THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 International (Ktwration juries 
 
 \~s 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 WILLIAM T. HAKRIS, A.M., LL.D. 
 
 VOLUME XXV.
 
 INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION 8 ERIE 8 
 
 HOW TO STUDY 
 AND TEACH HISTORY 
 
 WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE 
 HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 BY 
 B. A. HINSDALE, PH.D., LL. D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE AND THE ART OF TEACHING 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 
 
 AUTHOB OF 
 
 SCHOOLS AND STUDIES, THE OLD NOBTHWEST, AND THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT 
 AND EDITOR OF THE WORKS OF JAMES ABRAH GARFIELD 
 
 REVISED EDITION, WITH ADDITIONAL MATTER, 
 INCLUDING A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
 1912
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1893, 
 Br D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 Education 
 idbrary 
 
 r> 
 
 l&. Z 
 
 V H 5^ K 
 
 EDITOK'S PREFACE. 
 
 THE present volume belongs to the fourth division of 
 works included in this series. It relates to the art of 
 education, and comes under the first subdivision of that 
 head namely, methods of instruction.* There is no 
 branch of educational literature of more importance than 
 that which treats of methods of instruction. I might 
 add, too, that the method of teaching history, as con- 
 trasted with the methods of teaching mathematics or 
 geology, or other branches of natural science, even in- 
 cluding biology, has a peculiar importance of its own. 
 For history deals with the will power of man and moves 
 chiefly in the province of motives and purposes, and only 
 secondarily in the province of mere mechanical causation. 
 
 While it is important to study the theater of action 
 and to understand the problems presented by land and 
 water, by mountain ranges, deserts, rivers, climates, and 
 
 * The scheme includes works under four general heads : 
 
 I. History of Education. 
 
 II. Criticisms of Education, mostly written by educational reformers. 
 
 III. Systematic Works presenting the Theory of Education. 
 
 IV. Art or Practice of Education. 
 
 The fourth division Art or Practice includes: (1) Books on the 
 method of instruction ; (2) On methods of government and discipline ; (3) 
 On methods of organizing schools, etc. ; (4) Supervision of schools, 
 (v) 
 
 1267944
 
 vi EDITOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 soil, yet these and all circumstances of the environment 
 belong only to the category of means and agencies which 
 man as a self-active being has learned to use or will 
 learn how to use. They are the stuff which he is to work 
 up into patterns according to his ideals. The material 
 world is the quarry in which we may help ourselves to 
 whatever can serve to realize our inner aims. Civilization 
 is the conquest over material nature by the organization 
 of human society according to ideals of justice and be- 
 neficence. Justice returns the deed upon the doer ; but 
 beneficence, philanthropy, loving-kindness, or grace, as 
 this moral sensibility is called, seeks to bring good to the 
 doer in place of the evil that he sends forth, and conse- 
 quently prefers to accept pain and suffer from discom- 
 moding when it may thereby help an evil doer to grow 
 into righteousness and goodness. Righteousness and 
 goodness are the ideas that the Hebrew sacred writings 
 have given to mankind as the essential attributes of the 
 Divine Being. As righteous, He holds men responsible 
 for their actions and returns their deeds upon them ; as 
 goodness, however, He shows tenderness toward sinful 
 and erring humanity and is eternally forgiving thus 
 suffering and bearing evil in this world in order that He 
 may nurture self-active beings potentially in his image 
 into the realization of his image. 
 
 This Hebrew idea adopted into our civilization is the 
 essence of history, because it is at once the cause of civili- 
 zation and the measure of it. In proportion as a people 
 organize institutions that realize righteousness and good- 
 ness, or what is the same thing, justice and mercy, they 
 achieve civilization. 
 
 History is an account of this progress, and Hegel has 
 well said, in his Introduction to the Philosophy of His-
 
 EDITOR'S PREFACE. vil 
 
 tory, that " the theme of world history is the onward prog- 
 ress into the consciousness of freedom." * The steps to 
 this insight are, first, man's self -activity ; second, the re- 
 ligious idea that God is perfect self -activity ; third, that 
 perfect self -activity is moral ; f fourth, moral freedom, be- 
 ing the divine form and image, man's destiny is to grow 
 into it ; and hence, fifth, the measure of progress in history 
 is this development into the consciousness of freedom, or 
 into clear insight into what is divine and eternal, and the 
 use of the earth to celebrate this consciousness and make 
 it perpetual. For this consciousness can never be fully 
 achieved except through the conquest of nature for spirit- 
 ual uses ; nor except through a completed natural science 
 which will reveal all provinces of matter and force and 
 life as progressive steps in the development of free indi- 
 viduality mineral, plant, animal, man, being the four 
 chief stadia. The world in time and space, according to 
 this religious theory, is a cradle for the nurture of free 
 beings, beginning so low down as to include insensate 
 rocks and the very ether itself. 
 
 I have mentioned purposely this religious ideal in 
 order to bring out in sharpest contrast that view of his- 
 tory which delights to ally it most closely with natural 
 science, and to find the explanation of all human events 
 in the structure and forces of the material environment. 
 According to the materialistic school of historians there 
 is no such thing as free will ; each being is determined to 
 be what he is by the totality of conditions. 
 
 * Page 24, 3d ed. : " Die Weltgeschichte ist der Fortechritt im Bewusst- 
 seyn der Freiheit." 
 
 t The law of morality is to act in such a way that one's deed does not 
 infringe on the freedom or self-activity of others ; any such infringement 
 would be self-contradiction, and would be self-destructive in the end.
 
 EDITOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 I am not disparaging the study of man's environment, 
 however, but only pointing out the extremes to which 
 the reaction against the former somewhat abstract view 
 has led. The old theory was made by men intoxicated 
 with the great idea of individual freedom, and as a con- 
 sequence it slighted the material factor of civilization. 
 It was reluctant to admit the existence of such a factor. 
 The reaction that has set in from the province of natural 
 science proposes to ignore man's freedom and take ac- 
 count only of the determining circumstance, which sur- 
 round individuals and groups of men. 
 
 This contradiction is not, however, difficult to recon- 
 cile. Looking at the goal of human progress it is easy 
 to see that man is on his way to conquer and reduce to 
 his service the powers and products of Nature. The 
 amount of human energy expended in compelling Nature 
 to his use is far greater than that expended directly in 
 attaining consciousness of himself and in realizing moral 
 self-control. Man works for food, clothing, and shelter 
 far more hours than for science, art, religion, and civil 
 government. 
 
 He therefore spends most of his energy in reacting 
 against his material environments, and is thus said to be 
 enslaved by it. The materialists say that he is under 
 necessity. But they ignore the obvious fact of self- 
 activity. Man is acted upon, but he reacts on the exter- 
 nal through his native energy. His reaction consists 
 chiefly in turning out or dispossessing the control of Na- 
 ture and in seizing control for his own uses. He turns 
 Nature's forces against Nature's purposes and makes his 
 environment acknowledge his sway. 
 
 Man's self-activity presupposes as its basis what Kant 
 calls a transcendental freedom a radiating center of pure
 
 EDITOR'S PREFACE. i x 
 
 self-activity not dependent at all on anything in time 
 and space except for its manifestation. All Nature, all 
 facts and events, belong to the secondary order of use, but 
 not to the primary order of free causality ; all things are 
 for man's use, but man himself is a transcendental free- 
 dom that can dispense with the world and all that it con- 
 tains by simply refraining from any act of manifestation. 
 He can dispense with food and drink, letting his body 
 starve ; food and drink therefore do not determine him 
 in any such sense as his will determines him. They can 
 come only so far as to be secondary agencies in realizing 
 his motives. 
 
 A direct efficient cause necessitates a change in some- 
 thing else, but a motive or purpose (called a "final 
 cause ") does not constrain an actor or doer ; its presence 
 in the mind is the product of one free act (namely, that of 
 abstraction, which thinks of something else in the place 
 of what is), and then its realization by the will is another 
 free act, by which the soul affirms itself and encroaches 
 on the independent existence of its environment by sub- 
 stituting its own purposes for those of Nature. 
 
 This factor of transcendental freedom is the soul of 
 history, but of course it reveals itself or realizes itself 
 only in modifying its environment to adapt it to human 
 uses. In the frozen zone the Eskimo has fashioned him- 
 self a hut of snow and ice, using the product of cold to 
 exclude the cold. The environment does not create the 
 food, clothing, and shelter of the Eskimo. It is he, the 
 self-active, who has reacted against it and forced va- 
 rious products out of their natural purposes into his own. 
 Given his environment, and we can see and measure his 
 amount of reaction against it we can see how much he 
 has conquered it. His conquest is the measure of his en-
 
 x ii EDITOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 it,* that looks out upon the deeds of the race. It shows 
 man engaged in the work of revealing what is essential in 
 his inward nature and what he makes real in his institu- 
 tions the family, civil society, the state, the Church. 
 
 The study of our own national history is first in order,, 
 but it can not be carried very far without involving us in 
 the great European movements that led to the discovery 
 and colonization of America. Nor can mediaeval or mod- 
 ern European history be understood except through an 
 investigation of the three peoples Greeks, Komans, and 
 Hebrews that furnish the three strands which combine 
 to make modern civilization. 
 
 In the work of Dr. Hinsdale before us the reader will 
 find the safe guidance of an author who honors and appre- 
 ciates at their true value the two factors of history, the 
 material and the spiritual. The teacher will derive essen- 
 tial assistance from the hints which crowd its pages, 
 pointing out the discriminating marks that enable him to- 
 select the significant and to pass lightly over the unim- 
 portant. 
 
 W. T. HARRIS. 
 
 WASHINGTON, D. C., November S, 1893. 
 * How to Study Geography (in this series), Editor's preface, p. vii.
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 THE last generation has seen a great growth of inter- 
 est in history, and particularly so in the United States. 
 Evidences of this fact are the increased production of his- 
 torical literature of all kinds, the application of more sci- 
 entific methods to historical investigation, the growth of 
 historical societies in number, prosperity, and influence, 
 and especially the greatly augmented attention that is 
 given to history as a branch of general education. 
 
 The change in the colleges and universities is very 
 marked. A college or university can not be named that, 
 thirty years ago, employed a single professor exclusively 
 in historical teaching ; now there are a number of such 
 institutions that require the united labors of several men 
 to do the work. There has been a similar if not an equal 
 growth of interest in the secondary and elementary schools. 
 In fact, it was only a few years ago that the States first 
 began to put the History of the United States on the list 
 of studies required to be taught in the common schools. 
 
