Honorius. 
 
 It thus appears that Alaric, instead of sweeping 
 down upon the capital of the world at the head of the 
 great Visigothic nation, was pathetically anxious to 
 carry out his purposes in a peaceful fashion. When 
 he found that he could not manage an emperor of 
 his own, he was ready once more to open negotiations 
 with Honorius. The rather full report which Zosimus 
 gives, based very probably upon the contemporaneous 
 Greek writer, Olympiodorus, breaks off at this point, 
 and we do not know exactly what led Alaric finally 
 to lay siege once more to Rome. 
 
 The elaborate account in several pages which Gib- 
 bon gives of the sack of Rome is largely the product 
 of his reconstructive imagination. From the con- 
 temporaries we learn next to nothing. Orosius, then 
 a young man, anxious to prove that Christian influ- 
 ence, instead of precipitating the capture of the city, 
 
l82 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 served to shield many persons from the violence of 
 Alaric's followers, gives one or two instances of the 
 respect shown by the Goths toward the holy edifices, 
 and alleges that the barbarians retired voluntarily 
 on the third day, having burned a few houses. ''Re- 
 cent as is the event," he declares, writing less than ten 
 years after, ''no one would suppose now that anything 
 had happened in Rome except for the ruin of a few 
 structures" {nisi adhuc aliquantis existentihus ex 
 incendio ruinis forte doceatur). 
 
 As the prefect of the city, RutiHus Namatianus, 
 was leaving Rome some five years after Alaric's 
 occupation, he burst into song, and in elegiac verse 
 greets the beautiful queen of the world as she reposed 
 in her glory on the banks of the Tiber. There is 
 no lament over recent havoc, but only a confident 
 prophecy of Rome's eternal and universal empire. 
 
 Procopius, a writer of Justinian's time, over a cen- 
 tury later, gives in his Vandalic War a very contra- 
 dictory account of how Alaric took the city. Some 
 allege, he tells us, that the Gothic king sent a gift 
 of three hundred handsome youths to the nobility 
 of the city; these young men, when their masters 
 were asleep after dinner, opened the gates to their 
 fellows; but others claim, he adds, that the gates 
 were opened by a matron of the senatorial class, 
 Proba, who, out of pity for the poor of the city, who 
 were reduced to cannibahsm, ordered her servants to 
 admit the enemy by night. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 183 
 
 Gibbon's plan of extracting ''from the improbable 
 story of Procopius the circumstances which had an 
 air of probability'' was, of course, hazardous in the 
 extreme. The two accounts which Procopius gives 
 are not only improbable, — they are perfectly con- 
 tradictory. It may be added that it is to Procopius 
 alone that we owe the oft-repeated anecdote of 
 Honorius and his hen, Roma. While the historic 
 basis of the anecdote is obviously of the slightest, 
 it is one which perhaps merits perpetuation on account 
 of its inherent charm. 
 
 Alaric died, as we all know, soon after he left Rome 
 on his way southward to insure communication be- 
 tween Rome and Africa, for Rome was dependent on 
 Africa for its food supply. His successor, Athaulf, 
 married his hostage, the half-sister of Honorius, and 
 carried on, first in Italy and then in Gaul, a series 
 of political intrigues very similar to those of his de- 
 ceased brother-in-law, Alaric. Attains was once more 
 set up as emperor and again given up as a failure, so 
 that Orosius speaks humorously of this weak tool of 
 the Gothic kings as ''made, unmade, remade, and de- 
 made" {facto, infedo, rejecto, dejecto). Orosius also 
 reports a remarkable saying of Athaulf : 
 
 At first [Athaulf was wont to say] I ardently desired that the 
 Roman name should be obliterated and that all Roman soil 
 should be converted into an empire of the Goths and be so called ; 
 I longed that "Romania," to use a common expression, should 
 become Gothia, and Athaulf be what Caesar Augustus was. But 
 
1 84 THE NEW HISTORY" 
 
 I have been taught by much experience that the unbridled 
 Ucense of the Goths will never admit of their obeying laws, and 
 without laws a state is not a state. I have therefore assumed 
 the safer course of aspiring to the glory of restoring and increas- 
 ing the Roman name by Gothic vigor ; and I hope to be handed 
 down to posterity as the initiator of the Roman restoration, 
 since it is impossible for me to change the form of the Empire.^ 
 
 VI 
 
 After we are deserted by Zosimus and Orosius, the 
 information in regard to the fifth century becomes very 
 slight indeed. The annals are meager in the extreme, 
 and the statements of Procopius, written long after, 
 are very unreliable. It is clear, however, that the 
 successive barbarian chieftains continued to negotiate 
 with one another and with the Empire in the same 
 way that they had in the time of Stilicho and Alaric. 
 It is evident, too, that the West Gothic kings main- 
 tained the general form of the old government, its 
 administration and laws. We know less about the 
 little Burgundian kingdom ; and such accounts as 
 we have of the Vandals in northern Africa were written 
 by orthodox Christians who were particularly occupied 
 with the horrors of the Arian doctrines which the 
 barbarians professed. 
 
 In Italy, after Stilicho, the most important mili- 
 tary leader for a long period was the ''patrician," 
 ^tius. He had had long experience at the Hunnish 
 1 Adversum Paganos, Bk. VII, 43. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" ^ ig^ 
 
 court, had been at the head of Hunnish mercenaries 
 and was well qualified to organize the successful alli- 
 ance against Attila which led to his defeat in eastern 
 Cxaul m 451. He was followed by Ricimer, who en- 
 joyed the title of "patrician" and exercised functions 
 analogous to those of a New York boss. 
 _ After the death of the inefficient Valentinian III 
 m 4SS, emperors succeeded one another in the West 
 with startling rapidity. Maximus, who is said to have 
 killed Valentinian III, was himself killed within a few 
 months; and in the same year, 455, we have reigning 
 ior a brief time Avitus, the candidate of the West 
 Gothic king, Theodoric II. It was necessary, however 
 to find a more efficient man to oppose the Vandals 
 who were now threatening Rome from Africa, and 
 Boss Ricimer consented to the selection of Majorian 
 as emperor (455-461). He was a well-meaning com- 
 mander, who had formerly been associated with Rici- 
 mer. His chief distinction is perhaps the part he 
 played as " the man with the muck rake," since his 
 arraignment of the official corruption of the times 
 would have been gratefully received and well paid for 
 had there been an Everybody's Magazine or McClme's 
 to promulgate his exposures. But Ricimer was 
 dissatisfied with him, and in 461 he substituted 
 beverus, who reigned four years, but about whom 
 the records give us no information. After the death 
 of Severus, Ricimer took no steps to fill his place 
 and two years elapsed before the emperor in the East' 
 
1 86 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 Leo, associated with himself a family connection, 
 Anthemius. We have in Ennodius's Life of Bishop 
 Epiphanius a rather lively accounc of the relations 
 between the new emperor and the barbarian boss. 
 Ennodius declares that Ricimer conducted the com- 
 monwealth second only to Anthemius ; that Ricimer 
 regarded Anthemius as a sHppery fellow, and Anthe- 
 mius on his part declared Ricimer a hairy barbarian 
 with whom no one could get on. In 472 Ricimer set 
 up an anti-emperor, Olybrius, but both emperors 
 were carried off the same year by disease. 
 
 The next year a new candidate for emperor ap- 
 peared. Glycerins, an enterprising soldier who was 
 supported by the Burgundian king. At the same time 
 Julius Nepos, who was in command in Dalmatia, 
 assumed the imperial title with the sanction of the 
 emperor Zeno at Constantinople. The annals tell 
 us succinctly enough that at Tortus, near Rome, 
 Glycerins was made bishop, while Nepos became em- 
 peror. On the death of Ricimer a new and expe- 
 rienced barbarian leader, Orestes, who had formerly 
 been Attila's secretary, became "patrician," and he 
 it was who made his httle son, Romulus Augustulus, 
 emperor at a time when there were already two 
 emperors in the West, Glycerins and Nepos, while 
 Zeno was repelKng a rival in the East. 
 
 It has been necessary to review the circumstances 
 which led up to the famous deposition of the little 
 Romulus, in order to see the whole bearing of an 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 187 
 
 event which has long been viewed as synonymous with 
 the fall of the '' Western Empire." Let us see now 
 just what information the contemporaries give us in 
 regard to the events of the year 476. It is hardly 
 necessary to say that none of our information comes 
 from any one who claims to have seen anything he 
 narrates ; most of it, indeed, comes from those who were 
 far removed in time or space from the scene of the 
 events. Cassiodorus, the famous minister of Theo- 
 doric, was not born till some years after 476. In his 
 Chronicle, written forty years later, he says simply: 
 ^'a.d. 475 — This year, after Nepos had fled to Dal- 
 matia, Orestes gave the imperial power to his son 
 Augustulus." Under 476 he says : ''During this con- 
 sulate Orestes and his brother Paul were killed by 
 Odovacar, who assumed the title of king but did not 
 use the purple or royal insignia." It would seem clear 
 that Cassiodorus did not perceive in the events any- 
 thing which might properly be regarded as suggesting 
 the fall of the Empire. 
 
 We have the fullest account, perhaps, of the events 
 in a fragment of an Italian chronicle by some unknown 
 writer of about the middle of the sixth century.^ All 
 we know of him is that, as Mommsen has said, he 
 was evidently a Christian man of ''almost infantile 
 
 * The so-called "Valesian fragment," which owes its name to its 
 French editors of the seventeenth century, the Valois (Valesii), 
 may be found at the end of the Teubner edition of Ammianus 
 Marcellinus. 
 
1 88 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 simplicity/^ with a style bordering on illiteracy. He 
 writes as follows : — 
 
 While Zeno, the Emperor, was reigning at Constantinople 
 the patrician Nepos, coming suddenly to Portus, deprived Gly- 
 cerins of imperial power. Glycerins was made a bishop and 
 Nepos emperor at Rome. Nepos came presently to Ravenna, 
 but, fearing the patrician Orestes, who was following him with 
 an army, took ship and fled to Salona. There he remained five 
 years, and was assassinated by his own followers. 
 
 Soon after his departure Augustulus was made emperor 
 and reigned ten years [ ! ]. Augustulus, who before his reign had 
 been called Romulus by his parents, was made emperor by his 
 father, the patrician Orestes. Odovacar, however, with the 
 people of the Scyrri, coming suddenly on the patrician Orestes, 
 killed him at Piacenza, and afterwards his brother Paul in the 
 pine woods outside Classis [the port of Ravenna]. He took 
 Ravenna, moreover, and deposed Augustulus, but had compas- 
 sion on his youth and beauty, and spared his life besides paying 
 him a smn of six thousand solidi. He sent him into Campania, 
 where he lived undisturbed with his relatives. His father, 
 Orestes, was a Pannonian, who had attached himself to Attila 
 when the latter came into Italy and had been made his sec- 
 retary, whence he had been advanced until he had reached the 
 dignity of patrician. 
 
 Procopius, the famous historian of Justinian, writ- 
 ing about 550, gives a little more detail, but he tells us 
 nothing of his sources, and his data were collected 
 some seventy years after the events. In the opening 
 of his Gothic War he says : — 
 
 While Zeno was reigning at Byzantium the power in the 
 West was held by the Augustus whom the Romans nicknamed 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 189 
 
 Augustulus because he succeeded to the Empire in early youth. 
 His father, Orestes, a very prudent man, was regent. Some 
 time previously the Romans had received as allies the Scyrri and 
 Alani and other Gothic [German] tribes, after the defeats they 
 had suffered from Alaric and Attila, of whom I have written in 
 former books. The fame of the Roman soldiers decreased in 
 proportion as that of the barbarians increased ; and under the 
 specious name of "alliance" they fell under the tyrannical sway 
 of the intruders. The impudence of the latter grew to such an 
 extent that after many concessions had been willingly made to 
 their needs, they at length wanted to divide the entire arable 
 land of Italy among themselves. Of this they demanded a third 
 part from Orestes, and when he refused them, they straightway 
 slew him. Among these barbarians was a certain imperial 
 guardsman, Odovacar, by name, who then promised them the 
 fulfillment of their desires if they would appoint him to the com- 
 mand. After he had thus usurped the rule he did no other injury 
 to the emperor, but allowed him to live as a private citizen. To 
 the barbarians he handed over the third of all arable land, by 
 which act he assured their devotion to himself ; and he held his 
 usurped power ten years. 
 
 In the vast collection of extracts prepared at the order 
 of the learned emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus 
 in the tenth century we have a fragment from the 
 historian Malchus, of Philadelphia in Syria, who pre- 
 pared a history covering the period from 474 to 480. 
 He wrote in the early part of the sixth century and 
 thus reports an embassy sent by the Roman senate to 
 the emperor in the East, asking that Odovacar be 
 made ''patrician," a title which the barbarian bosses 
 had commonly enjoyed during the previous decades. 
 The extract is interesting for many reasons and, as I 
 
igo THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 shall show, furnishes an instance of the carelessness, 
 bordering upon unscrupulousness, which may now 
 and then be noted in the writings of Gibbon and 
 others of equally distinguished scholarship. 
 
 The Greek of Malchus, literally translated, reads as 
 follows : — 
 
 . . . Odovacar compelled the senate to dispatch an em- 
 bassy to the emperor Zeno to inform him that they no longer 
 needed an emperor of their own; a common emperor would be 
 sufficient who alone should be supreme ruler of both boundaries 
 [ot the empire] ; that they had, moreover, chosen Odovacar to 
 guard their interests, since he had an understanding of both 
 poHtical and mihtary affairs. They therefore begged Zeno to 
 honor him with the title of patrician and to commit to him the 
 diocese of the Italians. The men from the Roman senate ar- 
 rived, bringing this message to Byzantium. 
 
 During these days there came also messengers from Nepos, 
 who were to congratulate Zeno on what had taken place [namely, 
 the overthrow of his rival Basiliscus] and ask him at the same 
 time zealously to aid Nepos, who had been suffering in the same 
 way as he, to regain his power, by supplying money and an army 
 and all things necessary to effect his restoration. Those who 
 were to say these things were accordingly dispatched by Nepos. 
 
 But Zeno made the following reply to the men from the senate, 
 namely, that of the two emperors they had received from the 
 East, one they had driven out, while Anthemius they had kUled. 
 What should be done under the circumstances they must surely 
 perceive. So long as an emperor still lived there was no other 
 policy possible except that they should receive him when he 
 returned. 
 
 To the men from the barbarian [i.e. Odovacar] he replied 
 that it would be wise for Odovacar to receive the dignity of pa- 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 191 
 
 trician from the emperor Nepos ; but that he himself would send 
 it, should Nepos not anticipate him ; and he praised Odovacar 
 because he had shown a tendency to preserve the order estab- 
 lished by the Romans, and trusted therefore that Odovacar, if 
 he wished to do the fair thing, would receive the emperor who 
 had paid him these honors. And sending a royal letter to Odo- 
 vacar expressing his wishes, he addressed him as patrician. 
 
 Nothing whatever is said of Romulus Augustulus, 
 who has really no claim to be ranked as an emperor, 
 since he was no more than his father's (Orestes's) 
 unsuccessful candidate for the office. 
 
 We have now reviewed all the immediate sources 
 of the events of 476. Let us see, then, what Gibbon, in 
 his thirty-sixth chapter, makes of this extract from 
 Malchus. 
 
 Odoacer had resolved to abolish that useless and expensive 
 office [of emperor] ; and such is the weight of antique prejudice 
 that it required some boldness and penetration to discover the 
 extreme facility of the enterprise. The unfortunate Augustulus 
 was made the instrument of his own disgrace ; he signified his 
 resignation to the senate ; and that assembly, in their last act 
 of obedience to a Roman prince, still affected the spirit of free- 
 dom and the forms of the constitution. An epistle was ad- 
 dressed, by their unanimous decree, to the emperor Zeno, the 
 son-in-law and successor of Leo, who had lately been restored 
 after a short rebelUon to the Byzantine throne. They solemnly 
 "disclaim the necessity, or even the wish, of continuing any 
 longer the imperial succession in Italy, since, in their opinion, 
 the majesty of a sole monarch is sufficient to pervade and protect, 
 at the same time, both the East and the West." In their own 
 name, and in the name of the people, they consent that the seat 
 
192 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 of universal empire shall be transferred from Rome to Constan- 
 tinople; and they basely renounce the right of choosing their 
 master, the only vestige that yet remained of the authority that 
 had given laws to the world. The Republic (they repeat that 
 name without a blush) might safely confide in the civil and mili- 
 tary virtues of Odoacer ; and they humbly request that the em- 
 peror would invest him with the title of patrician and the ad- 
 ministration of the diocese of Italy. 
 
 The deputies of the senate were received at Constantinople 
 with some marks of displeasure and indignation. . . . But 
 the prudent Zeno soon deserted the hopeless cause of his abdi- 
 cated colleague [namely, Nepos]. His vanity was flattered by 
 the title of sole emperor and by the statues erected to his honor 
 in the several quarters of Rome; he entertained a friendly 
 though ambiguous correspondence with the patrician Odoacer ; 
 and he gratefully accepted the imperial ensigns, the sacred orna- 
 ments of the throne and the palace, which the barbarian was 
 not unwilling to remove from the sight of the people. ^ 
 
 It will be observed that there is but a slight resem- 
 blance between the alleged extract from Malchus, 
 which Gibbon encloses in quotation marks, and the 
 literal translation of the Greek. There is, in the 
 original, no mention of the word ^'Republic,'' and 
 even if there had been. Gibbon must have known 
 that the word respublica, or its equivalent in Greek, 
 would have had in those days nothing of the meaning 
 of ^'republic " in our sense of the word. It was simply 
 a colorless synonym for '^ state" or "commonwealth." 
 
 Most extraordinary of all is the statement that 
 Zeno "gratefully accepted the imperial ensigns, the 
 
 1 Vol. IV, pp. 50-51 of Bury's edition. 
 
"THE FALL OF ROME" 1 93 
 
 sacred ornaments of the throne and palace, which the 
 barbarian was not unwilKng to remove from the sight 
 of the people." Any reader would infer that there 
 was some evidence of the transmission by Odovacar 
 of the imperial insignia to Constantinople. As a 
 matter of fact this oft-repeated story is practically 
 without foundation. In that bit of Italian chronicle 
 already quoted (known as the Valesian fragment), 
 resting upon an entirely different basis from the report 
 of Malchus, we find the statement that after Theodoric 
 had, in the year 493, killed his rival Odovacar he made 
 peace with the emperor Anastasius ; that Anastasius 
 ''returned all the ornaments of the palace which 
 Odovacar had sent to Constantinople." Whatever 
 these ornamenta palatii may have been no one knows, 
 — the bric-a-brac from the parlor mantelpiece, for 
 aught we can say. We are in no way justified in 
 assuming that they were ''the imperial insignia," and 
 certainly there is absolutely no evidence that they 
 were sent, as Gibbon and even Hodgkin assume, at the 
 time of the embassy reported by Malchus. 
 
 Now, to sum up our review of a momentous 
 century, it becomes clear, as we examine the scanty 
 bits of information that have come down to us, that 
 the commonly accepted notions of the progress of 
 affairs during the break-up of the western portions of 
 the Roman Empire in the fifth century are apparently 
 foundationless. (i) Theodosius the Great was never 
 sole ruler ; (2) he never divided the Empire between his 
 
194 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 two sons, Arcadius and Honorius ; (3) there was never 
 a '^Western Empire'' — at least before Charlemagne's 
 time ; (4) there was little race feeling between the older 
 inhabitants of the Empire and the Germans, who 
 freely intermarried even in the higher ranks of so- 
 ciety ; (5) Alaric was not the reckless leader of a wild 
 barbarian race which swept down upon the capital of 
 the world, but a prudent and hesitating pohtician 
 addicted to prolonged negotiations ; (6) Rome was not 
 permanently injured by his brief occupation in 410; 
 (7) there was no fall of the Western Empire in 476,' 
 since there was no Western Empire to fall, and nothing 
 decisive appears to have happened during that year, 
 for (8) there is no reason to regard Romulus Augus- 
 tulus as having been properly an emperor at all, or 
 (9) to assume that Odovacar ever sent the imperial 
 insignia to Constantinople. 
 
^^THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789'* 
 
 Nearly a century and a quarter has elapsed since 
 the French National Assembly issued a remarkable 
 manifesto in which it discussed the nature, extent, and 
 general beneficence of the Revolution. After only 
 six or seven months of work the Assembly ventured to 
 claim that under its auspices "an old and corrupt 
 nation had been born again into liberty" ; the rights 
 of man, misconceived and insulted for centuries, had 
 been reestablished for all mankind ; privileges without 
 number which had formed the pubHc law of France 
 had been abolished forever. ''Is there a single citi- 
 zen worthy of the name," it exclaims, ''who dares to 
 look back, — who would once more rebuild the ruins 
 which surround us in order to contemplate again the 
 former structure?" 
 
 Yet not a few have dared to look back with regret, 
 even with yearning, upon that Ancien Regime whose 
 ruins the Assembly so plentifully sowed with the salt 
 of its contempt. Indeed, a writer of our own day, M. 
 Charles d'Hericault, solemnized the one hundredth 
 anniversary of the meeting of the Estates General by 
 rebuilding the ancient edifice with idyllic grace and 
 
 19s 
 
196 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 peopling it with a happy and virtuous throng who had 
 lived together in blessed concord until they suffered 
 themselves to be alienated from God and their king 
 by the satanic obsession of the Revolution. Accord- 
 ing to M. d'Hericault, the Ancien Regime had served 
 to develop ''in the highest degree in each social class 
 those particular qualities required in order that all 
 might work together toward the organization of a 
 perfect society. There was, first of all, the priest, 
 wise, venerable, devoted ; then the former despot, now 
 transformed into a courtly and respected king; and 
 the soldier, now a poHshed nobleman, the soul of 
 honor. The bourgeoisie were rich, dignified, and well 
 educated ; lastly the people, pious and gentle, consoled 
 themselves for the lesser troubles of life by amassing 
 wealth, by singing and dancing, while they met their 
 graver misfortunes by the thought of heaven." 
 
 But all at once, with stupefying suddenness and 
 inhuman violence, this happy, Christian, monarchical 
 France began cursing both priests and kings; she 
 bowed down before a new goddess with all the devotion 
 which she had formerly lavished upon her old guides 
 whom she would now exterminate — ''Cette idole 
 nouvelle, c'est ce qu'on nomma fort justement la 
 Revolution." ^ 
 
 It might at first sight seem hardly necessary to 
 reckon seriously with the opinions of a hopelessly 
 reactionary royalist who received his earliest impres- 
 1 La France Revolutionnaire, 1 789-1889 (Paris, 1889), p. i. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 197 
 
 sions under Charles X. But M. d'Hericault is only 
 one of a group of really important and scholarly 
 writers who, in the interests of reaction, have devoted 
 themselves to picturing the horrors and anarchy of 
 the Reign of Terror. Moreover, the existence of this 
 class of historians can alone explain the attitude of the 
 exalted Republicans, who by no means consent to pass 
 over the utterances of their inveterate enemies in silent 
 contempt. 
 
 When the present municipal government of Paris 
 subsidizes historical investigation, it is influenced by 
 something more than scientific interest or even ordi- 
 nary civic pride. The acts of the Commune during 
 the Revolution have been collected and published with 
 a view of estabhshing '^the immortal glory of Paris" 
 in forwarding "the emancipation of humanity." 
 They show, it is claimed, how the representatives of 
 Paris founded a new order based on liberty and equal- 
 ity, '^ opposing virtue, patriotism, and self-abnegation 
 to the treason, perfidy, and calumny which the selfish- 
 ness of the aristocrats never ceased to foment against 
 those noble citizens of whom they might make martyrs, 
 but never renegades." ^ When one calmly considers 
 the role of the Paris Commune in the establishing of 
 the first French republic, such sentiments appear quite 
 as absurdly apologetic as M. d'Hericault 's picture of 
 the feHcity of the Ancien Regime. 
 
 1 A ctes de la Commune de Paris, edited for the city by Lacroix, I, 
 p. i (1894). 
 
198 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 In short, Frenchmen still either love or hate the Revo- 
 lution as did their forefathers in 1 790. A French writer 
 has very recently declared that ^'the idea of treating 
 the Revolution as an event analogous to other events, 
 without either curses or apologies, has as yet never 
 occurred to any one." ^ This is certainly unfair, but 
 it is far nearer the truth than Aulard's claim that he 
 and his band treat the history of the Revolution in the 
 same spirit in which they might deal with that of 
 Greece or Rome. It will be a long time before French- 
 men will speak of Dan ton, Anacharsis Cloots, Lafay- 
 ette, and Desmoulins in the same disengaged spirit in 
 which they might of Cleon, Brasidas, Nicias, and Aris- 
 tophanes. 
 
 Partisan enthusiasm continues to be perpetuated in 
 many important works and must still be reckoned with 
 as it had to be reckoned with a hundred years ago. In 
 this respect the Revolution bears out the observation 
 of Tocqueville that, although political in its nature, it 
 proceeded in the manner of a religious revolution, for 
 it stirred up animosities which in their inveterate bit- 
 terness rank with the hateful emotions that have ac- 
 
 ^ T. Cerfberr, Essai sur le Mouvement Social et I ntellectiiel en France 
 depuis I78g{ Paris, 1902), p 113. Aulard sadly comments on Cerfberr's 
 harsh judgment: "C'est etrangement meconnaitre tout ce que mes 
 amis et moi, depuis bient6t vingt ans, avons ecrit professe, sans eclat 
 et sans talent, je le veux bien, mais en proclamant tres haut et en pour- 
 suivant sans relache le dessein d'etudier I'histoire de la Revolution 
 *sans anatheme comme sans apologie.'" — La Revolution Franqaisey 
 Vol. XLH, p. 475. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" jg^ 
 
 companied religious changes. The explanation of this 
 perpetual partisanship is to be sought partly in the 
 French temperament, but chieiiy in the fact that 
 the Revolution did not succeed in settling some of the 
 most important questions that it raised, notably the 
 nature of the central government and the relations 
 between Church and State. Then, the successive 
 constitutional revolutions, although by no means so 
 fundamental as commonly supposed, have served to 
 raise the spirits of each party in turn and so to per- 
 petuate hopes in the breasts of the most radical as 
 well as the most conservative. Consequently the 
 first Revolution forms the background of every 
 debate upon current issues, and the Principles of 
 1789 are appealed to with interpretations varying 
 with the taste, purposes, and convictions of each par- 
 ticular orator who invokes them. 
 
 The French Revolution is perhaps the most diffi- 
 cult theme that a historian can select. One who at- 
 tempts to treat it, encounters every obstacle and pitfall 
 that besets the path of those that endeavor to make 
 the present understand the past. There is much doubt 
 as to where the Revolution began, and as to when it 
 ceased, if it has yet come to an end. There is a bewil- 
 dering mass of sources in regard to certain matters, 
 and few or no sources for others. Every form of 
 violent partisanship -religious, political, social 
 and philosophical -must constantly be considered' 
 Every one took a hand - kings, foreign and domestic' 
 
200 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 courtiers, national assemblies and their innumerable 
 committees, local revolutionary bodies, communes, 
 deputies on mission, emigres, priests juring and non- 
 juring, clubs, orators, newspaper editors, pamphlet- 
 eers—and to each of these active forces must be 
 assigned its proper influence on the course of affairs. 
 Finally, on no occasion in recorded history were so 
 many changes effected or suggested, in so many fields 
 of human interest, in so short a time, as m France 
 during the ten or fifteen years following the convemng 
 of the Estates General in 1789- The most radical 
 political, social, economic, religious, and educational 
 reforms were associated with unprecedented popular 
 excitement and disorder, with foreign and civil war, 
 national defense, aggression and diplomacy, to such a 
 degree as to render any coherent treatment of the 
 whole range of events practically impossible. As 
 Carlyle said long ago, the words - Erench Revolution 
 may ^' have as many meanings. a^ there are speake.rs_of 
 theni." To him it meant ' ' the open, violent rebellion 
 and victory of disimprisoned anarchy against cor- 
 rupt, worn-out authority ; how anarchy breaks prison, 
 bursts up from the infinite deep, and rages uncontrol- 
 lable, immeasurable, enveloping a world in phasis 
 after phasis of fever-frenzy." By Taine the Revolu- 
 tion is likened to the disorders produced m a gentle- 
 man ''rather weak in constitution but apparently 
 sound and of peaceful habits, who drinks eagerly of a 
 new liquor, falls suddenly to the ground, foaming at 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 201 
 
 the mouth, delirious and convulsed." Neither Carlyle 
 nor Taine took his imagery so seriously as to miss some 
 of the deeper significance of the Revolution; but 
 weaker heads than theirs have been completely bewil- 
 dered by the loud talk and disorder of the period, which 
 they have mistaken for the Revolution itself. One of 
 the most striking achievements of the last quarter of 
 a century is the relegation of the Reign of Terror to its 
 proper place. The English-reading public has Pro- 
 fessor Morse Stephens in especial to thank for ex- 
 plaining and reducing to its proper proportions the 
 '^disimprisoned anarchy," which indeed seems almost 
 trivial when compared with the magnificent turmoil 
 in Russia in recent years. 
 
 The merely personal has always been conspicuous 
 in the histories of the Revolution. Marie Antoinette, 
 the Princess de Lamballe, Marat, Charlotte Corday, 
 Desmoulins, Danton, Saint-Just, the poor little 
 dauphin — these have been dear to the hearts of 
 readers whose interest was much more readily enlisted 
 in the storming of the Bastille or the September 
 massacres than in the origin of France's first constitu- 
 tion and the principles underlying it. 
 