 Nor is the change made in the schools limited to the 
 quantity of the work that is done ; in respect to subject- 
 matter and methods of teaching it is perhaps equally 
 pronounced. Here, however, there is reason to think that 
 the gain is greater in the higher schools than in the lower 
 ones. At least, it is the general opinion of competent 
 
 Oriii)
 
 xiv AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 judges that history is one of the studies that are poorly 
 taught, as a rule, in the schools below the college. The 
 reasons for this appear to be that only a short time has 
 elapsed since the new emphasis was placed upon the sub- 
 ject, that it is commonly taught by teachers who are not 
 prepared for the work (on the theory that almost anybody 
 can teach history), and that history presents some peculiar 
 difficulties to the teacher. 
 
 The aim of this book is practical. In writing it, I 
 have sought to help students and teachers who will read 
 it with attention. It is not indeed practical in the nar- 
 row mechanical sense of the word ; no effort is made to 
 tell the teacher just what he shall teach or just how he 
 shall teach it. The aim is rather to state the uses of his- 
 tory, to define in a general way its field, to present and to 
 illustrate criteria for the choice of facts, to emphasize the 
 organization of facts with reference to the three principles 
 of association, to indicate sources of information, to de- 
 scribe the qualifications of the teacher, and finally to illus- 
 trate causation and the grouping of facts by drawing the 
 outlines of some important chapters of American history. 
 If it be objected to these studies that they belong to his- 
 tory itself rather than to a book on teaching history, the 
 obvious reply is that they make the subject more con- 
 crete. The frequent criticism on pedagogical books and 
 lectures, that they are general and abstract, often betrays 
 a low mental plane on the part of the critic, but this is 
 not always the case. There can be no question that even 
 good teachers, in such discussions as the present one, re- 
 quire a great deal of concrete illustration. 
 
 While the book contains much matter that should, in 
 my opinion, interest teachers of history in colleges, I have 
 written it with the needs of elementary and secondary
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xv 
 
 teachers more particularly in mind. Others will decide 
 upon my success ; but I may fairly plead as qualifications 
 for writing it a considerable knowledge of students and 
 teachers gained in schools and institutes, some patient 
 study of history itself and some experience in teaching it, 
 some attention to its pedagogical aspects, and particularly 
 some service as a lecturer on teaching history in institutes, 
 summer schools, and in the college and university. 
 
 It has not been found possible so to divide the subject 
 as wholly to avoid touching more than once upon certain 
 parts of it. Such, however, is the value of reasonable 
 iteration that this can hardly be urged as a fair criticism. 
 
 B. A. HLNSDALE. 
 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, 
 October 26, 1893.
 
 GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 REFERENCES will be found accompanying the successive chapters. 
 It is thought best, however, to present a general bibliography, com- 
 prising for the most part works of a general character to which it 
 is desirable that teachers of history should have constant access. 
 The bibliographies preceding the chapters relate to special subjects. 
 
 While the English language is very rich in historical literature, 
 it is comparatively poor in works relating to the study and teaching 
 of history. For example, of the sixty-eight numbered titles found 
 in Dr. Hall's Bibliography of Education under the head of History 
 and Political Science, only some twenty are in English, while a ma- 
 jority of these are either manuals, guides, or articles prepared for 
 the periodical press. In fact, most of the pedagogical literature 
 relating to the subject must be sought in magazines, educational 
 journals, pamphlets, and proceedings of educational associations. 
 Upon the whole, it must be said that the professional literature re- 
 lating to the subject is now rapidly increasing. 
 
 I. C. K. ADAMS. A Manual of Historical Literature. Compris- 
 ing Brief Descriptions of the Most Important Histories in English, 
 French, and German, together with Practical Suggestions as to 
 Methods and Courses of Historical Study, for the use of Students, 
 General Readers, and Collectors of Books. Omitting the subheads, 
 the chapters are entitled : Introduction, On the Study of History, 
 Universal Histories, Histories of Antiquity, Histories of Greece, of 
 Rome, of the Middle Ages, of Modern Times, of Italy, of Germany, 
 of France, of Russia and Poland, of the Smaller Nationalities of 
 Europe, of England, and of the United States. This work is the 
 most valuable of its kind that American scholarship has produced. 
 
 II. H. B. ADAMS. The Study of History in American Colleges 
 
 2 (xvii)
 
 xviii GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 and Universities. A Circular of Information of the Bureau of Edu- 
 cation. Dr. Adams aims to exhibit the origin, development, and 
 present status of history in the colleges and universities of the 
 United States. The institutions treated at greatest length are Har- 
 vard, Yale, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins Universities, the University 
 of Michigan, and Columbia College, though some others are in- 
 cluded. A chapter is devoted to history and political science in the 
 Washington High School. 
 
 III. E. H. BUNBURY. A History of Ancient Geography among 
 the Greeks and Romans, from the Earliest Ages to the Fall of the 
 Roman Empire. Two volumes, with twenty illustrative maps. 
 
 IV. DR. E. A. FREEMAN. Few historical writers can be studied 
 by advanced students and teachers with more advantage than Dr. 
 Freeman. This is due in part to the diversity of his subjects, to , 
 the thoroughness of his treatment, and to the variety of forms into 
 which he has thrown his studies, but largely to his method and 
 style, which is always strong and clear, with plenty, and sometimes 
 an excess, of emphasis on the main points. Viewing his works from 
 a pedagogical standpoint, the following titles may be given : (1) The 
 Historical Geography of Europe, 2 vols. Vol. I., Text; Vol. II., 
 Maps. Introduction : The Geographical Aspect of Europe, The Ef- 
 fects of Geography on History, and The Geographical Distribution 
 of Races. The chapters bear the following titles : Greece and the 
 Greek Colonies, Formation of the Roman Empire, The Dismember- 
 ment of the Empire, The Final Division of the Empire, The Begin- 
 ning of the Modern European States, The Ecclesiastical Geography 
 of Western Europe, The Imperial Kingdoms, The Kingdom of 
 France, The Eastern Empire, The Baltic Land, The Spanish Penin- 
 sula and its Colonies, and The British Islands and Colonies. The 
 volume of maps is not properly an historical atlas, but is intended 
 to show boundaries of states and changes of political geography. 
 (2) Methods of Historical Study. Eight Lectures read in the Uni- 
 versity of Oxford, with an Inaugural Address entitled The Office of 
 the Historical Professor. The subjects of the lectures are: His- 
 tory and its Kindred Studies, The Difficulties of Historical Study, 
 The Nature of Historical Evidence, Original Authorities, Classi- 
 cal and Mediaeval Writers, Subordinate Authorities, Modern Writ- 
 ers, and Geography and Travel. (3) Comparative Politics. Six 
 Lectures Read before the Royal Institution. (4) The Unity of His- 
 tory. The Rede Lecture before the University of Cambridge. (5)
 
 GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY. XJ X 
 
 The Chief Periods of European History. (In Nos. 4 and 5 Dr. Free- 
 man has developed his favorite ideas of historical unity and conti- 
 nuity.) (6) The Growth of the English Constitution. (7) Good 
 examples of the author's method, as well as good historical work, 
 may be found in the following essays : The Relations between the 
 Crowns of England and Scotland, The Franks and the Gauls, The 
 Continuity of English History, The Holy Roman Empire (First 
 Series) ; Race and Language, The Byzantine Empire (Third Series) ; 
 Historical Cycles and Augustan Ages, The Growth of Common- 
 wealths, The Constitution of the German Empire, and The House 
 of Lords (Fourth Series). Freeman's General Sketch of History is 
 one of the best. In his essay on Lord Macaulay, Dr. Freeman re- 
 marks: "It is for others to judge whether I have learned from 
 Macaulay the art of being clear; I at least learned from Macaulay 
 the duty of trying to be clear.'' He says he learned of him that to 
 be clear a writer must (1) " avoid involved, complicated, parenthet- 
 ical sentences " ; (2) " avoid sentences crowded with relatives and 
 participles " ; (3) and, upon this he lays great stress, " never to be 
 afraid of using the same word over and over again, if by that means 
 anything could be added to clearness or force." He very justly re- 
 marks that Macaulay " never goes on, like some writers, talking 
 about the 'former' and the 'latter,' 'he,' 'she,' 'it,' and 'they,' 
 through clause after clause, while his reader has to look back to see 
 which of several persons it is that is so referred to." He might have 
 added, with equal truth, that Macaulay never, like Gibbon, writes 
 history allusively, assuming that the reader has the facts already in 
 his possession, and that it is the author's business merely to dis- 
 course or comment upon them ; but that, on the other hand, Macau- 
 lay always looks his facts squarely in the face, and proceeds to state 
 them in a straightforward manner, a virtue that is also exemplified 
 by Dr. Freeman himself. 
 
 V. H. GANNETT. Boundaries of the United States and of the 
 Several States and Territories, with a Historical Sketch of the Ter- 
 ritorial Changes. Bulletin of the United States Geological Survey, 
 No. 13. 
 
 VI. S. R. GARDINER. A School Atlas of English History. 
 
 VII. G. S. HALL. Methods of Teaching History. The first edi- 
 tion of this work contained Dr. Diesterweg's valuable treatise, In- 
 struction in History, but it has been excluded from the revised edi- 
 tion, and is now published separately. The contents of the book are
 
 xx GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 the following : Introduction, Methods of Teaching American History, 
 Practical Methods in Higher Historical Instruction, On Methods of 
 teaching Political Economy, Historical Instruction in the Course 
 of History and Political Science at Cornell University, Advice to an 
 Inexperienced Teacher, A Plea for Archaeological Instruction, The 
 Use of a Public Library in the Study of History, Special Methods of 
 Historical Study, The Philosophy of the State and of History, The 
 Course of Study in History, Roman Law, and Political Economy at 
 Harvard University, The Teaching of History, On Methods of 
 teaching History, On Methods of Historical Study and Research in 
 Columbia University, Physical Geography and History, Why do 
 Children dislike History? Gradation and Topical Method of His- 
 torical Study, Part 1., Historical Literature and Authorities, Part 
 II., Books for Collateral Reading, Part III., School Text-Books, 
 Supplement, History Topics, Bibliography of Church History. 
 These chapters are the work of distinguished specialists, and the 
 book is one of great value for the student and teacher. 
 