 It is high time that we had a general account of 
 the Revolution regarded simply and solely in its most 
 fundamental aspects as a reformation, social, political, 
 and economic. This is what Chassin evidently had 
 in mind when he began his never completed Genius 
 of the Revolution. He dreamed of an histoire posi- 
 
202 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the, in which the personal, anecdotal, transient, and 
 fantastic should give way to the permanent achieve- 
 ments of the time.^ By the term "Revolution" 
 Chassin understood not the upbubbling of ''disim- 
 prisoned anarchy," but quite prosaically the way in 
 which the reformers transformed their ideas into acts: 
 how they substituted for a poHty based upon privilege, 
 the regime of equality ; for despotism, a free state ; for 
 divine right, the sovereignty of the people ; for favor, 
 justice. Assuredly, as Chassin ventured to think, 
 ''cette histoire ne gagnerait-elle pas en certitude ce qu' 
 au premier aspect elle semblerait perdre en interet." 
 But why offer apologies ? We long to know just 
 what was actually accomplished. In order to learn, 
 however, what was done and so appreciate properly the 
 place of the Revolution among the great transforma- 
 tions of history, it will be necessary to bring the his- 
 tory of France from 1789 to 1800 into organic relation 
 not only with the Ancien Regime, but with the develop- 
 ments throughout western Europe of the half century 
 immediately preceding the assembling of the Estates 
 General. The older writers tended to give prefer- 
 ence, in their study of the Ancien Regime, to the spec- 
 tacular abuses and the eccentricities of speculation, 
 which may indeed serve to explain the attitude of 
 some of the more fantastic terrorists, but which will 
 never account for the seemingly abrupt and permanent 
 
 1 Le Genie de la Revolution (1864-1865), introduction. Only the 
 first two volumes, on the cahiers of 1789, ever appeared. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 203 
 
 betterment. This must remain a mystery to those 
 who have not traced the more or less abortive reforms 
 and the irresistible demands for improvement which 
 lie back of the Principles of lySg. The Revolution 
 will some day be recognized as the most decisive and 
 general readjustment to meet new and altered condi- 
 tions of which we have any record. To tell the story 
 of this rebirth, not only in France but in western 
 Europe, with scrupulous attention to the process of 
 gestation, is an aspiration which, it is to be hoped, will 
 dominate those who deal with this subject in the future. 
 
 So few writers have as yet set before themselves 
 quite clearly the problem of discovering and explain- 
 ing the really great and permanent results of the 
 Revolution, that the public may be forgiven for 
 scarcely suspecting that there have been such results. 
 One exception must certainly be made. M. Aulard 
 undertakes a definite task in his Political History of 
 the French Revolution and has chosen what he regards as 
 the two most essential principles of the movement — 
 equality of rights and popular sovereignty — and has 
 devoted his unswerving attention and vast knowl- 
 edge to narrating the vicissitudes which these two 
 principles underwent from 1789 to 1804. As one reads 
 his book it seems as if one had escaped from wild 
 delirium into a realm of tolerably coherent and intel- 
 ligible thought and purpose. 
 
 Underlying the dramatic episodes of the Revolu- 
 tion, and obscured by them, is a story of fundamental 
 
204 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 social and political reform which not only serves to 
 explain the history of France during the nineteenth 
 century, but casts much light as well upon the progress 
 of liberal institutions in Europe at large. If we im- 
 agine some sober-minded student of the future look- 
 ing back five hundred years hence upon the French 
 Revolution, it may well be that to him its romantic 
 episodes will so far have sunk into the background 
 that its real contributions to European institutions 
 will be apparent. Among the achievements to which 
 our remote observer will assign an important place 
 will be what are known in France as ''the Principles 
 of 1789." 
 
 Ever since Burke denounced the first French National 
 Assembly and the ''clumsy subtility of their political 
 metaphysics," which, like yEolus's winds, threatened 
 to "sweep the earth with their hurricane," there has 
 been a marked tendency upon the part of English 
 and German historians to condemn the Declaration 
 of the Rights of Man as an instance of Gallic light- 
 headedness. Sybel thinks that the terrible crisis 
 which confronted France in the following years may 
 clearly be seen in its provisions, and almost all writers 
 agree that much valuable time that should have been 
 devoted to urgent concrete reforms was wasted in 
 empty scholastic disputation. Frenchmen have in 
 some cases condemned the Declaration from the stand- 
 point of political expediency as harshly as foreign 
 critics. On the other hand, the Declaration not only 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 205 
 
 aroused general enthusiasm when first published, 
 but appeared over and over again, in a modified form, 
 in succeeding French constitutions down to 1848, and 
 has been the model for similar declarations in many of 
 the constitutions of the other continental states. 
 
 In the attempts to explain the origin and discover 
 the archetypes of the Declaration of Rights there 
 have been two main tendencies : the one, to lay the 
 responsibility at the door of Rousseau; the other, 
 to recall precedents in the United States, to which 
 reference is often made, though most vaguely, in the 
 debates of the National Assembly. Sybel believes 
 that our Declaration of Independence suggested the 
 idea to the French. Hausser and Stephens discover 
 a model in a mythical declaration of rights which, 
 they assume, is prefixed to our federal constitution.^ 
 
 The purpose of the present paper is to show how 
 gradually the idea of a constitution developed in 
 France, and how natural it was to preface her first 
 written constitution by a brief statement of the general 
 principles upon which it was founded. It is assuredly 
 high time that we should cease to study the conduct 
 of France^s first modern legislative body with the 
 
 1 These distinguished historians differ as to the nature of our fed- 
 eral bill of rights. Hausser asserts that it is expressed in knappen 
 laconischen Worten {Gesch. d. Fr. Rev., p. 169), while, according to 
 Professor H. Morse Stephens, all the deputies who admired the Ameri- 
 can constitution said " that no respectable constitution could pos- 
 sibly be drawn up without an elaborate [ ! ] declaration prefixed to 
 it." — Hist, of the Fr. Rev., American edition, I, p. 165. 
 
206 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 main aim of finding explanations for the Reign of 
 Terror. Let us endeavor, instead, to see their task 
 as it appeared to the deputies and to their constit- 
 uents. In order to do this we must review the cir- 
 cumstances under which the National Assembly 
 first announced its intention of drawing up a consti- 
 tution. 
 
 II 
 
 Every one knows that early in May of 1789 the 
 ancient feudal assembly of three orders known as the 
 Estates General assembled in Versailles after an inter- 
 val of a hundred and seventy-five years. In spite 
 of the studiously antiquated dress prescribed for its 
 members, the body was found to have undergone a 
 very significant change since last it met. No royal 
 edict could recreate the spirit of earlier centuries. 
 The inevitable metamorphosis into a modern repre- 
 sentative assembly took place during the succeeding 
 weeks, notwithstanding the opposition of the conserv- 
 ative elements. 
 
 The intriguing courtiers about the king were quick 
 to realize this dangerous tendency and induced 
 Louis XVI to suspend the sessions of the three orders 
 on the excuse that he proposed to hold a royal session 
 on June 22, and that it was necessary to set the car- 
 penters to work to prepare the hall for this solemn 
 occasion. 
 
 On finding the usual place of assembly occupied by the 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 207 
 
 workmen, the representatives of the third estate 
 gathered in the Tennis Court of Versailles and adopted 
 the following resolution : — 
 
 The National Assembly, regarding itself as called upon to 
 establish the constitution of the kingdom, effect a regeneration 
 of the state {Vordre public) and maintain the true principles of 
 monarchy, may not be prevented from continuing its delibera- 
 tions in whatever place it may be forced to take up its sittings. 
 Maintaining further, that wherever its members are assembled, 
 there is the Nadonal Assembly, the assembly decrees that all its 
 members shall immediately take a solemn oath never to separate, 
 and to come together wherever circumstances may dictate, until 
 the constitution of the kingdom shall be established and placed 
 upon a firm foundation. 
 
 The importance of this resolution lies in the fact 
 that it was the first distinct and formal assertion 
 of the assembly's mission. 
 
 The usual accounts of the French Revolution are 
 apt to give the impression that this famous oath was 
 the unpremeditated outcome of an invasion of car- 
 penters, — of ''hammering, sawing, and operative 
 screeching," as Carlyle says; but as a matter of fact 
 the oath of June 20 constituted in reality only a slight, 
 although politically important, advance beyond the 
 state of affairs before the deputies found themselves 
 excluded from their meeting place. 
 
 A resolution had been passed three days before 
 (June 17) by which the deputies of the third estate 
 had assumed the title of "National Assembly." 
 The deputies had, moreover, taken an oath upon this 
 
2o8 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 same seventeenth of June very like the Tennis Court 
 oath itself : ''We swear and pledge ourselves to fulfill 
 with zeal and fideUty the duties which devolve upon 
 us." "This oath," we are told, ''taken by six hun- 
 dred members, surrounded by four thousand specta- 
 tors (the public having gathered in crowds at this 
 session), excited the greatest emotion, and constituted 
 a most imposing spectacle." Apparently all that was 
 novel in the Tennis Court oath is the clear announce- 
 ment that the establishment of a constitution is the 
 essential task of the assembly. 
 
 The unanimous recognition on the part of the depu- 
 ties that the true object of the assembly was the 
 drafting of a constitution is quite sufhcient to prove 
 that the public mind was ripe for this declaration. 
 By what steps had the French nation attained to a 
 clear conviction that the salvation of the country 
 depended upon the distinct formulation of the prin- 
 ciples of government — a conviction which received 
 its first official announcement in the Tennis Court 
 oath? 
 
 The motives advanced by the king and his ministers 
 for convoking the Estates General had been but 
 vaguely conceived, and therefore but vaguely indicated, 
 in the Letter of Summons, of January 24, 1789. "We 
 have," the document relates, "need of the counsel 
 of our faithful subjects to aid us in overcoming all the 
 difficulties in which we are involved respecting the 
 state of our finances, and to establish according to 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 209 
 
 our wishes a constant and invariable order in the 
 various parts of the government which affect the hap- 
 piness of our subjects and the prosperity of our king- 
 dom." The phrase ''fixed and constant order in all 
 parts of the administration" occurs three times in 
 this brief document as one of the great objects 
 which the Estates General, in conjunction with the 
 king, are expected to accomplish. The report which 
 Necker, then in charge of the finances, made to the 
 king, a month previous to the actual summoning of 
 the estates, although claiming to reflect the inmost 
 purposes of the monarch, really does little to define 
 the vague terms used in the letter of convocation 
 itself. Necker says nothing of a constitution, but 
 seems to take for granted that the Estates General 
 are to be regularly and periodically convened in the 
 future, and that the worst abuses are to be done away 
 with and the administration improved. No further 
 program was furnished by the government until the 
 king submitted an elaborate and interesting plan 
 of reform in thirty-five articles at the royal session, 
 three days after the Tennis Court oath. 
 
 The ideas of reform vaguely advanced by the govern- 
 ment had taken a much more definite shape, however, 
 in the minds of the leading spirits in the nation at 
 large, and had developed into the matured concep- 
 tion of a constitution some time before the assembling 
 of the Estates General. A remarkable forecast of 
 the ideas which later became the basis of constitu- 
 
210 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 tional revolution is to be found in the " protests " of the 
 parlements issued from time to time during the eight- 
 eenth century. These superior courts of France had 
 formulated the theory of a constitution long before 
 the Revolution, and had, moreover, taken great pains 
 to familiarize the public with the idea. 
 
 Considering the inherently close connection between 
 the legislative and the judicial functions of govern- 
 ment, it is not strange that a proud and self-conscious 
 body Kke the parlement of Paris should have been 
 inclined to define its duties broadly and extend its 
 influence so as to exercise a certain control over the 
 formation of the law. This tendency was rendered 
 almost inevitable by a custom which had long existed 
 of permitting the courts to protest against, and demand 
 a reconsideration of, kingly edicts when presented to 
 them for registration. This anomalous right of par- 
 ticipation in legislation was stoutly defended by the 
 parlements, the arguments advanced being based not 
 only upon precedent, but upon justice and expediency 
 as well. The attempts of the king and his ministers 
 to force the courts to register edicts against their will 
 produced serious crises. On these occasions the 
 despotic character of the French monarchy and the 
 problem of the exact nature of the legislative act were 
 brought prominently before the nation. 
 
 In order to support their contingent opposition to 
 the wishes of the king, whom they recognized freely 
 enough as the supreme lawgiver, the courts put for- 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 211 
 
 ward the theory of a constitution. They assume the 
 guardianship of the '^fundamental laws" of the mon- 
 archy. It devolves upon them, they claim, to main- 
 tain the constitution of the kingdom and to see that 
 no fundamental maxims are violated. This consti- 
 tution was perhaps ill-defined, and was comprised 
 in no accepted written code ; nevertheless, the courts 
 very properly pointed out that it was only by contin- 
 uing to observe certain venerable usages that France 
 could be said to enjoy a regular legal government at 
 all. As they once bluntly told Louis XV: "Adula- 
 tion itself would not dare to assert that in every case 
 anything that the king wills becomes forthwith a law 
 of the monarchy." ^ The parlements appear to have 
 been conscious, however, that their claims rested at 
 best upon a somewhat precarious foundation. They 
 never venture to give a complete or even extended 
 enumeration of the '' fundamental laws" of the mon- 
 archy. For the vagueness of their pretensions they 
 seek to compensate by solemn reiteration.^ 
 
 Notwithstanding the obvious want of definiteness 
 in the theories of the parlements, there is much in the 
 widely circulated protests, beginning with that of 
 May, 1 7 16, which could not but leave a deep impres- 
 sion upon a public that was becoming more and more 
 
 ^ Protest of the Parlement of Brittany, July, 1771. 
 
 2 "Le Parlement sent bien la fragilite des droits qu'il reclame et 11 
 deguise la faiblesse de ses pretentions sous des affirmations vagues qu'il 
 developpe dans un langage solennel." Flammermont, Remontrances 
 du Parlement de Paris au XV II I e Steele, I, p. xxxi. 
 
212 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 conscious of the abuses and dangers of absolutism. 
 The nature of successive conflicts between the superior 
 courts and the king's ministers, important as they 
 were in cultivating a spirit of general discontent, can- 
 not be considered here. We must confine ourselves 
 to the stimulus given by the parlements to the grow- 
 ing demands in the eighteenth century for a limita- 
 tion of the king's powers. 
 
 The following statement of the parlements^ case, 
 made some seventy years before the Tennis Court 
 oath, contains a summary of the claims which are 
 separately developed at greater length in the various 
 manifestoes of those bodies : — 
 
 While we recognize, Sire, that you alone are lord and master 
 and the sole lawgiver, and that there are laws which varying 
 times, the needs of your people, the maintenance of order, and 
 the administration of your kingdom may oblige you to change, 
 substituting new ones according to the forms always observed 
 in this state, we nevertheless believe it to be our duty to call 
 to your attention the existence of laws as old as the monarchy, 
 which are permanent and invariable, the guardianship of which 
 was committed to you along with the crown itself. ... It is by 
 reason of the permanence of such laws that we have you as lord 
 and master. It is this permanence which leads us to hope that 
 the crown, having rested upon your head during a long, just, 
 and glorious reign, will pass to your posterity for aU time to 
 come. 
 