 VIII. A. B. HART. Epoch Maps illustrative of American History. 
 
 IX. E. F. HENDERSON. Select Historical Documents of the Mid- 
 dle Ages. 
 
 X. ALEX. JOHNSTON. History of American Politics. Third Edi- 
 tion Revised and Enlarged by Professor Sloane. A book that made 
 its author a reputation. 
 
 XI. J. J. LALOR. Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Econ- 
 omy, and United States History. The articles on American History 
 contributed to this Cyclopaedia by the late Alexander Johnston are 
 remarkable for clearness of insight and felicity of statement. 
 
 XII. E. LAVISSE. General View of the Political History of Eu- 
 rope. An admirable book for the teacher who can grasp its bold 
 generalizations. 
 
 XIII. T. MAcCouN. A Historical Geography of the United 
 States, Historical Charts of the United States. 
 
 XIV. C. PLOETZ. Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern History. 
 
 XV. H. W. PRESTON. Documents illustrative of American His- 
 tory, 1606-1868, with Introduction and References. 
 
 XVI. F. W. PUTZGER. Historischer Schulatlas zur Alten Mitt- 
 leren und Neuer Geschichte. 
 
 XVII. E. RECLUS. The Earth and its Inhabitants. 
 
 XVIII. N. S. SHALER. Nature and Man in America ; The United 
 States of America.
 
 GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY. xx i 
 
 XIX. W. STUBBS. The Study of Mediaeval and Modern History. 
 Seventeen Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford. Every- 
 thing that Bishop Stubbs has written, apart from its historical 
 value, has pedagogic merit. The following lectures may be particu- 
 larized : I. Inaugural. II.-III. On the Present State and Prospects 
 of Historical Study. IV. On the Purposes and Methods of Histor- 
 ical Study. V. Methods of Historical Study. VI.-VII. On the 
 Characteristic Differences between Mediaeval and Modern History. 
 
 XX. J. WINSOR. Narrative and Critical History of America: 
 Vol. I. Aboriginal America. II. Spanish Explorations and Settle- 
 ments from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century. III. English 
 Explorations and Settlements in North America, 1497-1689. IV. 
 French Explorations and Settlements in North America, and those 
 of the Portuguese, Dutch, and Swedes, 1500-1700. V. The English 
 and French in North America, 1689-1763. VI.-VII. The United 
 States of North America. VIII. The Later History of British, 
 Spanish, and Portuguese America. This monumental work, prepared 
 by specialists on the co-operative plan, is less valuable for its narra- 
 tive than for its critical portions. For students who can handle 
 such an apparatus, its critical essays, bibliographies, catalogues and 
 descriptions of maps, and editorial notes are invaluable. Mr. 
 Winsor's later contributions to American history are : Christopher 
 Columbus, Cartier to Frontenac, The Mississippi Basin. (These lat- 
 ter are considerably abridged.) 
 
 The following works deal more with the pedagogical side of his- 
 tory: 
 
 Frederic Harrison : The Meaning of History. 
 
 W. H. Mace: A Working Manual of American History for 
 Teachers and Students. A useful book for teachers in the elemen- 
 tary schools, and for teachers and pupils in high schools. 
 
 Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart: Guide to the 
 Study of American History. This is a book of distinctly high grade, 
 and the most useful manual of the kind that has been published.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 EDITOR'S PREFACE v 
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE . . . . . . . xiii 
 
 I. THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY ... 1 
 
 II. THE FIELD OF HISTORY 18 
 
 III. SOURCES OF INFORMATION 27 
 
 IV. THE CHOICE OF FACTS 42 
 
 V. METHODS OF TEACHING 53 
 
 VI. THE ORGANIZATION OF FACTS 67 
 
 VII. THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY . 75 
 
 VIII. THE PLACE RELATION: GEOGRAPHY ... 92 
 
 IX. CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HISTORY . . . 101 
 
 X. PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY . . 110 
 
 XI. HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY . . . 127 
 
 XII. THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS .... 138 
 
 XIII. HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD . . 153 
 
 XIV. HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD . . 174 
 
 XV. NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE 192 
 
 XVI. THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA . . . 204 
 XVII. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND 
 
 IN NORTH AMERICA 219 
 
 XVIII. A CONSPECTUS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION . 231 
 
 XIX THE WAR OF 1812 245 
 
 XX. THE TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES . 253 
 XXI. PHASES OF INDUSTRIAL AND POLITICAL DEVELOP- 
 MENT 277 
 
 XXII. THE SLAVK POWER 297 
 
 XXIII. TEACHING Civics 314 
 
 (MiU)
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH 
 HISTORY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 
 
 References. Formal discussions of the educational value of his- 
 tory, or at least thorough ones, are hardly to be found in the Eng- 
 lish language. Valuable remarks, however, will be found in the 
 following sources : 
 
 Bolingbroke : Letters on the Study and Use of History ; Diester- 
 weg : Instruction in History (I. The Meaning of History, II. On the 
 Use of History) ; Milton : Tractate on Education ; Locke : Thoughts 
 on Education ; Carlyle : Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (History) ; 
 Macaulay: Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (History, Hallam's 
 Constitutional History of Europe, Mackintosh's History of the Rev- 
 olution in England, 1688, and Mitford's History of Greece) : John 
 Morley : Critical Miscellanies, Second Series (Popular Culture) ; Em- 
 erson: Essays (History); Dr. Thomas Arnold: Lectures on Mod- 
 ern History (Inaugural Lecture); Lecky: The Political Value of 
 History, A Lecture; Spencer: Education (I. What Knowledge is 
 of most Worth f) ; Wells : The Teaching of History in Schools, An 
 Oxford Extension Lecture; Stubbs: The Study of Mediaeval and 
 Modern History (see particularly I. and II.) ; Howell : Education, I. 
 {History in its Relation to Practical Life); Birrell: Obiter Dicta (The 
 Muse of History) ; C. K. Adams : Manual of Historical Literature 
 (Introduction, On the Study of History); Schaff: History of the 
 Christian Church, I. (General Introduction), History of the Apos- 
 tolic Church (General Introduction to Church History) ; Guizot : His-
 
 2 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 tory of Civilization (passim) ; Jay : Papers of the American Histor- 
 ical Association, V., Nos. 1, 2 (The Demand for Education in Ameri- 
 can History). 
 
 The pedagogical writers deal with the subject from their own 
 point of view. Bain : Education as a Science, VIII. ; Compayre : 
 Theoretical and Practical Pedagogy, Part II., Chap. V. ; Currie : 
 Principles and Practice of Common School Education, XII. ; Pitch : 
 Lectures on Teaching, XIII. ; Klemm : European Schools, II., III. 
 
 WHY should we teach the history of the United States 
 in the schools of the country ? The question is part of a 
 larger one, Why teach history at all ? And this question 
 can not be answered without taking some account of the uses 
 and values of studies in general. These may be divided into 
 four groups. 
 
 First, the instrumental studies are those that are used in 
 carrying on other studies and in other similar mental work. 
 Writing is an instrument of impartation, and also an instru- 
 ment of record. It is the art preservative of arts. Heading, 
 on the other hand, is an art of acquirement. It unlocks the 
 printed page. Notation, numeration, and the other funda- 
 mental rules of arithmetic are also instrumental ; and the 
 same may be said of drawing, musical notation, and the 
 various kinds of symbolism employed for different purposes. 
 These studies or arts have a certain value in themselves, 
 but they are primarily tools for further acquisition or im- 
 partation. 
 
 Secondly, some studies give us knowledge that is directly 
 useful in practical affairs. These are the guidance or in- 
 formation studies. While the instrumental studies look to 
 further acquirement, these find their uses in the duties and 
 activities of real life. As far as they go, they tell us what 
 to do and what not to do. They inform the mind. Some of 
 them are preparatory to other studies, but this is only a sec- 
 ondary reason for carrying them on. They all have disci- 
 plinary value, but this fact does not determine their clas- 
 sification. Into this group fall such studies as geography, 
 physiology and hygiene, and many more.
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 3 
 
 Thirdly, the disciplinary studies exercise and so develop 
 or strengthen the mental powers. Some of them lead on to 
 other studies, as arithmetic to algebra; but they are not 
 pursued primarily for this reason. Some of them have 
 guidance value, but this is not their characteristic function. 
 The disciplines form the mind, and this fact determines their 
 classification. Into this group fall the mathematics, science, 
 and language. 
 
 Fourthly, culture is the slowly maturing fruit of a silent 
 feeding of the soul upon nourishing ideas. While discipline 
 looks to volume of mental power, culture looks to its kind. 
 Culture is the tone of power rather than its amount or in- 
 tensity. It is a qualitative rather than a quantitative word. 
 And the culture studies are those that conduce to such 
 results. Literature and art are typical studies of this group. 
 
 Of the many remarks that this mapping out of studies 
 suggests, perhaps the most obvious is that the several groups 
 overlap one another. There is discipline in the instrumental 
 and information studies ; information and guidance in the 
 disciplinary studies ; and so on. In fact, if we were to 
 make a close analysis, we should base it on the elements of 
 studies rather than on studies considered as units. A further 
 observation is that studies belonging to the same group are 
 by no means equal in respect to the amount of value that 
 they possess. They differ widely in this respect. It should 
 also be remarked that the value of a study is relative to the 
 pupil, as respects both the character of his mind and his 
 stage of mental advancement. One person may get most 
 discipline, for example, out of science, another most out of 
 language ; while arithmetic belongs to an early stage of 
 mathematical study, calculus to a late one. But the discus- 
 sion of these questions belongs to a treatise on Educational 
 Values. The division of studies into the instrumental, the 
 disciplinary, the guidance, and the culture groups, with the 
 explanatory observations offered, is all-sufficient for the 
 present purpose. 
 
 The further observation should be added that man's na-
 
 4 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 ture is complex ; he has not merely an intellect to be formed 
 and furnished, but also a sensibility to be affected and a will 
 to be energized. 
 
 It is now necessary to test history by these criteria in 
 other words, to determine the nature of its effects upon the 
 mind. Nor will this be sufficient ; we must also estimate, 
 approximately at least, the amount or quantity of educa- 
 tional value wherever it arises. But properly to reach these 
 ends we must consider what history is. 
 
 1. The staple or subject-matter is facts. This staple does 
 not differ in kind from the " practical knowledge " or " useful 
 information " so much prized by the practical man. Service- 
 able knowledge about the things going on in the world 
 when picked up by observation, gleaned from the press, or 
 gathered in conversation, is what Dr. Fitch calls " fact lore " ; 
 similar knowledge of what has gone on in the world, when 
 learned from books and not from tradition, is history. A 
 journal or newspaper presents a transcript of current life, a 
 history a transcript of past life. 
 
 History, then, deals with man in his proper human sphere 
 or capacity. It is knowledge of the workings of his intellect, 
 feelings, and will, especially as these workings reveal them- 
 selves in objective facts laws, cities, battles, religions, and 
 the like. It is therefore moral knowledge knowledge of 
 the play and activity of man's spiritual nature. 
 
 Evidently, there is the widest difference between history 
 and mathematics or logic in two respects. The first in its 
 elementary form is a fact study ; the other two begin with 
 definitions and axioms and proceed by logical deduction. 
 History moves in the all-important field of moral freedom ; 
 mathematics and logic, in the field of necessary inference. 
 
 2. Historical material must be elaborated and combined. 
 Historical facts by themselves are not history. They must 
 be worked up ; or, to use a better figure, they must be or- 
 ganized that is, be brought together and integrated with 
 reference to their relations. 
 
 3. History also tests its own results ; it seeks to verify
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 5 
 
 its own facts and conclusions. In order to do this, it must 
 take account of its methods and processes of investigation. 
 The reflective treatment of historical method falls, indeed, 
 to the philosopher; but its essential nature and practical 
 application must also engage the attention of the historical 
 student. 
 
 I. From the foregoing account it is manifest that his- 
 tory has great guidance value. As information, we may 
 well hesitate before we assign to any school study a higher 
 rank. In a great number and variety of matters experi- 
 ence is the lamp to a man's feet and the guide to his path. 
 No doubt oral knowledge immediately influences his con- 
 duct to a greater degree ; but in the long run history is the 
 great channel that conveys to him the past experiences of 
 the race. In politics, in religion,* in morals, in education, 
 and in economical, social, and industrial life it is indispen- 
 sable. This is why Cicero called history "the witness of 
 times, the light of truth, and the mistress of life " ; and why 
 Diodorus styled it " a handmaid of Providence, a priestess of 
 truth, and a mother of life." Hereafter something will be 
 said of the periods, epochs, and ages of history, and of the 
 profound influence that the idea of evolution has recently 
 exerted in modifying the ways in which it is written and 
 taught ; here it is necessary to observe that no man, or gen- 
 eration, or nation begins life anew, but that historical move- 
 ment is necessarily uninterrupted and continuous. In the 
 words of Dr. Schaff : u The present is the fruit of the past 
 and the germ of the future. No work can stand unless it 
 grows out of the real wants of the age and strikes firm root 
 in the soil of history. No one who tramples on the rights 
 of a past generation can claim the regard of its posterity. 
 
 * " While of all studies in the whole range of knowledge the study of 
 law aflbrds the most conservative training, so the study of modern his- 
 tory is, next to theology itself, and only next in so far as theology rests on 
 a divine revelation, the most thoroughly religious training that the mind 
 can receive." Bishop Stubbs.
 
 6 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 History will disregard him who disregards her." That is r 
 no man who sets at naught the lessons that history trans- 
 mits to him can hope to transmit influence to the future. 
 
 Bolingbroke quotes Dyonysius of Halicarnassus, "His- 
 tory is philosophy teaching by examples." Moreover, it is 
 the only channel through which philosophy can directly in- 
 struct or influence a majority of mankind. The typical fact 
 or story of the historian will make a lodgment in minds that 
 the generalizations of the philosopher can never enter. 
 
 Truth embodied in a tale 
 Shall enter in at lowly doors. 
 
 It is the old distinction between the concrete and the ab- 
 stract, the particular and the general, example and precept. 
 
 The practical value of history is a commonplace. A 
 few of the many testimonies to its use may be transcribed. 
 
 Milton. Children are to know the beginning, end, and reasons 
 of political societies, and to dive into the grounds of law and legal 
 justice. 
 
 Guizot. History is a great school of truth, reason, and virtue. 
 
 Locke. I recommend it to one who hath well settled in his mind 
 the principles of morality, and knows how to make a judgment on 
 the actions of men as one of the most useful studies he can apply 
 himself to. There he shall see a picture of the world and the na- 
 ture of mankind, and so learn to think of men as they are. There 
 he shall see the rise of opinions, and find from what slight and 
 sometimes shameful occasions some of them have taken their rise, 
 which yet afterward have had great authority and passed almost 
 for sacred in the world, and borne down all before them. There 
 also one may learn great and useful instructions of prudence, and be 
 warned against the cheats and rogueries of the world, with many 
 more advantages which I shall not here enumerate. 
 
 Carlyle. Clio was prefigured by the ancients as the eldest 
 daughter of Memory, and chief of the Muses; which dignity, 
 whether we regard the essential qualities of her art, or its practice 
 and acceptance among men, we shall still find to have been fitly 
 bestowed. History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 7 
 
 first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest expres- 
 sion of what can be called thought. . . . Let us search more and 
 more into the past ; let all men explore it as the true fountain of 
 knowledge, by whose light alone, consciously or unconsciously fern- 
 ployed, can the present or the future be interpreted or guessed at. 
 
 Macaulay. Many truths, too, would be learned, which can be 
 learned in no other manner. As the history of states is generally 
 written, the greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come 
 upon them like siipernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. 
 But the fact is, that such revolutions are almost always the conse- 
 quences of moral changes, which have gradually passed on the mass 
 of the community, and which ordinarily proceed far, before their 
 progress is indicated by any public measure. An intimate knowl- 
 edge of the domestic history of nations is therefore absolutely neces- 
 sary to the prognosis of political events. A narrative, defective in 
 this respect, is as useless as a medical treatise which should pass by 
 all the symptoms attendant on the early stage of a disease, and men- 
 tion only what occurs when the patient is beyond the reach of 
 remedies. 
 
 Morley. It is the present that really interests us ; it is the pres- 
 ent that we seek to understand and to explain. I do not in the 
 least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables 
 me to see my way more clearly through what is happening to-day. 
 I want to know what men thought and did in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, not out of any dilettante or idle antiquarian's curiosity, but be- 
 cause the thirteenth century is at the root of what men think and 
 do in the nineteenth. 
 
 Mr. Morley goes too far. While history is at bottom a 
 guidance study, it still does much more for the mind than 
 simply to furnish it some practical lessons. Professor Seeley 
 comes nearer the truth when he says, " History should not 
 merely gratify the reader's curiosity about the past, but 
 modify his views of the present." 
 
 II. While slight attention suffices to show that history 
 has disciplinary value, some well-directed thought is re- 
 quired to discover how great and varied this value is. 
 
 1. Taught even in the poorest way that is, by dint of 
 iterating and reiterating unorganized facts it trains the
 
 8 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 memory ; taught philosophically that is, care being taken 
 wisely to choose and properly to organize the facts it yields 
 to no other subject in mnemonic value. It has been said 
 that history is a fact study ; it will be shown hereafter that 
 its facts are readily capable of complete organization by 
 means of those great associating activities time, place, and 
 cause and effect. 
 
 2. All that has been urged concerning the memory will 
 be admitted. But that history is an equally valuable disci- 
 pline of the imagination has not been as generally per- 
 ceived. History is man-picturing, as geography is earth- 
 picturing. At this point teachers and writers have made 
 great mistakes. Only too often have they assumed that to 
 teach this subject nothing more is necessary than to lodge 
 in the memory masses of dry and unrelated facts dates, 
 names, statistics, and the like ; whereas, it is rather reveal- 
 ing to the mind's eye the whole movement that constitutes 
 the life of a man, a city, or a nation, or some selected portion 
 of such movement. No mind can take in such a scene as 
 Caesar's death, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, or the appear- 
 ance of Maria Theresa with her youthful son before the 
 Hungarian nobles, without the active employment of his 
 imaginative faculties ; and much less such complicated 
 scenes and series of historical transactions as the Seven 
 Years' War or the growth of the United States. For this 
 purpose an active imagination is as necessary as in painting 
 a battle-scene on canvas. What power is called for even to 
 glance over the field surveyed by Gibbon in the Decline 
 and Fall of the Roman Empire, and how valuable is the 
 resulting discipline ! To a pupil of a dull and wingless 
 mind the river of time is but a name, as the Amazon is 
 only a line of ink on a sheet of paper. 
 
 3. But history does far more for the mind than merely 
 to exercise the powers of representation ; it is also a valu- 
 able discipline of the thinking faculties. 
 
 First, analysis is involved in the recognition of the facts 
 with which we deal. Complex facts must be resolved into
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 9 
 
 simple ones. Many facts called simple are really complex* 
 and must be analyzed before they can be understood. Ar- 
 nold's treason is a fact, but one composed of many minor 
 facts. Our Civil War is a fact, but one that sums up volumes 
 of history. History makes an equally strong appeal to the 
 faculty of comparison or judgment. Events and characters 
 are a constant challenge to the balancing power of the mind. 
 This is strikingly true of such writings as Plutarch's Paral- 
 lel Lives, and also in some degree of the simplest historical 
 compositions. Then judgment passes into reasoning or 
 thinking proper. Here the characteristic mental act is in- 
 ference, or the drawing of conclusions from premises. If 
 the study consists of the mere committing to memory of 
 facts, it will do little for any of the logical powers ; but 
 studied philosophically, due attention being paid to the dis- 
 covery of relations and the criticism of method, it becomes 
 a noble exercise of thought. Nicely to observe chrono- 
 logical connections and geographical conditions, carefully to 
 search out causes, is thinking no less than solving mathe- 
 matical problems. This is why Bishop Stubbs contends that 
 history is a good school of the judgment. Thus, while his- 
 tory is primarily a fact study and not a logical study, it is by 
 no means destitute of valuable logical elements. The argu- 
 ment on this point can not, however, be fully stated, until 
 we take account of the nature of historical subject-matter. 
 