 In recent times it has been clearly shown how much France 
 owes to the maintenance of these original laws of the state, and 
 how important it is in the service of your Majesty that your 
 parlement, which is responsible to you and to the nation for their 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 213 
 
 exact observation, should assiduously guard against any attack 
 upon them.^ 
 
 Even Louis XIV, the parlement claims, had regarded 
 that body as ''the real guardian of the fundamental 
 laws of the kingdom, and even the most absolute of 
 the kings had accepted the registration by the parle- 
 ment as a necessary condition for the enactment of 
 a law." 2 
 
 The superior tribunals, especially the parlement of 
 Paris, are thus placed upon the same footing as the 
 monarch himself. They both exist in virtue of the 
 same fundamental or constitutional laws. Thus, 
 ''la constitution la plus essentielle et la plus sacree 
 de la monarchic,"^ as conceived by the magistrates, 
 provided not only for a king with "fortunate inabili- 
 ties,"^ but for tribunals which had a right to cooper- 
 ate in legislation.^ Both owed their existence to the 
 
 * Iterathes Remontrances siir la Refonte des M annates, July 26, 1718. 
 Flammermont's collection, I, pp. 88 S., especially pp. 94, 95. 
 
 2 Ibid., pp. 95, 96. 
 
 2 Remontrance of June 18, 1763, p. 16. 
 
 ^ " Bienheureuse impuissance," a constantly recurring quotation 
 from the Droits de la Reine stir divers Etats de la Monarchic dc VEspagne- 
 supposed to have been inspired by Louis XIV. 
 
 ^ "Que toute administration dans I'etat est fondee sur des Loix, et 
 qu'il n'en est aucune sans un enregistrement libre, precede de verifica, 
 tion et d'examen, que cette verification est necessaire pour donner a 
 toutes les Loix ce caractere d'authenticite, auquel les peuples recon- 
 noissent I'autorite qui doit les conduire," etc. Extrait des registres du 
 Parlement, January 2, 1760, p. 13. See also Remontrance of June 18, 
 1763, passim. 
 
214 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 same imprescriptible law by which the kings themselves 
 were kings. ^ 
 
 The so-called Grandes Remontrances of 1753 dis- 
 cuss at length the relation of the will of the sover- 
 eign to the law of the land. The subjection of the 
 kingly will to law is clearly set forth, and the theory 
 is supported by a variety of somewhat startling quo- 
 tations culled from the political literature of Louis 
 XIV's reign.2 This remonstrance of 1753, dealing 
 with the refusal of the sacraments, closes the long 
 struggle growing out of the bull Unigenitus. The 
 succeeding conflicts between parlements and ministry 
 turn on other matters. The popularity-loving magis- 
 trates, susceptible to the spirit of the times, learn to 
 
 1 The Parlement asserts, in a protest of June 18, 1763 : "Que de 
 meme que le souverain est I'auteur et le protecteur des Loix, de meme 
 les Loix sont la base et les garants de I'autorite du Souverain ; et que 
 toute atteinte portee aux Loix retombe plus ou moins directement sur 
 le Souverain lui-meme. Que meconnoitre I'existence ou la force irre- 
 fragable des Loix immuables par leur nature, constitutives de I'economie 
 de I'etat, ce seroit ebranler la solidite du Trone meme. Que suivant 
 les expressions du Premier President de son Parlement, parlant a I'un 
 des augustes Predecesseurs dudit Seigneur Roi, 'les Loix de I'etat et du 
 Royaume ne peuvent etres violees sans revoquer en dout la Puissance 
 meme et la Souverainete dudit Seigneur Roi. Que nous avons deux 
 sortes de loix ; les unes sont les Ordonnances des Rois, qui se peuvent 
 changer selon la diversite des temps et des affaires ; les autres sont les 
 Ordonnances du Royaume, qui sont inviolables, et par lesquelles ledit 
 Seigneur Roi est monte au Tr6ne royal, et cette Couronne a ete con- 
 servee par ses predecesseurs jusqu'a lui.'" This last quotation the 
 court derived from a speech made by Harlai before the king, June 15, 
 1586. 
 
 ^ Flammermont, I, pp. 521 ff. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 215 
 
 give a democratic or, at least, a popular, tone to their 
 declarations. The terms ^'nation," ''people," and 
 citoyen occur more and more frequently in the expostu- 
 lations with the king. We can easily perceive the 
 growing antagonism of the nation towards an unlimited 
 or ill-defined royal power. The clearest and most ma- 
 ture statement of the theory of a constitution which 
 I have found occurs in an obscure remonstrance ad- 
 dressed to the king by the parlement of Brittany, 
 dated July, im'- — 
 
 There is an essential difference between the transitory regu- 
 lations which vary with the times, and the fundamental laws 
 upon which the constitution of the monarchy rests. In respect 
 to the former [that is, the transitory regulations], it is the duty 
 of the courts to influence and enUghten the ruUng power, al- 
 though their opinions must, in the last instance, yield to the 
 decisions of your wisdom, since it appertains to you alone to 
 regulate everything relating to the administration. To admm- 
 ister the state is not, however, to change its constitution. . . . 
 It is therefore, most indispensable to distinguish and to except 
 the cases where the right of expostulation suffices to enlighten 
 the ruling power in an administration which, in spite of its wide 
 scope, still has its limits, and those cases where the happy in- 
 ability [of the monarch] to overstep the bounds established by 
 the constitution implies the power necessary legally to oppose 
 what an arbitrary will cannot and may not do. 
 While this is obviously an ex parte argument with a 
 view to justifying the pretensions of the courts, it is 
 a remarkable approximation to the later ideas of a 
 constitution as distinguished from current statutory 
 legislation. Not only was the word "constitution'^ 
 
2l6 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 familiar to the thoughtful Frenchman many years 
 before the Revolution, but the idea which underlies 
 the modern conception of a constitutional government 
 was ready at hand. 
 
 That the superior courts represented the nation 
 since the discontinuance of the Estates General was 
 perhaps the basis of the claim which the parlements 
 ventured to make upon the sympathy of the public.^ 
 It was the parlement of Paris which, on July i6, 1787, 
 requested that the Estates General be again convoked, 
 "m view of the fact that the Nation, represented by the 
 Estates General, alone has a right to grant the king the 
 necessary subsidies.''^ This demand, passed by a 
 strange coaHtion of radicals and conservatives, who 
 held opposite views of the meaning of their action, 
 was the beginning of the end. 
 
 Doubtless our own early state constitutions may 
 have served to clarify the ideas of some of their more 
 thoughtful readers in France. The earliest collection 
 of these, published in 1778, was prepared for French 
 readers. Another edition of two hundred copies, exacts 
 et corrects, appears to have been dispatched to France 
 somewhat later, by order of Congress.^ Turgot, 
 
 ^ "Ce peuple avoit autrefois la consolation de presenter ses dole- 
 ances aux Rois vos predecesseurs ; mais depuis un siecle et un demi les 
 6tats n'ont point ete convoques. Jusqu'a ce jour au moins la reclama- 
 tion des Cours suppleoit a celle des etats, quoiqu'imparfaitement." 
 Remontrances de la Cour des Aides, February i8, 1771. 
 
 ^ Professor James Shotwell has called my attention to a curious 
 review of this official collection in Yxexon'sAnnee Litter air e^ VH, p. 107 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 217 
 
 Mably, Condorcet, and others published comments 
 upon our institutions. There can, I think, be no 
 doubt that the hazy allusions which we find in the 
 debates of the National Assembly to the Declarations 
 of Rights in America have no reference to our federal 
 constitution,! nor, ordinarily, to the Declaration of 
 Independence, but to the elaborate bills of rights which 
 precede some of our early state constitutions, notably 
 those of Massachusetts and Virginia. 
 
 The experience of the United States may well have 
 added somewhat to the precision and vigor of an 
 already well-developed movement towards constitu- 
 tional reform; more weight than this cannot safely 
 be ascribed to American example. It is in the condi- 
 tions and course of events in France, not in foreign 
 influence, that the true explanation is to be found 
 of the demand for a written guaranty of their rights 
 
 curiot^ Ji" I'F™ °' ^""Sress "a e«, sans doute, de sadsfaire la juste 
 cunosite de I Europe,^ en lu, faisant connaitre sous quel caractSre et 
 avee quels ftres les Etats-Unis vont paraitre sur la sc^ne du monde 
 Nous ne doutons pas que cela ne soit accueilli avec empressement 
 surtout par la France, qui a si bien aide I'Amerique i enfanter la R6- 
 pubhque nouvelle Ce n'est pas que nous adoptons toutes les idees- 
 nous sonnnes s, hbres sous des monarques cheris, que dans le temps 
 meme ou nous fehatons nos amis de jouer d'une liberie qui est plu 
 
 envie. While the Declaration of Independence is pronounced the 
 redTCl'"— ' ''' --'-'- - ^-'chusetts it 
 a s^rl o'f Ml T -7^*"™" °' "" ^'^''^^ constitution, which form 
 after the final formulation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man 
 
2l8 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 made by all classes of Frenchmen in 1 788-1 789. In 
 the period of excitement accompanying the attempt 
 of a hampered and incensed ministry to destroy the 
 old tribunals in May, 1788, the Parlement of Paris 
 ventured to formulate the principles of the constitu- 
 tion in more detail than ever before. Among the 
 fundamental laws were ^'the right of the nation 
 freely to grant subsidies through the Estates General'* 
 and the right of every citizen never to be arrested 
 except to be sent immediately before competent judges. 
 These propositions suggest two of the "rights" of 
 man and the citizen as later sanctioned by the As- 
 sembly. With these propositions were associated a 
 number of others which aimed to estabhsh the consti- 
 tutional inability of the king and his ministers to 
 abolish the parlements, whose prerogative it was "to 
 examine in each province the volontes of the king and 
 order the registration of such as were in agreement 
 with the constitutional laws (lots constitutives) of the 
 particular province, as well as with the fundamental 
 laws of the state." 
 
 This appeal of the parlement of Paris to provincial 
 particularism, although in a certain sense an absurd 
 anachronism, was for the moment successful. The 
 ministry had lost every vestige of public sympathy 
 since Calonne's financial revelations of the year be- 
 fore, and the effort to abolish the local parlements 
 caused a number of serious revolts in the provinces. 
 That in Dauphine not only precipitated the assem- 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 219 
 
 bling of the Estates General, but exercised a most 
 important influence upon their spirit and character. 
 
 Now, this crisis of 1788 is an integral part of the 
 movement of the French Revolution. Although 
 upon the surface the opponents of the ministry were 
 merely defending outworn provincial privileges, which 
 a year later were to be done away with forever, the 
 struggle, at bottom, was against absolutism as such. 
 It was plain that not only were there numberless 
 abuses to be remedied, but also that the king's arbi- 
 trary powers must be limited at all cost ; for had not 
 the ministers just modified the whole organization of 
 the state by abolishing, by royal ordinance, in a most 
 underhand manner, the last remnants of public or 
 semi-public control ? The defense of provincial rights 
 came first, but the issue was really national. 
 
 Ill 
 
 As was most natural, the determination of the king 
 to summon the Estates General called forth a great 
 number of pamphlets, especially in the latter half of 
 the year 1788. These corresponded in function to the 
 modern newspaper editorial, which very quickly devel- 
 oped from them. While they dealt mainly with the 
 question of the number of representatives and with 
 the method of voting in the assembly, some took up 
 the work which the Estates General had before it. 
 That of Sieyes is well known, and its author occupied an 
 
220 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 authoritative position in the Assembly from the first. 
 A less known pamphlet, published anonymously, but 
 attributed with good reason to Rabaut St. Etienne, 
 the most radical perhaps of the more influential speak- 
 ers in the Assembly before June 20, appeared a year 
 before the Tennis Court Oath, and set forth the neces- 
 sity of estabhshing a constitution. 
 
 So long as the changing and arbitrary form of your admin- 
 istration continues to exist [the author urges], so long will the 
 ministers to whom your interests are temporarily confided be in 
 a position to overturn the established order, modify or abrogate 
 the laws and regulations made by their predecessors, while all 
 your efforts to correct the abuses and better your situation will 
 be futile and without permanent results. ^ 
 
 In determining the principles of a good constitution, 
 while the author speaks of those of Switzerland and 
 of the United States, he evidently recognizes that 
 England, after all, furnishes the most feasible model. 
 The constitution ought, he holds, to provide for two 
 houses of legislation, a separation of the powers of 
 government, ministerial responsibihty, security of 
 person and property, and liberty of the press, etc., — 
 a complete program, extracted in a measure no doubt 
 from Montesquieu. So far, however, as I have exam- 
 ined the pamphlets of the times, the one just described 
 seems to be exceptional. AsSorelsays: ''The French 
 
 ^ A la Nation Franqoise, sur les Vices de son Gouvernement, sur la 
 Necessite d'etablir une Constitution et sur la Composition des Etats- 
 Generaux. Archives Parlementaires, Vol. I , pp . 5 7 2-5 73 . 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 221 
 
 were much more anxious for civil than for poHtical 
 liberty." We find a great deal more discussion of 
 financial oppression and of the existing social and eco- 
 nomic abuses than of a proposed political or constitu- 
 tional reorganization. 
 
 The same tendency is apparent in the cahiers, the 
 lists of grievances and suggestions for reform, drawn 
 up according to an ancient custom by the nobihty 
 and clergy of each electoral district and by the com- 
 moners in town and country. These indicate a very 
 general, if not practically universal, desire that the 
 despotic government of the Bourbons should cease. 
 To take an example at random from one of the cahiers 
 of the clergy, we find in Article i, this statement : '' The 
 fundamental [constitutives] laws of the nation ought not 
 to be based upon doubtful and obscure traditions, but 
 estabHshed upon a solid foundation, to wit, justice 
 and the good of the people." Nothing is to be done 
 in the assembly of the Estates General, the cahier 
 declares, *' until the rights of the nation are solemnly 
 recognized and determined. A charter containing 
 these shall be drawn up, in which they shall be formally 
 and irrevocably inscribed." ^ This is characteristi- 
 cally vague, and, taking the orders throughout, repre- 
 sents the average minimum demand. Every one 
 seemed to feel that the desired civil rights and free- 
 dom could only be secured by establishing so much of a 
 constitution as would insure the periodic meetings of 
 
 ^ Senechaussee de Mans. Archives Parlementaire, III, p. 637. 
 
222 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the Estates General. This regular participation of 
 the nation in the exercise of legislative power would 
 prevent oppression, if the rights of the individual were 
 once defined and solemnly and irrevocably reduced to 
 writing. Such a course was not regarded as implying 
 any radical innovations. In fact, in the case of some 
 of the cahiers of the nobility, the desire appears to have 
 been to secure their own special privileges, which they 
 regarded as '^fundamental laws." These, if reduced 
 to writing, were, it was argued, not so likely to be 
 questioned in the future as they had been of recent 
 years. Taine's assertion that the nobility in general 
 held, with Montesquieu, that France already had a 
 constitution, is not, however, borne out by the cahiers} 
 although there are some instances which give counte- 
 nance to this view. 
 
 The general desire for some security for the mainte- 
 nance of the fundamental rights of person and prop- 
 erty takes a more definite form in certain \xrh2incahiers ; 
 for example, in that of the senechaussee of Lyons : — 
 
 Since arbitrary power has been the source of all the evils 
 which afflict the State, our first desire is the establishment of a 
 really national constitution, which shall define the rights of all 
 and provide the laws to maintain them. Consequently our 
 representatives shall request the Estates General to decree, and 
 His Majesty to sanction, a strictly constitutional law, the chief 
 aims of which shall be as follows : [a list of fourteen articles are 
 enumerated, concluding with the provision that] since in no 
 
 ^ This is pointed out by Champion in his introduction to his 
 edition of Sieyes's pamphlet, p. ix, note. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 223 
 
 society can any happiness be hoped for without a good constitu- 
 tion, the Province of the Lyonnais recommends its deputies 
 to discuss no other subject until the French constitution shall be 
 fixed by the Estates General. ^ 
 
 We note in the cahiers a perfectly natural and un- 
 conscious confusion, or rather fusion, of two quite 
 different demands, that for '^une regie invariable dans 
 toutes les parties de Tadministration et de I'ordre 
 public,"^ and that for ^'une charte fran^aise qui as- 
 surera pour jamais les droits du Roi et de la nation." ^ 
 This expression, "rights of the nation," appears fre- 
 quently, sometimes with the correlative "rights of 
 the king." But national rights rested after all upon an 
 uncertain historical basis. Should not the recurrence 
 of abuses and the insidious encroachments of tyranny 
 be forever precluded by an appeal to the inalienable 
 rights of each and every member of society ? If these 
 and "the principles of the social contract" were clearly 
 and solemnly proclaimed, they would, it was hoped, 
 become the basis of the French government. The 
 nobility of Mantes and Meulan went a step further : 
 "political principles should," they claimed, "be as ab- 
 solute as those of morality" ; they asked consequently 
 for a "declaration of rights, that is to say, an act by 
 which the representatives of the nation shall pro- 
 claim in its name the rights which belong to all men 
 
 1 Archives Parlementaire, III, pp. 608-609. 
 
 2 Third Estate of Beauvais, Archives Parlementaires, II, p. 279. 
 ^ Clergy of Caen, Archives Parlementaires, II, p. 486. 
 
224 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 in their quality of reasonable, intelligent beings, ca- 
 pable of moral ideas — rights anterior to any social 
 institutions [ ! ]." ^ 
 
 Nowhere is this anxiety for a separate proclamation 
 of man's natural pohtical immunities clearer than in 
 the cahier of the third estate of Nemours, which re- 
 quested the king to draw up a '^declaration " so soon as 
 the Estates General should have set forth the natural 
 and social rights of man and the citizen. This declara- 
 tion was to be registered in all the courts, published 
 several times a year in all the churches, and inserted 
 in all the books destined for the earliest childhood. 
 No one should be admitted to any judicial or admin- 
 istrative office without having repeated the declaration 
 from memory. This cahier, moreover, furnishes an 
 elaborate draft of such a bill of rights, as do a number 
 of others, including the cahier of Paris intra muros. 
 
 This last was drawn up later than the rest, not being 
 completed until after May 5, the day upon which the 
 Estates General met. The committee appointed to 
 draft the cahier included a number of distinguished 
 men, and the result of their deliberations is the most 
 complete scheme of a constitution which appeared 
 before that drawn up in the National Assembly itself. 
 The first division of the cahier is devoted to this subject, 
 and the representatives of Paris ''are expressly for- 
 bidden to consent to any subsidy or loan until the 
 declaration of the rights of the nation shall have be- 
 * Archives Parlementaires, Vol. HI, p. 661. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 225 
 
 come a law, and the foundations of a constitution are 
 agreed upon and assured." The draft of the constitu- 
 tion is preceded, Hke that actually decreed later in the 
 National Assembly, by a declaration of rights, which 
 the cahier claims should *' constitute a national charter 
 and form the basis of the French government." No 
 other cahier, so far as I have observed, except that of 
 Nemours, contains so clear a statement of this char- 
 acteristic idea that the declaration of rights is an essen- 
 tial element of the constitution. Not only was this 
 suggestion accepted by the National Assembly, which, 
 as is well known, formulated the "Declaration of the 
 Rights of Man and the Citizen" before proceeding to 
 the constitution itself, but the clauses themselves, as 
 they appear in this cahier of Paris, are strikingly sim- 
 ilar to those finally adopted by the assembly. The 
 importance of the well-ordered constitutional pro- 
 visions suggested in the cahier can best be estimated 
 by their close approach to those of the constitution 
 of 1 791. Among them are the following : — 
 
 In the French monarchy the legislative power belongs to 
 the nation in conjunction with the king. The executive power 
 belongs to the king alone. 
 
 The Estates General shall be periodically convoked every 
 three years, without, however, excluding extraordinary sessions. 
 They shall never adjourn without indicating the day and place 
 of their next session. 
 
 Any one convicted of an attempt to prevent the assembling 
 of the Estates General shall be declared a traitor to his coun- 
 try, guilty of the crime of Vese-nation [sic /]. 
 Q 
 
226 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 In the intervals between the sessions of the Estates General, 
 only provisional regulations may be issued in execution of that 
 which has been decreed in the preceding Estates General, nor 
 can these regulations be made laws, except in the following 
 Estates General. 
 
 Many more examples might be given to illustrate the 
 similarity between this sketch and the plan ultimately 
 adopted. The cahier claims that 
 
 the constitution which shall be drawn up by the present Estates 
 General, according to the principles which have just been set 
 forth, shall be the property of the nation, and may not be 
 changed or modified except by the constituent power, that is to 
 say, by the nation itself, or by its representatives elected ad hoc 
 by the whole body of citizens for the single purpose of supple- 
 menting or perfecting this constitution. 
 
 The confidence in a declaration of rights is not diffi- 
 cult to explain. The French nation at large had no 
 idea of the tremendous difficulty of completely re- 
 organizing the government upon a new plan. Few, 
 if any, foresaw that the constitution would be, when 
 completed, a very lengthy legal document. The 
 people, while they longed for a fundamental change, 
 did not care much about the intricacies of the govern- 
 mental system. They wanted, above all, to secure 
 their civil liberty; they cared little to participate in 
 the government, but were only anxious to control it 
 so far as to prevent the revival of old abuses. Two 
 or three things were clear to them : The king and his 
 ministers were wasting the public funds and had got 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 227 
 
 the state into serious financial straits ; the ministers, 
 too, had but recently tried to abolish arbitrarily an 
 ancient and, on the whole, popular institution, the 
 parlements, so as to consolidate their despotism and 
 shake off the last constitutional guaranty; certain 
 governmental practices were open and scandalous 
 violations of the most obvious rights of humanity; 
 and, finally, the general anarchy of the Ancien Regime 
 hampered commerce and industry and brought home 
 the evils of the situation to thousands who had never 
 read a word of Rousseau or seen a single Hne of the 
 constitution of Massachusetts. The nobles of La 
 Rochelle explained clearly enough the reasons why a 
 distinct statement of the fundamental laws and civil 
 guaranties was demanded by practically the whole 
 nation. 
 
 We behold taxes of all kinds arbitrarily depriving the sub- 
 ject of his possessions; privileged monopolies paralyzing ac- 
 tivity; lettres de cachet fettering liberty, saving the guilty and 
 putting the innocent in chains; commissions suspending the 
 laws and turning the courts of justice upside down ; each min- 
 ister reversing the arrangements of his predecessors.^ 
 
 In view of these declarations M. Champion is correct 
 in his assertion : — 
 
 The classical spirit, the taste for abstractions, a priori sys- 
 tems, may have had some influence in the drawing up of certain 
 cahiers; but the idea of making a constitution did not come 
 from philosophy nor from a noble frenzy ; it was called forth by 
 
 1 Archives Parlementaires, Vol. Ill, p. 472. 
 
228 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the public misfortunes. Had there never been a Social Contract, 
 the idea would have been propagated by the force of circum- 
 stances. Why impute to mean or evil sentiments a demand 
 which is so well explained by the state of the kingdom, which 
 had become a veritable chaos ? ^ 
 
 The French, long conscious of the abuses of their 
 system of government, and anxious to insure their 
 liberties by limiting the prerogatives of their monarch, 
 turned their minds naturally and inevitably to a species 
 of written guaranty which should give definiteness 
 to the chief fundamental laws of the state. The very 
 insistence placed upon the declaration of the rights of 
 man showed that the people had in view a charter in 
 the EngHsh sense of the word rather than an elab- 
 orately wrought out constitution, like that of 1791. 
 ^'No one denies now," Mirabeau once remarked with 
 characteristic insight, 2 ^'that the French nation was 
 prepared for the revolution which has just taken 
 place rather through a consciousness of its ills and the 
 faults of its government than by the general advance 
 of knowledge. Every one was conscious of what 
 should be destroyed; no one knew what should be 
 estabhshed." 
 
 IV 
 
 This brief review of the crisis of 1788 and of the 
 pubHc spirit shown in the cahiers renders the attitude 
 
 1 La France d'apres les cahiers de lySg, pp. 39-40- 
 
 2 Twenty-third note to the court in correspondence with Lamarck. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 229 
 
 of the National Assembly perfectly intelligible. The 
 Third Estate, on June 17, 1789, proclaimed its mission 
 to be the determination of the principles of national 
 regeneration. On July 9 its committee on the consti- 
 tution made its first report, and an excellent report it 
 was. The distinction between a constitution — an 
 established system of government — and a declaration 
 of rights was carefully laid down. In order to prepare 
 a good constitution, the report said, "it is necessary 
 to recognize the rights which natural justice grants 
 to every individual, and to recall all those principles 
 which must form the basis of every kind of society." 
 The committee recommended that, in order to keep 
 in view the object of the constitution, it should be pre- 
 ceded by a declaration of the rights of man, but that 
 this should not be issued separately, for fear that its 
 provisions might prove too abstract if unaccompanied 
 by the concrete provisions of the constitution. 
 
 Thus a declaration of the rights of man was to be 
 drawn up in answer to a very general demand. Very 
 few, if any, of the deputies deprecated the declaration, 
 and on August 4 it was decided, by a practically unani- 
 mous vote, that it should precede the constitution. 
 There is no need to follow here the somewhat depress- 
 ing discussion in regard to its contents. It reached 
 its final form on August 26, and had occupied the main 
 attention of the Assembly, at different intervals, for 
 perhaps a fortnight altogether. Was this time wasted, 
 or worse than wasted? Did the deputies lose them- 
 
230 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 selves in vague and misleading abstractions and so 
 sacrifice the best interests of the nation to mere theories 
 and prepare the way for far worse calamities than those 
 which they pretended to remedy ? Or, on the other 
 hand, were the principles of their declaration upon the 
 whole sound, general rather than abstractly theoretical, 
 dictated by years of national experience, and well 
 fitted to form the program of their great undertaking ? 
 Before attempting to answer these questions, let us 
 read over once more the declaration itself — it is brief 
 and instructive. 
 
 The representatives of the French people, organized as a 
 national assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or con- 
 tempt of the rights of man are the sole causes of public calam- 
 ities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to 
 set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable, and 
 sacred rights of man, in order that this declaration, being con- 
 stantly before all the members of the social body, shaU remind 
 them continually of their rights and duties; in order that the 
 acts of the legislative power, as well as those of the executive 
 power, may be compared at any moment with the ends of all 
 political institutions and may thus be more respected; and, 
 lastly, in order that the grievances of the citizens, based here- 
 after upon simple and incontestable principles, shall tend to the 
 maintenance of the constitution and redound to the happiness 
 of all. Therefore, the national assembly recognizes and pro- 
 claims in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme 
 Being the following rights of man and of the citizen : — 
 
 Article i. Men are born and remain free and equal in 
 rights. Social distinctions may only be founded upon the gen- 
 eral good. 
 
 2. The aim of all political association is the preservation 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 231 
 
 of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights 
 are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression. 
 
 3. The essence [principe] of all sovereignty resides essen- 
 tially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any 
 authority which does not proceed directly from the nation. 
 
 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which 
 injures no one else ; hence the exercise of the natural rights of 
 each man has no Umits except those which assure to the other 
 members of society the enjoyment of the same rights. These 
 limits can only be determined by law. 
 
 5 . Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. 
 Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and 
 no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law. 
 
 6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen 
 has a right to participate personally, or through his representa- 
 tive, in its enactment. It must be the same for all, whether it 
 protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of 
 the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public posi- 
 tions and occupations, according to their abilities and without 
 distinction, except that of their virtues and talents. 
 
 7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except 
 in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any 
 one soUciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed 
 any arbitrary order shall be punished. But any citizen sum- 
 moned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, 
 as resistance constitutes an offense. 
 
 8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are 
 strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punish- 
 ment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law, passed and 
 promulgated before the commission of the offense. 
 
 9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have 
 been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all 
 severity not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall 
 be severely repressed by law. 
 
232 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, 
 including his religious views, provided their manifestation does 
 not disturb the public order established by law. 
 
 11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of 
 the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, ac- 
 cordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shaU be 
 responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by 
 
 law. . . 
 
 12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen re- 
 quires public miUtary force. These forces are, therefore, es- 
 tabhshed for the good of all and not for the personal advantage 
 of those to whom they shall be intrusted. 
 
 13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance 
 of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This 
 should be equitably distributed among aU the citizens in propor- 
 tion to their means. 
 
 14. AU citizens have a right to decide, either personaUy or 
 through their representatives, as to the necessity of the public 
 contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is 
 put ; and to fix the amount, the mode of assessment and of col- 
 lection, and the duration of the taxes. 
 
 15. Society has the right to require of every pubUc agent 
 an account of his administration. 
 
 16. A society in which the observance of the law is not 
 assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitu- 
 tion at all. 
 
 17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no 
 one shall be deprived thereof except in cases where pubHc neces- 
 sity, legally determined, shall clearly require it, and then only 
 on condition that the owner shall have been previously and 
 equitably indemnified. 
 
 Do not these ''principles of 1789" represent the 
 most commonplace assumptions of European govern- 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 233 
 
 ments to-day ? And yet every one of them was neg- 
 lected by every European government in the eigh- 
 teenth century, if we except England. M. Seignobos 
 reminds us that ^'when a Frenchman turned his atten- 
 tion to political questions in the eighteenth century, 
 most of the institutions in the midst of which he lived 
 appeared to him to be abuses contrary to reason and 
 humanity." Now, if we are not prejudiced against 
 the Declaration of the Rights of Man by careless and 
 hostile critics and by the suggestions made during 
 the debates by Sieyes and others, — which certainly 
 reached a degree of fatuity rarely exceeded in the most 
 futile of parliamentary discussions, — and if we neglect 
 one or two oratorical flourishes, do we not find it to be, 
 after all, simply a dignified and succinct repudiation 
 of les abus ? Is it not a concrete and positive, although 
 general, statement of the practical reforms which the 
 Assembly was in duty bound to realize ? Was there 
 not back of each article some crying evil of long stand- 
 ing, in view of which the nation might expect a com- 
 prehensive constitutional guaranty ? 
 
 The Declaration is evidently the result of a compro- 
 mise and reflects the confusion which reigns in the 
 cahiers. Some wanted to enumerate the rights of man 
 before he became a social being; others held that rights 
 could only result from a contract; still others wished 
 to formulate only such general principles as might be 
 associated with the practical reform of existing insti- 
 tutions. It seems that this last party of discretion 
 
234 
 
 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 and sense was practically successful in the long run. 
 They were not so conspicuous in the debates as the 
 doctrinaire groups, but the obvious superiority of the 
 final draft to all previously submitted is a tribute to 
 the good sense of the Assembly, which knew how to 
 repress the vagaries of the more fantastical deputies.^ 
 
 It will be noted that in the text of the constitution of 
 1791 the Declaration of the Rights of Man is followed, 
 without a break, by the explicit abolition of a number 
 of the most serious vices of the Ancien Regime ; and 
 following this is a list of the natural and civil rights 
 guaranteed by the constitution. 
 