 As remarked above, historical knowledge is moral knowl- 
 edge. Mathematical studies deal with certain data and their 
 method is demonstration. They start with definitions and 
 axioms that are intuitively perceived, and proceed by neces- 
 sary inference to inevitable conclusions. There is no gath- 
 ering of facts, no balancing of opposite arguments, no halt- 
 ing or hesitation. There can be no looking at the other side, 
 because there is no other side. Uncertainty is an impossible 
 state of mind. Very different are the problems of practical 
 life, springing out of the relations of human beings. Very 
 different the transaction of human business. Here we ac- 
 cumulate data, weigh the force of opposing evidence, recon- 
 3
 
 10 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 cile contradictory views, and at last reach probable conclu- 
 sions. No merchant, manufacturer, or ship-owner can dem- 
 onstrate that a given venture will be successful. Generals 
 can not certainly predict the issue of battles and campaigns ; 
 if they could, battles would not be fought or campaigns be 
 waged. Politicians are not absolutely sure that canvasses 
 and elections will turn out so and so. And so it is with the 
 teacher, the preacher, and the moralist. 
 
 In historical matters the process of making up one's 
 mind is a kind of moral bookkeeping : some items are en- 
 tered on the credit side and some on the debit side of the 
 ledger, and then a balance is struck between them. Hence 
 it is that, as one has said, " the most important gift, after all, 
 of a citizen in such a profession as politics, or law, or medi- 
 cine, or teaching, or war, is ability in the selection of the 
 premises from which the solution of the various problems 
 of life is to be extracted. In fact, soundness of judgment 
 and clearness of perception in collecting and arranging these 
 premises is a large part of each man's or woman's work in 
 the world." The moral world is, indeed, governed by laws 
 fixed and unalterable : what a man sows, that he also reaps, 
 is the fundamental fact ; but a large majority of its situa- 
 tions and problems, and all its difficult ones, combine oppo- 
 site and confusing elements. 
 
 Now, mathematical and scientific discipline enables the 
 mind to deal with those subjects, both numerous and im- 
 portant, into which demonstration enters, but does not nec- 
 essarily enable it to handle the elements of probability, or 
 human questions. On the contrary, it may even unfit the 
 mind for such work. As the writer just quoted remarks : 
 " The mathematician's data are all provided for him with 
 the utmost precision, and he is forbidden to add thereto or 
 take away therefrom one jot or tittle. Consequently, it is 
 possible to be a great mathematician indeed, and be at the 
 same time a very ordinary person in most other fields of 
 mental activity, and especially in what may be called, using 
 the term in its largest sense, the transaction of human busi-
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. H 
 
 ness." It has also been said that an exclusive study of bio- 
 logical science "may incapacitate one for what is of all 
 things most practical, namely, historical reasoning." Hence 
 we must resort to some other source than mathematics or 
 science for this kind of discipline. And when we remem- 
 ber that historical knowledge is moral knowledge ; that its 
 subject-matter is the doings of human beings ; in a word, 
 that it moves in the wide field of freedom and so of proba- 
 bility, we discover that we have in history the very disci- 
 pline that we need. 
 
 As the author of several well-known historical text-books 
 says, " The object of teaching history is not to cram with 
 facts and dates (useful and indeed necessary as these are), 
 but to awaken thought, and especially to teach the habit of 
 thinking intelligently about the political events of our own 
 and other countries." A second writer speaks of "that in- 
 sight into character, that training of judgment and sym- 
 pathy to which the detailed study of a historical special 
 subject may help " the student. Still a third tells us that his- 
 tory embraces " to a great extent the principles on which the 
 every-day life of the world around us is being conducted." 
 
 But there is even more involved in the matter than has 
 yet appeared. To the mere perception of an object that is, 
 its recognition as present to the mind apperception adds 
 its inward digestion and assimilation; or, as one has said, 
 " We identify the object, or those features of it which were 
 familiar to us before; we recognize it; we explain it; we 
 interpret the new by our previous knowledge, and thus are 
 enabled to proceed from the known to the unknown, and 
 make new acquisitions ; in recognizing the object we classify 
 it under various general classes ; in identifying it with 
 what we have seen before, we note also the differences 
 which characterize the new object, and lead to the definition 
 of new species or varieties." * It is impossible to exaggerate 
 
 * Dr. W. T. Harris. Preface to A Text-Book in Psychology, by Her- 
 bait, International Education Series.
 
 12 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 the importance of our present knowledge as a means to 
 further acquisition ; and yet many teachers seem not to ap- 
 preciate, or not fully to appreciate, the relation between the 
 two. 
 
 Now, a young person on admission to the world of man 
 is immersed in a sea of facts wholly different in their nature 
 from the facts of the material world. They are facts of the 
 human mind, facts of the intellect, and, what are still more 
 difficult, facts of the sensibility and the will ; and the most 
 important question concerning his education is, How has 
 this education prepared him for this new world? Reference 
 is made, of course, to the time when the youth assumes a 
 separate place in the social body, independently of parent or 
 tutor. It may be said that this step is progressively taken, 
 and not all at once ; also, that antecedent life is the best 
 possible training for work in the new sphere, which is in 
 fact but an extension of the old sphere ; but the fact still 
 remains that the youth requires a careful discipline under 
 the hand of a competent teacher in those studies which look 
 immediately to social activities. And among these studies 
 history must be inscribed. 
 
 It may be objected that historical questions are not practi- 
 cal questions ; that they come from books and documents, 
 and not from the haunts of living men instinct with thought, 
 passion, and will. There is truth in this view ; no proper 
 school subject is just like real life, while history can be made 
 almost as abstract as mathematics itself. The reply is, that 
 no other school subject, save possibly certain forms of litera- 
 ture, comes so near to real life, and that the dry abstractnet3 
 so often complained of is mainly the fault of the author anf 
 the teacher. If the teacher deals with human beings, and 
 not merely with names, dates, and other items of fact, there 
 will be no lack of interest. It should also be observed that 
 the fact just maintained is to a degree a point of advaiitag-e. 
 Both history and politics are great educative powers, but 
 history has this advantage over politics, that it enlists less 
 passion and prejudice, and so is a better school of the judg-
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 13 
 
 ment. On a similar ground Bishop Stubbs argues that 
 ancient and mediaeval history surpass modern and recent 
 history as such a discipline. And yet he truly says, " The 
 subject-matter of modern historical inquiry has peculiar ad- 
 vantages for the training of the powers most constantly in 
 exercise in a practical generation." 
 
 III. On this division of the subject a few words will suf- 
 fice. Mr. Matthew Arnold tells us that the great source of 
 culture is the best things that have been thought and said. 
 Why not add, " and done " ? But whether we include deeds 
 as well as words and thoughts in the formula or not, argu- 
 ment is not necessary to show that history enriches and 
 adorns the mind with noble ideas. Its natural affiliations 
 are not with mathematics or science, but with literature, 
 which the great writer just named considered the true source 
 of culture. There is a truth lurking in the Greek conception 
 of the Muse of History. 
 
 The idea that there are studies which, on account of their 
 peculiar influence on the mind, may appropriately be called 
 humanity, or the humanities, originated in antiquity. Says 
 Aulus Gellius: " Humanitas that is, instruction in good 
 arts, the which whosoever truly take to and seek after are 
 in very deed most human. For the caring for this knowl- 
 edge and its discipline out of all living things is given to 
 human beings only ; and therefore hath it been called hu- 
 manitas." The humanities are the man-studies ; they liber- 
 alize the mind, freeing it from prejudice, narrowness, selfish- 
 ness. History is one of the group, and in some aspects the 
 noblest of the group. " The real use of traveling to distant 
 countries and of studying the annals of past times," says 
 Macaulay, " is to preserve men from the contraction of mind 
 which those can hardly escape whose whole communion is 
 with one generation and one neighborhood, who arrive at 
 conclusions by means of an induction not sufficiently copi- 
 ous, and who therefore constantly confound exceptions with 
 rules and accidents with essential properties." And again: 
 " The student, like the tourist, is transported into a new
 
 14 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 state of society. He sees new fashions. He hears new 
 models of expression. His mind is enlarged by contem- 
 plating the wide diversities of laws, of morals, and of man- 
 ners." 
 
 IV. History furnishes motive power as well as guidance. 
 It is oar or sail, and not merely chart and rudder. Men 
 who are chosen as models, or who are imitated without con- 
 scious choice, furnish impulse as well as a pattern to those 
 who imitate them. This is the great reason why moral ex- 
 ample is so effective. To the common mind, there is far 
 more energy in a man or a life than in an idea or a creed. 
 
 One of the best known forms of motive power is the 
 patriotic sentiment or love of country. And it is mainly 
 at the altar of history that patriotism feeds her fires. The 
 patriotic orator or poet indeed invokes the inspiration of the 
 mountains and rivers, the vales and hills, the firesides and 
 battlefields, of the fatherland or the mother country; but 
 this is only because these material monuments are the im- 
 perishable symbols of the deeds and thoughts of men that 
 are associated with them. It was not the plain of Marathon 
 that expanded the soul of Demosthenes, but the generous 
 souls that perished there in the tremendous struggle that 
 Greece waged against the barbaric power of Asia. It is not 
 the Concord turf that fires the heart and brain of the patriot, 
 nerves his will, strengthens his purpose, or renews his hope, 
 but the memory that 
 
 Here once the embattled farmers stood 
 And fired the shot heard round the world. 
 
 As Mr. Lincoln said at Gettysburg, what the soldiers who 
 fell in that great strife did, and not what he or others might 
 say about it, makes that name immortal. The flag, be it the 
 Union Jack, the tricolor, or the Stars and Stripes, is not the 
 piece of parti-colored silk ; it is the national emblem for 
 which patriots have suffered and died. What charms the 
 traveler visiting foreign countries is not always, or perhaps 
 commonly, the scenery considered as plain or valley, sea or
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 15 
 
 mountain, but the human associations with which these are 
 invested. As a great geographer * has said : 
 
 The admiration with which travelers behold Greece is due, above 
 all, to the memories attaching to every one of its ruins, the smallest 
 among its rivulets, and the most insignificant rock in its seas. 
 Scenery in Provence or in Spain, though it may surpass in grace or 
 boldness of outline anything to be seen in Greece, is appreciated 
 only by a few. The mass go past it without emotion, for names like 
 Marathon, Leuctra, or Platsea are not connected with it, and the 
 rustle of bygone ages is not heard. 
 
 No people were ever more patriotic than the Jews ; with 
 them, love of country has often passed beyond enthusiasm 
 into fanaticism. And what is the cause of this extraordinary 
 fervor ? Far more than anything else it is the stress laid 
 on the national history as the means of forming the youth- 
 ful character. Not only in the family and in the school, 
 but in the synagogue, the study of the great poets, warriors, 
 prophets, and rulers of Israel has been strongly emphasized. 
 
 Of late much attention has been paid to teaching patriot- 
 ism in the schools of our country. The spectacular means 
 so frequently resorted to serve a certain purpose, but in the 
 long run the great means of teaching patriotism must be 
 history and literature. Study of the times that tried men's 
 souls tends to form souls that are capable of enduring trial. 
 
 Education should have respect to all the powers of the 
 mind. It should aim at developing all the faculties of 
 the perceptive, representative, and reflective groups. More 
 than this, it should, as far as practicable, exercise them upon 
 subjects appropriate to prepare them for dealing with all the 
 great groups of activities. So much will be admitted, t 
 
 * Keclus : The Earth and its Inhabitants, vol. i, 38. 1882. 
 
 t Discussing the points to be aimed at in teaching history, Mr. J. Wells, 
 cf Wadham College, Oxford, sums up as follows : 
 
 " 1. Of course, to educate our children. 
 
 " 2. To give them some idea, so far as possible, of their duties as citizens; 
 to make them, in Milton's words, ' steadfast pillars of the state.'
 
 16 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 It is quite unnecessary to enlarge upon the general ob- 
 servation that, if history is made the noble educational agent 
 which has been described, it must be properly studied and 
 taught. But to a single point some remarks may be directed. 
 
 Since the elements of history are facts to be remembered, 
 the student from first to last relies more upon his memory 
 than the student of mathematics or the sciences. Again, 
 history is the storehouse of human experience, the mirror 
 of past ages. It is therefore the typical study as respects 
 the conservative faculties of the mind and the conservative 
 tendencies of society. At this point it is that a word of 
 caution needs to be spoken. If the facts of history are 
 taught simply or mainly to be remembered ; if the teacher 
 considers the pupil's mind only a receptacle to be filled ; if 
 the student's sole ambition is " to kno w " a great deal of his- 
 tory then the powers of analysis, comparison, and infer- 
 ence will be but feebly developed. Nay, more; the mind 
 will take on a conservative cast, facing backward rather 
 than forward, and so be unfitted for useful initiative in prac- 
 tical affairs. Rightly studied, history has a strongly sober- 
 ing effect upon the mind, in which fact consists much of its 
 value ; taught as a mnemonic exercise, it becomes a burden 
 and an obstacle to progress. No country is, or perhaps 
 can be, more thoroughly saturated with historicalism than 
 China. " A Chinese memorial," it has been said, u is noth- 
 ing if not historical ; nor has any argument a chance of 
 acceptance which is not based upon precedent." What 
 China is, I need not pause to tell. The results are all the 
 worse if history is regarded as a necessary evolution, in which 
 the individual will counts for nothing, because history be- 
 comes then a bar to free individual and social movement. 
 
 " 3. To make them love England, to use the phrase of Macaulay, ' as the 
 Athenians loved the city of the violet crown.' 
 
 " 4. To make them interested in those hits of Old England which are 
 always round them in buildings, in institutions, in offices." The Teaching 
 of History in Schools, London, 1892, 16.
 
 THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 17 
 
 Germane to the subject also is the undoubted fact that an 
 exclusive study of one's own country, especially when the 
 student is narrow-minded to begin with, tends to conceit. 
 Witness the enormous complacency of the Chinese. Hap- 
 pily, an efficient corrective is furnished by general history, 
 and particularly by the careful study of other countries. 
 Here comes in that mental enlargement, that acquaintance 
 and sympathy with other lands and ages, which entitles 
 history to rank as one of the humanities. 
 
 The question may be asked, Why preface a book on teach- 
 ing history that is designed to be practical with a disserta- 
 tion on its educational uses ? The question is pertinent, 
 especially as the answer will show that the practical and the 
 theoretical can not be separated. 
 
 Dr. Arnold said, " It is clear that in whatever it is our 
 duty to act, those matters also it is our duty to study." The 
 teacher's function as an instructor is determined by the rela- 
 tions of knowledge to the mind, or it is rather to cause his 
 pupil to use knowledge in such a way as to promote proper 
 mental growth. As a former of minds, he has no duty to 
 perform that is not included in this generalization. That 
 the teacher may successfully prosecute his art, he must 
 know 
 
 1. The activities of the mind, their nature and relations, 
 and their respective values as determined by the facts of life, 
 individual and social ; or, in other words, he must have an 
 educational ideal. 
 
 2. The varieties of knowledge or, as Bacon called them, 
 the " knowledges " and their power to stimulate and form 
 the mind, in respect both to quantity and quality ; or he 
 must have worked out, partially at least, the problem of 
 educational values. 
 
 The person who has this knowledge conjoined with skill 
 in bringing knowledge, or the world, and the mind into vital 
 relation, can successfully discharge the function of a teacher, 
 and only such person can do so.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE FIELD OF HISTORY. 
 
 References. Diesterweg. Spencer, Carlyle, and Macaulay : same 
 references as in previous chapter ; Green : A Short History of the 
 English People (author's preface to the original edition, and Mrs. 
 Green's preface to the revised edition) ; McMaster : A History of the 
 People of the United States (Introduction). 
 
 IN the broadest sense, history is the story of man living 
 in social relations in the world, as traced in various records 
 and memorials. More narrowly, it is the story of man liv- 
 ing in the higher social relations that constitute the civil 
 state or civilization. Dr. Arnold calls history " the biogra- 
 phy of a political society or commonwealth," meaning by 
 these terms a state. 
 
 The writer who set the earliest copy of historical com- 
 position that has come down to us, thus states his purpose : 
 "This is a publication of the researches of Herodotus of 
 Halicarnassus, in order that the actions of men may not be 
 effaced by time, nor the great and wondrous deeds dis- 
 played both by Greeks and Barbarians deprived of renown ; 
 and among the rest, for which cause they waged war upon 
 each other." Here we have the characteristic feature of 
 our subject. History deals with the actions of men, in con- 
 tradistinction to natural history that deals with the facts of 
 vegetable and animal life. In this all students are agreed. 
 
 History is divisible into two grand departments general 
 and special history. The first deals with man in his broad- 
 est relations. Practically the so-called general or universal 
 histories are all more or less limited, being confined to the
 
 THE FIELD OP HISTORY. 19 
 
 main stream of human movement, to the exclusion of side 
 currents and back waters ; but their name implies that they 
 are histories of the world. Special history, on the other 
 hand, deals with man in his narrower or particular rela- 
 tions. Works falling under this division are occupied with 
 special countries, states, cities, or periods, as Egypt and 
 Greece, Athens and Prussia, Rome and Venice, the Crusades, 
 the Thirty Years' War, and the eighteenth century. An- 
 cient, mediaeval, and modern history are but chronological 
 divisions of general history. On this second point also there 
 is a common agreement. 
 
 Either one of the divisions now described may be con- 
 sidered under two aspects. The student or writer may take 
 a broad view of his subject, covering many different groups 
 of facts ; or he may take a narrow view, confining his atten- 
 tion to some particular group of facts. Proceeding in the 
 first way, he produces either a general history, or a work 
 dealing with some division of it, as the history of Europe, 
 France, or America. Proceeding in the second way, he pro- 
 duces an ecclesiastical history, a constitutional history, a 
 military history, etc. Nor is there any difference of opinion 
 touching this point. 
 
 As to the subject-matter of the special branches of his- 
 tory, there can be no dispute. The ecclesiastical historian is 
 concerned with religion or the Church, the constitutional 
 historian with political institutions, the industrial historian 
 with the employments and occupations of men. But as to 
 history in the broader sense that is, universal history or 
 some selected portion of it there is a wide difference of 
 opinion and practice. All historians agree that this consists 
 of the actions of men, but all do not agree upon the ques- 
 tion, What actions ? This question is so important as to de- 
 mand brief consideration. 
 
 Living in an age when books were few, and in a country 
 where libraries did not exist, Herodotus carried on his re- 
 searches mainly by means of travel and personal inquiry, 
 and there is almost as much reason for calling him the
 
 20 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 father of travellers as the father of historians. He visited 
 in person the principal countries and cities of which he 
 wrote. Giving wide scope to the phrase "the actions of 
 men," he included in his immortal book a varied selection of 
 information scientific theories, geographical descriptions, 
 religious rites, national and tribal manners and customs, 
 personal anecdotes, conversations, speeches, and dialogues, 
 as well as facts relating to governments, dynasties, kings, 
 wars, and conquests. This was a conception of history very 
 natural at a time when the several branches of literature 
 were but faintly differentiated, and it was obviously too 
 broad to be maintained permanently. Still, it was a truer 
 conception than one that has sometimes obtained currency 
 in later times. 
 
 The subsequent development of historical composition 
 need not be marked out. It suffices to say that in time the 
 tendency to confine history closely to the transactions of 
 government and the doings of important personages be- 
 came strong. The court, the camp, and the halls of state 
 now absorb the student's principal attention. A great 
 writer of our own times (Dr. E. A. Freeman) keyed his 
 historical writings to the motto, " History is past poli- 
 tics, politics present history." This is the governmental 
 theory. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in criticising history as 
 formerly taught in the schools of England, and as com- 
 monly written, says it consists of the biographies of mon- 
 archs, court intrigues, plots, usurpations, and the like ; 
 and he demands to be told what it is out of the accu- 
 mulated details making up the narrative, that helps one 
 in deciding on his conduct as a citizen. Lord Macau lay 
 more tersely describes this view of history. "Most peo- 
 ple," he says, "seem to imagine that a detail of public 
 occurrences the operations of sieges, the changes of ad- 
 ministration, the treaties, the conspiracies, the rebellions 
 is a complete history. Historians have, almost without 
 exception, confined themselves to the public transactions 
 of states. "
 
 THE FIELD OF HISTORY. 21 
 
 This narrowing of the field was due to a variety of causes. 
 The term " government " sums up a great number of the im- 
 portant actions of men. Government exemplifies historical 
 continuity better, perhaps, than any other single fact, thus 
 furnishing the best clew through the tangled labyrinth of 
 human affairs, and in its successions and divisions furnishes 
 a good chronological scheme for the organization of histor- 
 ical material. The Greeks counted time by Olympiads, but 
 the Egyptians referred events to reigns and dynasties, the 
 Romans to consular terms, and modern peoples have often 
 followed the Roman and Egyptian examples. Battles and 
 wars are important in themselves, and are also among the 
 most striking and exciting of historical events. Emperors, 
 kings, generals, and other great people rather than the 
 multitude, arrest the attention of the common observer ; and 
 where monarchical ideas prevail, or hero worship abounds, 
 it is not surprising that historians should assign to them an 
 exaggerated importance. Finally, the ever-widening field of 
 human actions practically compels a limitation of the his- 
 torian's view. 
 