 To the greatest statesman of the Assembly, Mirabeau, 
 the Declaration was in theory the ''exposition of cer- 
 tain general principles, vahd for every pohtical society 
 and every form of government." Nevertheless, in pre- 
 paring a statement of these principles for the existing 
 body poHtic — " vieux et presque caduc " — it was ab- 
 
 1 Some of the most important articles only ratified concessions 
 already made by the king or reforms introduced by the Assembly in 
 the great decree abolishing the feudal system. The king had prom- 
 ised on June 23 that the representatives of the nation should grant 
 the taxes, that a yearly budget should be pubHshed, that privileges 
 should exist no longer in the payment of taxes, and had asked the es- 
 tates to confer with him upon the abolition of the lettres de cachet and 
 the maintenance of the liberty of the press. Then, by the decree of 
 August II, the Assembly had abolished the sale of judicial and munici- 
 pal offices and declared all citizens eligible to office without distinc- 
 tion of birth. These concessions of the king and this legislation of the 
 Assembly made sufficiently real several important articles in the later 
 declaration. 
 
"THE PRINCIPLES OF 1789" 235 
 
 solutely necessary to subordinate and adapt them to 
 ''many local circumstances." The object, Mirabeau 
 declared, was 
 
 to recall to the people, not what they had got from books or 
 abstract meditations, but what they themselves had experienced, 
 so that the Declaration of Rights, from which a political body 
 should not deviate, should be such a statement as it would itself 
 naturally make, were it accustomed to express its ideas — not 
 an effort to teach a science. 
 
 This is, gentlemen, a most essential distinction. Since Ub- 
 erty has never been the fruit of theory resulting from philosoph- 
 ical deductions, but springs from everyday experience and the 
 simple reasoning which events excite, it follows that we shall be 
 the better understood the nearer we approach to this reason- 
 ing. . . . This is the way in which the Americans drew up 
 their declaration of rights. They purposely left theory to one 
 side and stated the political truths which were to be defined, in 
 such a form that they might appeal to the people, to whom alone 
 liberty is important, and who alone can maintain it.^ 
 
 1 Hist. Pari., II, pp. 269, 270. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM IN 
 THE LIGHT OF HISTORY 
 
 It is a long, long time since human history began, 
 when a species of apes, probably closely allied to the 
 gorilla and chimpanzee of the African forests, found 
 itself able to go on its hind legs without the as- 
 sistance of its fore limbs, leaving these free to be- 
 come ever more dexterous arms and hands. This 
 new being, with his good, big brain case, found that 
 his ability to do things with his hands begat a 
 tendency to use his advantages in novel ways. Acci- 
 dentally easting bits of flint into the fire, he perceived 
 that they would crack into convenient pieces for cut- 
 ting and scraping, and so he perhaps made his first 
 tools. What manner of creature he was — whether 
 still hairy, and sleeping, mayhap, in trees like his con- 
 geners, the apes of to-day — is a matter of conjecture. 
 The veteran French archaeologist, de Mortillet, con- 
 jectures that the earliest of the chipped stone tools 
 foimd in the drift along river banks may be assigned 
 to a period extending back two hundred and forty thou- 
 sand years. Suppose we allow some two hundred and 
 fifty thousand years back of that for the ancestors of 
 
 236 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 237 
 
 paleolithic man, the makers of the so-called "dawn 
 stones'' (eoliths), we arrive at the conclusion that man 
 and his upright forerunners have lived on the earth 
 for at least half a million of years. ^ I think that few 
 versed in prehistoric archaeology or in biology would 
 feel incHned to reduce this period, although we have 
 no way of determining it with any satisfactory degree 
 of accuracy. Now to judge from the cavern remains, 
 it would appear that no very great progress was 
 made except in the skill with which the flints were 
 chipped, in the variety of their forms, and in the 
 decoration of bone objects, until perhaps ten thou- 
 sand years ago, when the so-called neolithic or ground 
 stone period, with its pottery, its agriculture, and 
 its rude dwelUngs, comes clearly into sight. The 
 American aborigines were still in the neolithic age 
 when the first Europeans arrived in the late fifteenth 
 century. 
 
 These facts about man's past are still such compara- 
 tively recent discoveries that they have not as yet so 
 fundamentally revolutionized our thought as they 
 should and will. Lyell's famous book on The An- 
 tiquity of Man, which first brought the great age of the 
 human species to the knowledge of intelligent EngHsh 
 readers, was pubhshed in 1863. It is true that Augus- 
 
 1 De Mortillet, G. et A., La Prehistoire, Paris s. d. (1910), pp. 
 663 sq. Even archaeologists who are unconvinced that the so-called 
 "eoliths" indicate human adaptations do not usually question the fact 
 that man had probably used flint and shells long before the "fist 
 hatchet " was elaborated. 
 
238 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 tine found it necessary, in order to secure precedence 
 for the Hebrew prophets, to refute the "lying vanity" 
 of certain authors who maintained that the Egyptians 
 had been carrying on their astronomical observations 
 for no less than a hundred thousand years. How was 
 this possible, he scornfully asks, when not six thousand 
 years have elapsed since the creation of the first man ? ^ 
 This estimate of the great church father was somewhat 
 reduced by an EngHsh prelate, Archbishop Usher, in 
 the time of Cromwell. With laudable precision he 
 assigned to Friday, October 28, 4004 B.C., the creation 
 of all the terrestrial animals and the appearance of 
 Adam, who, wholly inexperienced as he was, was called 
 upon to devise a complete zoological nomenclature. 
 Before the close of the day Eve was created to solace his 
 loneliness, and the nuptials, duly performed, consti- 
 tuted the last act of the first working week.^ Although 
 some thoughtful philosophers and theologians of the 
 early church had expressed doubts as to the literal 
 truth of this account, Archbishop Usher's exactitude 
 found favor in the eyes of Protestants in the seven- 
 teenth century, and it was left for Darwin, Lyell, 
 Huxley, and the anthropologists fundamentally to 
 readjust our historical perspective, not half a cen- 
 tury since. 
 
 ^De Civitate Dei, ed. Dombart (Teubner edition), lib. XVHI, 
 cap. 40: "De Aegyptiorum mendacissima vanitate, quae antiquitati 
 scientiae suae centum milia ascribit annorum." 
 
 2 Annates veteris Testamenti a prima mundi origine deducti, London, 
 1651, p. I. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 239 
 
 In order to understand the light which the discovery 
 of the vast age of mankind casts on our present posi- 
 tion, our relation to the past and our hopes for the 
 future, let us borrow, with some modifications, an 
 ingenious device for illustrating modern historical 
 perspective.^ Let us imagine the whole history of 
 mankind crowded into twelve hours, and that we are 
 living at noon of the long human day. Let us, in the 
 interest of moderation and convenient reckoning, 
 assume that man has been upright and engaged in 
 seeldng out inventions for only two hundred and forty 
 thousand years. Each hour on our clock will then 
 represent twenty thousand years, each minute three 
 hundred and thirty-three and a third years. For over 
 eleven and a half hours nothing was recorded. We 
 know of no persons or events ; we only infer that man 
 was living on the earth, for we find his stone tools, bits 
 of his pottery, and some of his pictures of mammoths 
 and bison. Not until twenty minutes before twelve 
 do the earliest vestiges of Egyptian and Babylonian 
 civilization begin to appear. The Greek literature, 
 philosophy, and science of which we have been accus- 
 tomed to speak as ''ancient," are not seven minutes 
 old. At one minute before twelve Lord Bacon wrote 
 his Advancement of Learning, to which we shall recur 
 presently, and not half a minute has elapsed since 
 
 1 One of Haeckel's students, Heinrich Schmidt, seems to have first 
 hit upon this method of representing " cosmological perspective." 
 See Lester F, Ward, Pure Sociology, 1907, p. 38, note. 
 
240 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 man first began to make the steam engine do his work 
 for him. There is, I think, nothing delusive about 
 this reduced scale of things. It is much easier for 
 us to handle and speculate upon than the life-sized 
 picture, which so transcends our experience that we 
 cannot grasp it. 
 
 / Two reflections are obvious : In the first place, 
 / those whom we call the ancients — Thales, Pythago- 
 I ras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Lucretius 
 \— are really our contemporaries. However remote 
 they may have seemed on Archbishop Usher's plan of 
 the past, they now belong to our own age. We have 
 no reason whatever to suppose that their minds were 
 better or worse than ours, except in point of knowledge, 
 which has been accumulating since their day. In the 
 second place, we are struck by the fact that man's 
 progress was at first shockingly slow, well-nigh im- 
 perceptible for tens of thousands of years, but that it 
 tends tQ increase in rapidity with an ever accelerating 
 tempo.: Our forefathers, the drift men, may have 
 satisfied themselves for a hundred thousand years with 
 a single stone implement, the so-called coup de poing 
 or fist hatchet, used, as Sir John Lubbock surmises, 
 for as many purposes as a boy's jackknife. In time 
 they learned to make scrapers, borers, arrow-heads, 
 harpoon points, and rude needles of flint and bone. 
 But it was scarcely more than half an hour before 
 twelve by our clock that they can be shown to have 
 invented pottery and become the possessors of herds. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 241 
 
 The use of bronze and iron is much more recent, and 
 the men of the bronze age still retained a pious de- 
 votion to the venerable stone hatchet, which the priests 
 appear to have continued to use to slay their victims, 
 long after the metals began to be used. 
 
 The Greeks were the first of all peoples, so far as 
 we know, to use their minds freely. They unques- 
 tionably demonstrated the capacity of our intellects 
 in ethics, metaphysics, logic, and mathematics, but the 
 incalculable importance of the common things round 
 about them escaped them in the main. Aristotle 
 seems to have conceived that all the practical arts had 
 already been discovered. He was willing that the slaves 
 should be left to carry them on, while the philoso- 
 phers reasoned on the ideals of a contemplative life, 
 — on the good, the true, and the beautiful. Doubtless 
 some advance was suggested in what we should call 
 applied science, especially at Alexandria, but conditions 
 were unpropitious, and mankind had no better ways of 
 meeting his practical needs in Roman times than he 
 had before Aristotle summed up all the achievements 
 of the preceding Greek thinkers. The great Christian 
 fathers, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, if they did not 
 think material things absolutely bad, at least had no 
 interest in them.^ Their gaze was fixed on the rela- 
 tion of the soul to God. This transcended knowledge. 
 Their contemporaries, the Neoplatonists, maintained 
 that the highest truth came through intuition. Reason 
 
 1 Henry Osborn Taylor, The MedicBval Mind, 191 1, Ch. IV. 
 
 R 
 
242 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 could reveal at best only unimportant matters. Both 
 Neoplatonists and Christians were far more interested 
 in miracles and various magical and sacramental 
 methods of promoting man's heavenly interests than 
 in a study of God's world. It was with this heritage 
 that the Middle Ages began. A great part of what 
 had been known in the Fathers' time was forgotten. 
 The textbooks handed down a little Greek knowledge, 
 half understood and mixed with incredible errors. 
 The natural world was looked upon as at best a sort 
 of gigantic allegory. The minerals possessed moral and 
 magical virtues, rather than chemical and physical. The 
 alleged habits of the lion recalled the death and resur- 
 rection of Christ, and those of the wren illustrated our 
 dependence on the past. With the rediscovery of Aris- 
 totle's works, which were prayerfully studied in the 
 universities in the thirteenth century and elaborately 
 explained and interpreted by the great Dominican 
 friars, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, a new 
 barrier was erected to the fruitful study of nature and 
 the application of knowledge to man's material wel- 
 fare. All of Aristotle's mistakes as well as all of the 
 mistakes of his new interpreters, became sanctified. 
 
 Roger Bacon, the first person, so far as we know, to 
 express an unbounded confidence in the possibilities 
 of experimental science, impatiently declared that it 
 would be far better if all the works of Aristotle were 
 destroyed than that the universities should be en- 
 gaged in attempting to get at the sense of the bad Latin 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 243 
 
 translations upon which they were dependent. Aris- 
 totle, he concedes, certainly knew a great deal; but at 
 best he only planted the tree of knowledge, and it 
 had still many branches to put forth. ''If we mortals 
 could continue to live for countless centuries, we could 
 never hope to reach full and complete knowledge of all 
 that is to be known." Bacon held that the intelHgent 
 man of science should acquaint himself with the simple, 
 homely things that farmers and old women know about. 
 While in many ways the victim of his age, Roger 
 Bacon, a Httle over six hundred years ago, gave first 
 expression to the promise of man's happiness that lay 
 in a study of plain material things. Experimental 
 science,^ he prophesied, would enable men to move 
 ships without rowers, carriages might be propelled 
 at an incredible speed without animals to draw them, 
 flying machines could be devised to navigate the air 
 like birds, and bridges might be constructed without 
 supports ingeniously to span rivers.^ 
 
 These tentative and seemingly fantastic suggestions 
 came — to revert to our clock —about two minutes be- 
 
 1 Perhaps the most striking presentation of Bacon's view is to be 
 found in the following words : "Quia licet per tria sciamus, videlicet 
 per auctoritatem, et rationem, et experientiam, tamen auctoritas non 
 sapit nisi detur ejus ratio, nee dat intellectum sed credulitatem ; 
 credimus enim auctoritati, sed non propter earn intelligimus. Nee 
 ratio potest scire an sophisma vel demonstratio, nisi eonclusionem 
 sciamus experiri per opera." Compendium studii, Opera Inedita, 
 ed. Brewer, p. 397. 
 
 2 "Epistola Fratris Rogerii Baeonis de secretis operibus artis et 
 naturae," loc. cit., pp. 532 sqq. 
 
244 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 fore twelve. A whole minute more was required before 
 the expostulations of Roger Bacon were really heeded. 
 The leaders of Protestantism had no heart in what we 
 call progress. , Luther decried reason as a ^'pretty har- 
 lot" who would blind us to the great truths God had 
 revealed in the Bibles Melanchthon jreedited with 
 enthusiastic approval an ancient astrology. .Calvin 
 declared man innately and unspeakably bad and 
 corrupt, utterly incapable of essentially bettering him- 
 self. But Pomponazzi and Giordano Bruno, and then 
 Francis Bacon and Descartes, about one minute before 
 twelve, began to batter down the great edifice which 
 the scholastic doctors had reared from the blocks they 
 had appropriated from Aristotle. They pleaded for 
 reason and denounced the senseless respect for tradi- 
 tion. Descartes, at the close of his immortal treatise 
 on The Method of Seeking Truths says that he is 
 writing in his own native French instead of the Latin 
 of his Jesuit instructors because he hopes to reach those 
 who use their own good wits instead of relying on old 
 books. A little earlier Lord Bacon published his 
 wonderful Advancement of Learning, also in his own 
 mother tongue, and at the end of his Hfe his Novum Or- 
 ganon, in Latin. In both he deals with what he calls 
 *'the kingdom of man." Augustine knew only of a 
 kingdom of God and a kingdom of the devil. Lord 
 Bacon was the first to popularize, in his varied and 
 resourceful English, the promises of experimental 
 science. He says : — 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 245 
 
 Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should take 
 a stand thereupon and discover what is the best way ; but when 
 the discovery is well taken, then to make progression. And to 
 speak truly, Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi. These times 
 are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those 
 which we account ancient or dine retrogrado, by a computation 
 backward from ourselves. ... 
 