 The conception of history that is now most current in 
 English-speaking countries assigns large room to the popular 
 element. It originated in democratic ideas, and it gives the 
 first place to the people or the nation. Writing to one of 
 his correspondents about his History previous to its pub- 
 lication, Lord Macaulay said he should not be satisfied un- 
 less he produced something which should for a few days 
 supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young 
 ladies. And this he actually did. His biographer tells us 
 that " at Dukinfield, near Manchester, a gentleman who 
 thought that there would be a certain selfishness in keeping 
 so great a pleasure to himself, invited his poorer neighbors 
 to attend every evening after their work was finished, and 
 read the History aloud to them from beginning to end. At 
 the close of the last meeting one of the audience rose, and 
 moved, in north-country fashion, a vote of thanks to Mr. 
 Macaulay for having written a history which workingmen
 
 22 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 can understand." * It is easy to point out serious defects in 
 The History of England from the Accession of James II., 
 hut no one can deny that it is both eminently instructive 
 and eminently readable. It is equally easy to tell how its 
 author produces his magical effects. 
 
 First, he is a master story-teller. For the art of narra- 
 tion he was admirably fitted both by nature and by train- 
 ing. But, secondly and this is more to the present purpose 
 Macaulay selects his facts with the utmost care according 
 to a certain theory. He tells us that the two rulers of this 
 province of literature are reason and imagination ; that it is 
 a combination of the novel and the essay, a compound of 
 poetry and philosophy ; and gives us to understand that 
 the perfect historian, at least of England, would be a com- 
 pound of Mr. Hallam and Sir Walter Scott. He exclaims 
 against that false dignity or majesty of history those ab- 
 surd conventional decencies that rob the historian of many 
 of his most valuable materials. He thinks that the historian's 
 business is to depict the national life. He sees the place that 
 government holds in the world, but also the place that the 
 people hold. The perfect historian "shows us the court, 
 the camp, and the senate. But he shows us also the nation. 
 He considers no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no 
 familiar saying, as too insignificant for his notice, which is 
 not too insignificant to illustrate the operation of laws, of 
 religion, and of education, and to mark the progress of the 
 human mind. Men will not merely be described, but will 
 be made intimately known to us. The changes of manners 
 will be indicated, not merely by a few general phrases, or a 
 few extracts from statistical documents, but by appropriate 
 images presented in every line." 
 
 A later English writer one of whom it was said that he 
 had rediscovered the lost art of historical composition ; one 
 whose best known work reached in a few years its one hun- 
 dredth edition carried Macaulay's central thought still fur- 
 
 * Trevelyan : Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, N. Y., ii, 207.
 
 THE FIELD OF HISTORY. 23 
 
 ther. Defining the aim of his Short History of the English 
 People, Mr. J. R. Green wrote in his preface : 
 
 The aim of the following work is defined by its title : it is a 
 history, not of English kings or English conquests, but of the Eng- 
 lish People. At the risk of sacrificing much that was interesting 
 and attractive in itself, and which the constant usage of our his- 
 torians has made familiar to English readers, I have preferred to 
 pass lightly and briefly over the details of foreign wars and diploma- 
 cies, the personal adventures of kings and nobles, the pomp of 
 courts, or the intrigues of favorites, and to dwell at length on the 
 incidents of that constitutional, intellectual, and social advance in 
 which we read the history of the nation itself. It is with this pur- 
 pose that I have devoted more space to Chaucer than to Cressy, to 
 Oaxton than to the petty strife of Yorkist and Lancastrian, to the 
 Poor Law of Elizabeth than to her victory at Cadiz, to the Metho- 
 dist revival than to the escape of the Young Pretender. 
 
 It has been said of Mr. Green : 
 
 However Gibbon might err in massing together his social facts 
 in chapters apart, however inadequate Hume's attempts at social 
 history might be, however Macaulay might look at social facts 
 merely as bits of external ornament, they all, he maintained, pro- 
 fessed the faith he held. He used to protest that even those Eng- 
 lish historians who desired to be merely " external and pragmatic," 
 could not altogether reach their aim as though they had been " High 
 Dutchmen." The free course of national life in England was too 
 strong to allow them to become ever wholly lost in state papers.* 
 
 Mr. J. B. McMaster is writing his popular work, A His- 
 tory of the People of the United States, on similar lines. 
 His opening paragraph defines his plan. 
 
 The subject of my narrative is the history of the people of the 
 United States of America from the close of the war for independ- 
 ence down to the opening of the war between the States. In the 
 course of this narrative much, indeed, must be written of wars, con- 
 spiracies, and rebellions ; of Presidents, of Congresses, of embassies, 
 
 * Mrs. Green's Preface to the Revised Edition.
 
 24 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 of treaties, of the ambition of political leaders in the senate house, 
 .and of the rise of great parties in the nation. Yet the history of 
 the people shall be the chief theme. At every stage of the splendid 
 progress which separates the America of Washington and Adams 
 from the America in which we live, it shall be my purpose to de- 
 scribe the dress, the occupations, the amusements, the literary can- 
 ons of the times ; to note the changes of manners and morals ; to 
 trace the growth of that humane spirit which abolished punishment 
 for debt, which reformed the discipline of prisons and of jails, and 
 which has, in our own time, destroyed slavery and lessened the mis- 
 eries of dumb brutes. 
 
 Carlyle clearly discerned the imperfection of the govern^ 
 mental theory, and saw that the time had come for a change 
 on the part of the historian. 
 
 From of old it was too often to be reproachfully observed of 
 him that he dwelt with disproportionate fondness in senate houses, 
 in battlefields, nay, even in kings' antechambers ; forgetting that 
 far away from such scenes the mighty tide of thought and action 
 was still rolling on its wondrous course, in gloom and brightness ; 
 and in its thousand remote valleys, a whole world of existence with 
 or without an earthly sun of happiness to warm it, with or without 
 a heavenly sun of holiness to purify and sanctify it, was blossoming 
 and fading, whether the ' famous victory ' were won or lost. The 
 time seems coming when much of this must be amended ; and he 
 who sees no world but that of courts and camps, and writes only 
 how soldiers were drilled and shot, and how this ministerial con- 
 jurer outconjured that other, and then guided or at least held 
 something which he called the rudder of government, but which 
 was rather the spigot of taxation, wherewith, in place of steering, he 
 could tap, the more cunningly the nearer the lees will pass for 
 a more or less instructive gazetteer, but will no longer be called a 
 historian. 
 
 No doubt the democratic theory of history may be over- 
 done : but those who are in touch with the modern spirit 
 are little likely to question that it is a much truer theory 
 than the one that limits the field to a mere detail of public 
 transactions. Still, it must be said that the history of
 
 THE FIELD OF HISTORY. 25 
 
 different countries is by no means composed of the same ele- 
 ments. In some the master factors are the king and the gov- 
 ernment, in others the people themselves. Sometimes the 
 sphere of the state is so enlarged that nearly all the most 
 important actions of men are public occurrences ; again, the 
 people are most prominent in initiating and carrying on 
 many of the most important interests of society. Of course, 
 such differences must appear in history. Contrast the civ- 
 ilizations of Egypt and Assyria with those of Greece and 
 Rome. In the Eastern nations everything is uniform and 
 monotonous ; men move before us on the historic page a 
 dumb and lifeless herd, without individual or personal char- 
 acter. Despots of unlimited power rule over men in brute 
 masses, but there is in our sense no national life and no peo- 
 ple. There are conquerors and lawgivers, but no statesmen 
 or politics as we understand statesmanship and politics. In 
 Europe all this is very different. The moment we cross the 
 Bosporus or the Mediterranean the scene changes : there 
 are a people, a public life, statesmen, politicians, and orators ; 
 government is carried on by modern methods that is, by ar- 
 gument and persuasion ; we see somebody besides the king. 
 In Athens, Socrates teaches in the market place ; JSschy- 
 lus and Sophocles write for the theatres that are thronged 
 with people ; Pericles comes in the room of Pharaoh. Mod- 
 ern history really began in Greece. Or consider the civiliza- 
 tion of France and England. In France the government, 
 in addition to conducting the civil and military administra- 
 tion, patronizes art, science, and literature, and provides 
 public works on a vast scale, while in England these latter 
 interests have been largely left, though by no means wholly 
 so, to the energy of voluntary individual and co-operative 
 enterprise. A French writer could not find as large a theme 
 in a History of the French People as Mr. Green found in 
 England or as Mr. McMaster finds in America. The con- 
 clusion is, that histories of different countries, if well writ- 
 ten, will combine the governmental and the popular ele- 
 ment in quite different proportions. For example, the 
 4
 
 26 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 French colonies of America from the first were children of 
 power and patronage, and so grew up dependent and almost 
 helpless ; the English colonies, on the other hand, planted 
 by voluntary efforts and left very largely to themselves, 
 grew up vigorous and independent. The place that is occu- 
 pied by the government in the one instance is occupied by 
 the people in the other. 
 
 Still another difficulty should be noted. It is not practi- 
 cable to make the history that is taught in common schools 
 very broad or discursive. There must be a pretty strict 
 limitation of matter. This point will be more fully con- 
 sidered when we come to deal with the choice of facts ; but 
 it is pertinent to observe here that, after the preliminary 
 stage is passed, the story of the government, or the record of 
 public transactions, must constitute the backbone of what 
 is taught, at least until the differentiated work of the college 
 is reached. Still, the social aspects of history should by no 
 means be overlooked in the common school.
 
 CHAPTER m. 
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 
 
 References. Adams : A Manual of Historical Literature (the 
 bibliographies) ; H. B. Adams and others : Johns Hopkins Universi- 
 ty Studies, Eighth Series, XI., XII. (Seminary Notes on Recent His- 
 torical Literature) ; White : Papers of the Historical Association, I., 
 No. II. (On Studies in General History and the History of Civiliza- 
 tion) ; Hart : The Academy, II. (A List of General Readings in the 
 History of the United States) ; Hall : Methods of Teaching History 
 (the bibliographies) ; Gordy and Twitchell : A Pathfinder of Ameri- 
 can History (numerous lists of well-selected books) ; Davidson : 
 Reference History of the United States ; Barnes : Studies in Gen- 
 eral History, Studies in Greek and Roman History, Studies in 
 American History, also Teachers' Manuals and Aids ; Heilprin : 
 Historical Reference-Book. 
 