 Another error that hath also some affinity with the former, 
 is the conceit that of former opinions or sects, after variety and 
 examination, the best hath still prevailed and suppressed the 
 rest ; so that if a man should begin the labor of a new search, 
 he were but like to light upon something formerly rejected, and 
 by rejection brought into oblivion : as if the multitude, or the 
 wisest for the multitude's sake, were not ready to give passage 
 rather to that which is superficial, than to that which is substan- 
 tial and profound ; for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of 
 the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that 
 which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that 
 which is weighty and solid. . . . 
 
 Another error hath proceeded from too great a reverence 
 and a kind of adoration of the mind and understanding of man ; 
 by means whereof, men have withdrawn themselves too much 
 from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of ex- 
 perience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reason 
 and conceits. Upon these intellectualists, which are notwith- 
 standing commonly taken for the most sublime and divine 
 philosophers, Heraclitus gave a just censure, saying, "Men 
 sought truth in their own little worlds and not in the great and 
 common world;" for they disdain to spell, and so by degrees 
 to read in the volume of God's works. . . . 
 
 But the greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or 
 misplacing of the last or furthest end of knowledge. For men 
 have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes 
 upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes 
 
246 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes 
 for ornament and reputation ; and sometimes to enable them 
 to victory of wit and contradiction, and most times for lucre 
 and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of 
 their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men ; as if there 
 were sought in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a search- 
 ing and restless spirit ... or a shop for profit and sale ; and 
 no°t a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of 
 man's estate.^ 
 
 Bacon thus undermines reverence for the past by 
 pointing out that it rests on a gross misapprehension. 
 Living before us, the ancients could not be expected 
 to be our peers in knowledge or experience. He would 
 have the universities give up worshiping Aristotle and 
 his commentators, cease ''tumbling up and down" in 
 their own metaphysical exaltations, and turn to the 
 study of real things in the world about them. The 
 reason for such study should be, first and foremost, 
 the bright prospect of relieving man's estate. Like Sir 
 Thomas More, Bacon wrote a Utopia, the New 
 .Atlmtis. The central feature of his ideal commu- 
 nity was a national academy of sciences, a sort of 
 Carnegie Institution, in which all sorts of experiments 
 were carried on with a view to making discoveries 
 designed to better the people's lot. Bacon has often 
 been reproached with making no real contributions to 
 science.2 The criticism is probably just, but his role 
 
 1 Advancement of Learning, Bk. I, Ch. V, sections i-ii, passim. 
 
 2 For example by Draper, in his History of the Intellectual Develop- 
 ment of Europe. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 247 
 
 was that of a herald, as he himself recognized. He was 
 the trumpeter who announced the dawn of our own 
 day. 
 
 It was in 1605 that the Advancement of Learning 
 was first pubHshed. (And we may safely say that it is 
 scarcely three centuries since the idea of the possibiHty 
 of indefinite progress through man's own conscious 
 efforts first clearly emerged in the minds of a very few 
 thoughtful persons. And it is to Francis Bacon that 
 the glory is due, as we have said, of first populariz- 
 ing this great idea — the greatest single idea in the 
 whole history of mankind in the vista of possibilities 
 which it opens before us.^ 
 
 The idea of conscious progress was not only essen- 
 tially new; it could only develop in an obviously 
 dynamic social environment and with the growth of 
 historic perspective. The Greek thinkers did not have 
 it at all in its modern form, so far as we can judge. It 
 is true that Herodotus had a lively appreciation of the 
 general debt of Greek civilization to the Egyptians, 
 and Plato now and then refers to Egypt, but there is 
 no clear comprehension of just what we call progress. 
 Aristotle was keenly aware of the development of 
 Greek philosophy since the Ionian philosophers, but 
 there is nothing to indicate that he thought of mankind 
 as going on indefinitely discovering new truth, and 
 he had none of Lord Bacon's interest in seeing the 
 results of natural science applied to the gradual ame- 
 lioration of the general lot of mankind. Lucretius, 
 
248 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 the Epicurean philosopher of Cicero's time, doubtless 
 reflecting earlier Greek speculations, guessed that there 
 had been a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age.^ 
 But his was no philosophy of progress. Men might, 
 it is true, understand the universe so far as to perceive 
 that it was the result of a fortuitous concourse of 
 atoms, Hmited in kinds and obeying certain fixed laws. 
 But the chief significance of this to Lucretius lay in 
 abolishing all fear of the gods and of death. He did 
 not discover in his mechanistic universe any promise 
 of steady human progress. Indeed, he thought that 
 a degeneration was setting in which foreboded the 
 complete dissolution of the universe as we know it. 
 In short, the Greek and Roman philosophers would 
 have agreed with the medieval theologians in accepting 
 the stationary character of the civilization with which 
 they were familiar. 
 
 Augustine and his disciple, Orosius, gave history 
 a new background, and illustrated God's dealings 
 with man, from the Garden of Eden to the sack of 
 Rome by Alaric ; but they knew Httle or nothing of 
 man's long history and unconscious progress in the 
 past, nor did they anticipate any future improvement, 
 for to the ardent Christian no earthly betterment 
 
 1 In the oft-quoted and remarkable lines : — 
 
 Arma antiqua manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt 
 Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami, 
 Posterius f erri vis est aerisque reperta ; 
 Sed prior aeris erat quam ferri cognitus usus. 
 
 — De rerum natura, Bk. V, vv. 1281 sqq. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 
 
 249 
 
 could compare with the overwhelming issue which 
 awaited man after death,, when every one entered 
 into eternal and unchanging bHss or misery. Accord- 
 ingly, emulation consisted at best, until the opening 
 of the seventeenth century, in striving to reach stand- 
 ards set by the past. The mere age of an institution 
 or a behef came to be its surest sanction. The present 
 might consider itself fortunate if it was at any point 
 as good as the past. Only with Giordano Bruno and 
 Lord Bacon did the strength of authority and tradi-/ 
 tion begin to be weakened, in spite of the hostiHty^ 
 and consistent opposition of those who believed that 
 they were defending God-given arrangements againstl 
 the attacks of infidels, freethinkers, and rationalists.^'J 
 The process of weakening authority has been very 
 rapid, considering its novelty and its fundamental char- 
 acter. ^ It went on apace in the eighteenth century. 
 Beccaria, the Itahan jurist, who pleaded so eloquently 
 for the revision of the horrible criminal law, foresaw 
 that the conservatives would urge that the practices 
 which he sought to abolish were ratified by a hoary 
 past; he begged them to recollect that the past was 
 after all only an immense sea of errors from which 
 there emerged here and there an obscure truth.2 Dur- 
 
 1 This cursory treatment of a great theme, the origin of the idea of 
 progress, may be supplemented by Delvaille, J., Essai sur I'Mstoire de 
 Itdee de Progres jusgu'd la fin d^c XVIIIieme Steele, igio; Laurent. 
 £udessnr I histoire de rhumanite, 1866, Ch. XII, pp. 63 sqq • and 
 Fhnt, Htstory of the Philosophy of History, pp. 88 sqq. 
 
 ^ Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 1788, p. 113. 
 
2 JO THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 ing the early years of the French Revolution, and un- 
 der most discouraging circumstances, Condorcet wrote 
 his famous treatise on the indefinite perfectibihty 
 of man. In it he seeks to trace the steps which human- 
 ity has taken in the past toward truth and happi- 
 ness "Ces observations," he trusts, "sur ce que 
 I'homme a ete, sur ce qu'il est aujourd'hui, conduiront 
 ensuite aux moyens d'assurer et d'accelerer les nou- 
 veaux progres que sa nature lui permet d'esperer 
 encore. Tel est le but de I'ouvrage que j'ai enterpns, 
 et dont le r6sultat sera de montrer, par le raisonne- 
 ment et par les faits, qu'il n'a ete marqu6 aucun ternie 
 au perfectionnement des facultes humames, que la 
 perfectibilit6 de I'homme est rSellement indefinie; que 
 les progres de cette perfectibility, d6sormais independ- 
 ent de toute puissance qui voudrait FarrSter, n'ont 
 d'autre terme que la dur6e du globe oil la nature nous 
 
 ajetes."^ , 
 
 These genial speculations tending to turn men s eyes 
 toward the future rather than the past were tremen- 
 dously reenforced by the scientific discoveries of the 
 nineteenth century. These proved, first, that man 
 was learning a great deal more than any one had ever 
 known before about the world and his place in it. 
 Secondly, he was applying his knowledge in such a 
 way as to make older methods of manufacture and 
 transportation and communication appear very crude 
 
 I " Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de I'esprit humain," 
 1797. P- 4- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 251 
 
 and antiquated. Lastly, Darwin, Lyell, Boucher de 
 Perthes, Huxley, G. de Mortillet, Haeckel, and the 
 rest established the fact that long before historic 
 times man had proved himself capable of the most 
 startling progress. He had not only made his way 
 from savagery to civilization, but from the estate of 
 an animal to that of a man. Not only had his an- 
 cestors gone on all fours and lived as the beasts of 
 the field, but their remoter ancestors had mayhap 
 Kved in the sea and, as Darwin conjectures, resembled 
 a so-called Ascidian larva, a tadpole-Hke creature not 
 yet supplied with an unmistakable backbone. • Roger 
 Bacon, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Beccaria, Condorcet, 
 — these and many like them stoutly maintained that 
 man could learn indefinitely more than any of his 
 predecessors had known, and could better his estate in- 
 definitely by the use of this knowledge and the deser- 
 tion of ancient prejudices and habits. The nineteenth 
 century proved conclusively that he had been learning 
 and had been bettering himself for hundreds of thou- 
 sands of years. ," But all this earlier progress had been 
 unconscious/ For the first time, close upon our own 
 day, progress became an ideal consciously proclaimed 
 and sought. So, whatever the progress of man has been 
 during the twelve hours which we assign to him since 
 he became man, it was only at about one minute to 
 twelve that he came to wish to progress, and still more 
 recently that he came to see that he can voluntarily pro- 
 gress, and that he has progressed. This appears to 
 
Q-2 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 me to be the most impressive message that history 
 has to give us, and the most vital in the light that it 
 casts on the conduct of life. 
 
 II 
 
 If it be conceded that what we rather vaguely and 
 provisionally call social betterment is coming to be 
 regarded by large numbers of thoughtful persons as 
 the chief interest in this game of life, does not the 
 supreme value of history lie for us to-day in the sug- 
 gestions that it may give us of what may be called 
 the technique of progress, and ought not those phases 
 of the past especially to engross our attention which 
 bear on this essential point ? History has been regu- 
 larly invoked, to substantiate the claims of the 
 conservative, but has hitherto usually been neglected 
 by the radical,^ or impatiently repudiated as the 
 chosen weapon of his enemy. The radical has not yet 
 Perceived the overwhelming value to him of a real 
 [understanding of the past. It is his weapon by right, 
 \ and he should wrest it from the hand of the conserva- 
 tive. It has received a far keener edge during the 
 last century, and it is the chief end of this essay to 
 indicate how it can be used with the most decisive 
 effect on the conservative. 
 
 So far as I know, no satisfactory analysis has ever 
 
 1 The Marxian socialist, of course, uses his version of the past in 
 support of his plan of social amelioration. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 253 
 
 been made of the conservative and radical tempera- 
 ments. It is commonly assumed that every boy and 
 girl is born into one or the other party, and doubtless 
 as mere animals we differ greatly in our bravery, 
 energy, and hopefulness. But nurture is now seen 
 to be all that separates even the most uncompromis- 
 ing radical from a life far lower than that of any 
 savage that exists on the earth at the present time. 
 Even the recently extinct race of Tasmanians, still 
 in a paleolithic stage of development, represented 
 achievements which it took man long ages to ac- 
 cumulate. The literally uneducated European even 
 to-day could neither frame a sentence nor sharpen a 
 stick with a shell. //A great part, then, of all that goes 
 to make up the conservative or radical may be deemed 
 the result of education in the broadest sense of that 
 term, including everything that he has got from asso- 
 ciating since infancy with civilized companions/ I 
 think that the modern anthropologist and psychologist 
 would agree on this point; at least, every one who 
 allows his mind to play freely over the question must 
 concede that a great part of what has been mistaken 
 for nature is really nurture, direct and indirect, con- 
 scious or, more commonly, wholly unconscious. 
 
 Now it has been the constant objection urged by 
 the conservative against any reform of which he dis- 
 approved that it involved a change of human nature. 
 He has flattered himself that he knew the chief char- 
 acteristics of humanity and that, since it was hope- 
 
254 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 less to alter any of these, a change which seemed to 
 imply such an alteration was obviously impracticable. 
 This argument was long ago met by Montaigne, who 
 declared that one who viewed Mother Nature in her 
 full majesty and luster might perceive so general and 
 so constant a variety that any individual and even the 
 whole kingdom in which he happened to Hve must 
 seem but a pin's point in comparison.^ But there is 
 a wholly new argument now available. Whether the 
 zoologists are quite right or no in denying the possi- 
 bility of the hereditary transmission of acquired 
 traits, there is no reason to think that one particle of 
 culture ever gets into the blood of our human species ; 
 it must either be transmitted by imitation or inculca- 
 tion, or be lost, as Gabriel Tarde has made clear. We 
 doubtless inherit the aptitudes of our parents, grand- 
 parents, and remoter ancestors ; but any actual exer- 
 cise that they may have made of the faculties which we 
 share with them cannot influence us except by example 
 or emulation. Those things that the radical would 
 alter and the conservative defend are therefore not traits 
 of human nature hut artificial achievements of human 
 nurture. Accordingly, the anthropologist and his- 
 torian can rule out this fundamental conservative 
 appeal to human nature by showing that the most 
 extraordinary variety has existed and still exists in 
 the habits, institutions, and feelings of various groups 
 of mankind ; and the student familiar with the chief 
 1 "On Education," Essays, Bk. I, Ch. XXV. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 255 
 
 results of embryology will see that the conservative 
 has constantly mistaken the artificially acquired and 
 hereditarily non-transmissible for constant and unal- 
 terable elements in our native outfit. And, indeed, it 
 may be asked, if it has proved possible to alter an in- 
 vertebrate tadpole-like creature living in the sea into 
 an ape-Hke animal sleeping in a tree, and to transform 
 the ape-like animal into an ingenious flint-chipping 
 artist, able to paint pictures of bison and deer on the 
 walls of a cave, and to derive from the flint chipper 
 of the stone age a Plato able to tell a most edifying 
 tale about a cave full of conservatives, what becomes 
 of the argument for the fixity of human nature in any 
 important sense ? 
 
 Wliile it is then highly unscientific and unhistorical 
 to consider the way in which men behave and feel 
 at any particular time as exhibiting the normal and 
 immutable principles of human nature, history and 
 anthropology nevertheless concur in proving that 
 each new generation is indebted to the previous gen- 
 eration for very nearly all that it is and has. This 
 is true of even the most rapidly progressing societies, 
 and there is reason to suppose that a group of mankind 
 could live indefinitely adhering to an unchanged 
 scheme of civilization so long as they were undis- 
 turbed and their environment remained constant. 
 We have seen how very recently the idea that progress 
 is possible has dawned upon a small portion of man- 
 kind. The alterations which any people can effect 
 
256 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 within a half century in its prevaiHng ideas and insti- 
 tutions, and in the range and character of its gen- 
 erally diffused knowledge, are necessarily slight when 
 compared with the vast heritage which has gradually 
 been accumulating during hundreds of thousands 
 of years. In order to make the nature and variety 
 of our abject dependence on the past clear, we have 
 only to consider our language, our laws, our political 
 and social institutions, our knowledge and education, 
 our view of this world and the next, our tastes and the 
 means of gratifying them. On every hand the past 
 dominates and controls us, for the most part uncon- 
 sciously and without protest on our part. We are 
 in the main its willing adherents. The imagination 
 of the most radically-minded cannot transcend any 
 great part of the ideas and customs transmitted to 
 him. When once we grasp this truth, we shall, accord- 
 ing to our mood, humbly congratulate ourselves that, 
 poor pygmies that we are, we are permitted to stand 
 on the giant's shoulders and enjoy an outlook that 
 would be quite hidden from us if we had to trust to 
 our own short legs ; or we may resentfully chafe at our 
 bonds and, Hke Prometheus, vainly strive to wrest 
 ourselves from the rock of the past, in our eagerness 
 to bring relief to the suffering children of men. 
 
 Es erben sich Gesetz' und Rechte 
 Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort. 
 
 In any case, whether we bless or curse the past, we 
 are inevitably its offspring, and it makes us its own 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 257 
 
 long before we realize it. It is, indeed, almost all that 
 we can have. The most frantic of us must follow 
 the beaten path; we are like a squirrel in his revolv- 
 ing cage. 
 
 There is no space here to discuss the general rela- 
 tion of history to the causes and technique of progress, 
 but a word may be said of the effect which our modern 
 outlook should have on our estimate of the conserva- 
 tive mood. Mr. John Morley has given an unpleas- 
 ant but not inaccurate sketch of the conservative, 
 ''with his inexhaustible patience of abuses that only 
 torment others; his apologetic word for behefs that 
 may not be so precisely true as one might wish, and 
 institutions that are not altogether so useful as some 
 might think possible ; his cordiality towards progress 
 and improvement in a general way, and his coldness 
 or antipathy to each progressive proposal in particular ; 
 his pygmy hope that life will one day become somewhat 
 better, punily shivering by the side of his gigantic 
 conviction that it might well be infinitely worse." 
 How numerous and how respectable is still this class ! 
 It is made up of clergymen, lawyers, teachers, editors, 
 and successful men of affairs. Doubtless some of 
 them are nervous and apologetic, and try to find 
 reasons to disguise their general opposition to change 
 by taking credit for improvements to which they con- 
 tribute nothing, or by forwarding some minor changes 
 which exhaust their powers of imagination and 
 innovation. But how rarely does one of them fail, 
 
258 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 when he addresses the young, to utter some warning, 
 some praise of the past, some discouragement to 
 effort and the onward struggle ! The conservative 
 is a perfectly explicable and inevitable product of 
 that long, long period before man woke up to the 
 possibility of conscious betterment. He still justifies 
 existing conditions and ideas by the standards of the 
 past rather than by those of the present or future. 
 He neither vividly realizes how mightily things have 
 advanced in times gone by, nor has he the imagination 
 to see how easily they could be indefinitely bettered, 
 if the temperament which he represents could cease 
 to be artificially fostered. 
 
 Should the conservative be roused to defend him- 
 self, having been driven from the protection which his 
 discredited conception of ''human nature" formerly 
 offered, he may ask peevishly, ''what does progress 
 mean anyway ? " But no one who realizes the relative 
 barbarism of our whole civilization, which contains, 
 on a fair appraisal, so little to cheer us except promises 
 for the future, will have the patience to formulate 
 any general definition of progress when the most 
 bewildering opportunities for betterment summon 
 us on every side. What can the conservative point 
 to that is not susceptible of improvement ? 
 
 There is one more solace, perhaps the last, for the 
 hard-pressed conservative. He may heartily agree 
 that much improvement has taken place and claim 
 that he views with deep satisfaction all deliberate 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 259 
 
 and decorous progress, but ascribe to himself the 
 modest and perhaps ungrateful function of acting as 
 a brake which prevents the chariot of progress from 
 rushing headlong down a decline. But is there any 
 reason to suppose that any brake is necessary ? Have 
 fiery radicals ever got possession of the reins and 
 actually driven for a time at a breakneck speed? 
 The conservative would find it extremely difficult 
 to cite historic examples, but doubtless the Reign of 
 Terror would occur to him as an instance. This 
 certainly has more plausibility than any other alleged 
 example in the whole recorded history of mankind. 
 But Camille Desmoulins, one of its most amiable 
 victims, threw the blame of the whole affair, with 
 much sound reasoning, on the precious conservatives 
 themselves. And I think that all scholars would agree 
 that the incapable and traitorous Louis XVI and his 
 runaway nobles, supported by the threats of the mon- 
 archs of Prussia and Austria, were at the bottom of 
 the whole matter. In any case, as Desmoulins urges, 
 the blood shed in the cause of liberty was as nothing 
 to that which had been spilt by kings and prelates 
 in maintaining their dominion and satisfying their 
 ambitions.^ 
 
 So even this favorite instance of o'er-rapid change 
 will scarcely bear impartial scrutiny, and we may 
 safely assert that so far the chariot of progress has 
 always been toiling up a steep incline and that the 
 
 ^ "Vieux Cordelier," No. 3, December, 1793. 
 
26o THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 restraining brake of the conservatives has been worse 
 than useless. MaeterHnck exhorts us never to fear 
 that we shall be drawn too far or too rapidly; and 
 there is certainly nothing in the past or present to 
 justify this fear. On the contrary, as he says, ^' There 
 are men enough about us whose exclusive duty, whose 
 precise mission, is to extinguish the fires that we 
 kindle." *'At every crossway on the road that leads 
 to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a 
 thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us 
 have no fear lest the fairest towers of former days be 
 sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid 
 among us can do is not to add to the immense dead- 
 weight which nature drags along." 
 
 History, the whole history of man and of the organic 
 universe, seems now to put the conservative arguments 
 to shame. Indeed it seems to do more ; it seems to 
 justify the mystic confidence in the future suggested 
 in Maeterlinck's Our Social Duty. Perhaps, as he 
 believes, an excess of radicalism is essential to the 
 equilibrium of life. ''Let us not say to ourselves," 
 he urges, ''that the best truth always lies in modera- 
 tion, in the decent average. This would perhaps be so 
 if the majority of men did not think on a much lower 
 plane than is needful. That is why it behooves others 
 to think and hope on a higher plane than seems reason- 
 able. The average, the decent moderation of to-day, 
 will be the least human of things to-morrow. At the 
 time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 261 
 
 sense and of the just medium was certainly that people 
 ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; 
 extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded 
 that they should burn none at all." 
 
 Here again we may turn to the past for its authenti- 
 cating testimony. A society without slaves would 
 have been almost incomprehensible to Plato and Aris- 
 totle. To the latter slavery was an inevitable corollary 
 of human society. To Innocent III a church without 
 graft was a hopeless ideal. To Richelieu a foreign 
 service without bribery was a myth. To Beccaria a 
 criminal procedure without torture, and courts without 
 corrupt judges, were a dream. It would have seemed 
 preposterous enough to Franklin to forecast a time 
 when a Philadelphian could converse in his home with 
 friends far beyond the Mississippi, or to assert that 
 one day letters would be carried to all parts of the earth 
 for so small a sum that even the poorest would not 
 find the expense an obstacle to communication. But 
 all these hopeless, preposterous dreams have come to 
 pass and that in a little more than a hundred years. 
 
 From forwarding these achievements the conserva- 
 tive has hitherto held himself aloof, whether from tem- 
 perament, ignorance, or despair. But let us exonerate 
 him, for he knew no better. He had not the wit to 
 see that he was a vestige of a long, unenlightened 
 epoch. But history would seem to show that this 
 period of exemption from service is now at an end. It 
 is plain that his theory that human nature cannot be 
 
262 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 altered is exploded, as well as his belief that a fractious 
 world needs him to apply the brakes. 
 
 The conservative has, in short, been victimized 
 by a misunderstood past. Hitherto the radical has 
 appealed to the future, but now he can confidently rest 
 his case on past achievement and current success. 
 He can point to what has been done, he can cite what 
 is being done, he can perceive as never before what 
 remains to be done, and, lastly, he begins to see, as 
 never before, how it will get done. It has been the 
 chief business of this essay to suggest what has been 
 done. If there were time, I might try to show that 
 progress in knowledge and its application to the allevia- 
 tion of man's estate is more rapid now than ever be- 
 fore. But this scarcely needs formal proof; it is so 
 obvious. A few years ago an eminent French lit- 
 terateur, Brunetiere, declared science bankrupt. This 
 was on the eve of the discoveries in radioactivity 
 which have opened up great vistas of possible human 
 readjustments if we could but learn to control and 
 utilize the inexhaustible sources of power that lie 
 within the atom. It was on the eve of the discovery 
 of the functions of the white blood corpuscles, which 
 clears the way for indefinite advance in medicine. 
 Only a poor discouraged man of letters could think 
 for a moment that science was bankrupt. No one 
 entitled to an opinion on the subject believes that 
 we have made more than a beginning in penetrating 
 the secrets of the organic and inorganic world. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 263 
 
 In the fourth canto of the Inferno Dante describes 
 the confines of hell. Here he heard sighs which made 
 the eternal air to tremble. These came of the woe felt 
 by multitudes, which were many and great, of infants 
 and of women and men who, although they had lived 
 guiltless lives, were condemned for being born before 
 the true reHgion had been revealed. They lived with- 
 out hope. But in the midst of the gloom he beheld a 
 fire that conquered a hemisphere of darkness. Here, in 
 a place open, luminous, and high, people with eyes 
 slow and grave, of great authority in their looks, sat 
 on the greensward, speaking seldom and with soft 
 voices. These were the ancient philosophers, states- 
 men, military heroes, and men of letters. Neither 
 sad nor glad, they held high discourse, heedless of the 
 wails of infants, unconscious of the horrors of hell 
 which boiled beneath them. They knew nothing of 
 the mountain of purgatorial progress on the other side 
 of the earth, which others were climbing, and heaven 
 was forever inaccessible to them. Yet why should 
 they regret it — were they not already in the only 
 heaven they were fit for ? 
 
 As for accomphshing the great reforms that demand 
 our united efforts — the abolition of poverty and dis- 
 ease and war, and the promotion of happy and ra- 
 tional lives — the task would seem hopeless enough 
 were it not for the considerations which have been 
 recalled above. Until very recently the leaders of 
 men have looked backward for their standards and 
 
264 
 
 THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 ideals. The intellectual ancestors of the conservative 
 extend back in an unbroken line to the very begin- 
 ning of human history. The reformer who appeals 
 to the future is a recent upstart. He belongs to the 
 last half minute of our historical reckoning. His 
 family is a new one, and its members have often seemed 
 very black sheep to the good old family of conserva- 
 tives who have found no names too terrible to apply 
 to the Anthony Collinses, the Voltaires and Tom 
 Paines, who now seem so innocent and commonplace 
 in most of their teachings. But it is clear enough to- 
 day that the conscious reformer who appeals to the 
 future is the final product of a progressive order of 
 things. While the conservative sullenly opposed what 
 were in Roger Bacon's time called "suspicious novel- 
 ties," and condemned changes either as wicked or 
 impracticable, he was himself being gradually drawn 
 along in a process of insensible betterment in which 
 he refused consciously to participate. Even those of 
 us who have httle taste for mysticism have to recognize 
 a mysterious unconscious impulse which appears to 
 be a concomitant of natural order. It would seem^ as 
 if this impulse has always been unsettling the exist- 
 ing conditions and pushing forward, groping after 
 something more elaborate and intricate than what 
 already existed. This vital impulse, elan vital, as 
 Bergson calls it, represents the inherent radicahsm of 
 nature herself. This power that makes for experi- 
 mental readjustment, — for adventure in the broadest 
 
THE SPIRIT OF CONSERVATISM 265 
 
 sense of the term, — is no longer a conception con- 
 fined to poets and dreamers, but must be reckoned 
 with by the most exacting historian and the hardest- 
 headed man of science. We are only just coming to 
 realize that we can cooperate with and direct this in- 
 nate force of change which has so long been silently 
 operating, in spite of the respectable lethargy, indif- 
 ference, and even protests of man himself, the most 
 educable of all its creatures. 
 
 At last, perhaps, the long-disputed sin against the 
 Holy Ghost has been found ; it may be the refusal 
 to cooperate with the vital principle of betterment. 
 History would seem, in short, to condemn the prin- 
 ciple of conservatism as a hopeless and wicked anach- 
 ronism. 
 
 If what has been said above is true, or any consid- 
 erable part of it, is not almost our whole education at 
 fault? We make no consistent effort to cultivate a 
 progressive spirit in our boys and girls. They are not 
 made to reahze the responsibility that rests upon them 
 — the exhilaration that comes from ever looking and 
 pressing forward. They are still so largely nurtured 
 upon the abstract and the classical that we scarcely 
 yet dare to bring education into relation with life. 
 The history they are taught brings few or none of the 
 lessons the past has to offer. They are reared with 
 too much respect for the past, too little confidence 
 for the future. Does not education become in this 
 way a mighty barrier cast across the way of progress, 
 
^gg THE NEW HISTORY 
 
 rather than a guidepost to betterment? Would not 
 most o those ^charge of the education of our youth 
 "emble before the possibility of haying them reahze 
 Sly what has been hinted in thxs essay? What 
 Sd happen if the teachers in our schoo^ and co^ 
 leges our theological semmanes and ^w schools, 
 slou d make it their business to emphasize the tem- 
 tray'nd provisional character of the mstruction 
 ?h Ly ofier, and urge the students to transc^d 
 it as fast as a progressive world permitted? The 
 humo ofs nature' of such a suggestion shows how 
 iTwe are stiU from any general realization and 
 acceptance of the great lesson of history. _ 
 
 "Let us " to quote Maeterhnck once more, think 
 of the gr at invisible ship that carries our human 
 destties'upon eternity. Like the vessel of our con- 
 ted oceans, she has her sails and her bal ast. Th 
 fear that she may pitch or roll on leavmg the oad 
 stead is no reason for increasing the weight of he 
 b Hast by stowing the fair white sails in the dep... 
 f the hold. They were not woven to -^^'^if^^ 
 . ide with cobblestones in the dark. Bal ast exists 
 
 will collect the winds of space. 
 
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