 IT is a matter of regret that the teachers who are teach- 
 ing history in the schools of the country command such 
 slender resources. Those who are thus employed in the dis- 
 trict schools and in the elementary grades of the towns and 
 cities, it is to be feared, have commonly derived their knowl- 
 edge wholly or mainly from the text-books that they use, 
 and perhaps one or two similar books besides. Nor is the 
 equipment of high-school teachers by any means all that we 
 could desire. No doubt there are many capable teachers in 
 both kinds of schools. The general subject of the teacher's 
 qualifications will be dealt with in another place ; but it is 
 desirable to describe here the principal sources of knowl- 
 edge with which the ideal teacher must be more or less 
 familiar, and also to offer such practical remarks as can be 
 made with most effect.
 
 28 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 I. To begin at the teacher's desk, text-books of history 
 may first be mentioned. Such books are commonly only 
 compilations from larger works, but they demand special 
 attention because they are prepared with special reference to 
 the needs of the school and of the pupils. That the teacher 
 should thoroughly know the book in daily use does not need 
 to be argued, but it does need to be emphasized. More than 
 this, the teacher should also know quite familiarly a few 
 other text-books dealing with the same subject, two or three 
 at least. The advantages of such familiarity are, that a 
 wider view of the subject may be obtained, and that differ- 
 ent ways of putting things may be studied ; or, if the topical 
 method is pursued, the teacher assigning topics and sending 
 the pupils to the library, the teacher should be acquainted 
 with the authorities that the pupils resort to for informa- 
 tion. 
 
 No text-books now used in schools, when compared with 
 those in use a generation ago, show greater improvement 
 than books in history. Such books as Gardiner's, Myers's, 
 Montgomery's, and Johnston's were not then in existence. 
 It may also be said, for the further encouragement of 
 teachers, that still greater improvement may be ex- 
 pected. 
 
 II. The next class of books to be mentioned consists of 
 the larger historical works that cover the same ground as 
 the text-books. Text-books are nothing but outlines, and can 
 be nothing else skeletons, with a little flesh and blood and 
 life ; and the teacher will never understand the bearings of 
 a subject so that he can fully explain it, and much less pos- 
 sess a sufficient fund for illustration and expansion, if he is 
 wholly dependent upon them. To consult several such 
 books will not suffice, although that is a great advantage. 
 They are always more or less dry and confined, while the 
 teacher should know something of the freedom which the 
 author shows who is not limited to a fixed number of 
 pages. For a teacher of American history who holds a 
 practically permanent position, and so has opportunity for
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 2 
 
 self -improvement, to be ignorant of Bancroft, Hildreth, Mc- 
 Master, and Schouler should be counted a disgrace. More 
 than this, he should have read, volume by volume, Fiske's 
 Discovery of America, The American Revolution, and The 
 Critical Period of American History, and Parkman's ad- 
 mirable series, France and England in North America. He 
 should be cognizant of some of the more valuable works 
 devoted to particular sections of the country, as Palfrey's 
 History of New England, and to particular periods, as 
 Adams's History of the United States. 
 
 Of the numerous histories of the Civil War no one stands 
 out with marked prominence. For the political side, per- 
 haps Greeley's American Conflict is as good as any ; while 
 for the military side, the series of volumes called The Cam- 
 paigns of the Civil War may be recommended. 
 
 Here it may be observed that no teacher should attempt 
 to deal comprehensively with the Civil War, or indeed with 
 any series of military operations that are to be treated some- 
 what in detail, without first forming a conspectus of the 
 whole. This requires much patient study and much exer- 
 cise of the imagination. As an aid, Colonel T. A. Dodge's 
 Bird's-Eye View of Our Civil War can be highly recom- 
 mended. If the title does not sufficiently explain the char- 
 acter of this admirable work, these sentences may be quoted 
 from the introduction : " The principal military events are 
 herein grouped in such sequence that a careful reading, with 
 maps before you, will yield you a fair knowledge of what 
 modern war is, and what our Civil War was. . . . My aim has 
 been to give the layman a clear idea of the war as a military 
 whole, paying no heed to individual heroism, nor dwelling 
 upon the war as a spectacle." While a book of this descrip- 
 tion is not properly a history of the war, it can not fail to be 
 of great service to a student or teacher who, having looked 
 at the war as a spectacle, filled his mind with facts, and ob- 
 served sufficient instances of individual heroism, is thereby 
 fitted to form a conspectus. Manifestly, such a book is not 
 a proper one to put into the hands of a student first taking
 
 30 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 up the subject, unless, indeed, he is a person having much 
 knowledge of history and mental discipline. 
 
 III. History teaching in elementary schools, and to a 
 considerable extent in high schools, should bear heavily on 
 biography. Facts about a man arouse more interest and 
 enthusiasm in pupils, and particularly in young pupils, than 
 facts about a community or state ; while for many purposes 
 historical characters are the very best centers about which to 
 group facts. A good life of Washington is almost a com- 
 plete history of the Revolution ; a good life of Lincoln, of the 
 Civil War. Besides, such a life, and especially one of Lincoln, 
 since he was the more original character, contains elements 
 of interest that an ordinary history does not contain. But 
 the value of history in men has, perhaps, been sufficiently 
 emphasized on previous pages. Still, it is important to ob- 
 serve that the teacher's biographical reading should not be 
 confined to men in public life, statesmen, and soldiers; busi- 
 ness men, scholars, moral and religious reformers, men of 
 letters, men of science, discoverers, and inventors, not only 
 stand for invaluable elements of the national life, but they 
 also furnish as instructive and healthful reading as boys and 
 girls can have. Many men who have exercised far-reaching 
 influence were never in public life at all Fulton, Whitney, 
 Morse, Garrison, Emerson, Agassiz, Ericsson, and many more. 
 Mention may be made of diaries, autobiographies, and mem- 
 oirs, which have an interest and charm in themselves. Per- 
 haps no books relating to the Civil War are more valuable 
 than the personal memoirs of Grant, Sherman, and Sheri- 
 dan. 
 
 Many series* of English and American books may be 
 
 * We are living in an age of series. History, art, science, literature, and 
 religion are set before the public in an endless array of monograph-groups. 
 Whatever the disadvantages of the fashion, it has a distinct aesthetic signifi- 
 cance. The dainty series is to the ponderous fourteen-volurae history as a 
 French cook's masterpiece to a Virginia barbecue. There may be more 
 nourishment in the latter, but an appreciation of the former denotes the 
 more refined palate. The Political Science Quarterly, vol. v,p. 54-
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 31 
 
 mentioned that illustrate these observations. English Men 
 of Action, English Men of Letters, Twelve English States- 
 men, Rulers of India, The Queen's Prime Ministers. Ameri- 
 can Statesmen, American Men of Letters, American Religious 
 Leaders, Great American Commanders, etc. The Questions 
 of the Day Series also contain some good studies that will 
 be useful to the teacher of history. 
 
 Both the volumes making up these series and the series 
 themselves are of quite unequal merit. Many of them have 
 a very high literary value. As contributions to American 
 history, nearly all the Statesmen volumes may be strongly 
 recommended. This is not because that, either singly or 
 collectively, they have added materially to historical knowl- 
 edge, but because they bring together important facts and 
 group them around leading actors, thus adding to history 
 the peculiar interest of biography. As most of the series 
 mentioned are incomplete, the number of volumes is not 
 given. Names of publishers and prices are readily obtain- 
 able. 
 
 IV. Books of a different class should have due mention. 
 Historical scholarship tends strongly, as does scholarship in 
 other branches of learning, to the production of works sum- 
 ming up the salient features of the subject in single volumes 
 of convenient size, many of which are adapted both to 
 scholars and to general readers. Green's Short History of 
 the English People, save that it is rather large, is an excel- 
 lent example of this kind of book. Bryce's Holy Roman 
 Empire, while in no sense a popular book like Green's His- 
 tory, may also be mentioned. Seeley's Expansion of Eng- 
 land handles an important subject in an engaging way. 
 Lodge's Short History of the English Colonies belongs to 
 the same class of works. Higginson's and Johnston's single 
 volumes are the best ones treating of the United States. It 
 may be observed that a good two-volume history of our 
 country is a desideratum. 
 
 V. Of a somewhat different character are the various se- 
 ries of volumes, known both by general and special titles, that
 
 32 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 deal with the striking epochs or phases of connected histor- 
 ical subjects. Such books often present in a clear manner 
 the subjects with which they deal ; they may be read to ad- 
 vantage as single works, or in connection with the other 
 volumes of the series as sections or chapters of a continu- 
 ous work. Many such series have been produced, or are in 
 course of production, in England. Mention may be made 
 of the following : Epochs of English History, Epochs of 
 Modern History, Epochs of Ancient History, Epochs of 
 Church History. The Epochs of American History and The 
 American History Series are well-known examples of simi- 
 lar American books. 
 
 VI. A knowledge of constitutional and municipal law, 
 religion, science, art, literature, moral reform, and many 
 other subjects are necessary to the full illumination of his- 
 tory. It is very true that when general history is prop- 
 erly written, it includes much of this knowledge. But spe- 
 cial works have the advantage of bringing attention to a 
 special class of facts, and of permitting a more scientific 
 treatment than is attainable in works of a general character. 
 Such books as Cairnes's The Slave Power, Cooley's Princi- 
 ples of Constitutional Law, Curtis's History of the Constitu- 
 tion, De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Bryce's Amer- 
 ican Commonwealth, Taussig's Tariff History of the United 
 States, Sumner's Financial History of the United States, and 
 Johnston's American Politics, may be given as examples. 
 Valuable articles on such subjects are often found in the 
 magazines and quarterlies. Mention may also be made of 
 the cyclopaedias, and particularly of Lalor's Cyclopaedia of 
 Political Science, Political Economy, and United States His- 
 tory. 
 
 VH. Treatises, dissertations, monographs, and essays de- 
 voted to special aspects or elements of history. Not only is 
 history a very important factor in various studies that are 
 not grouped under the head of historical, as political philoso- 
 phy, constitutional law, and social science, but these sciences 
 throw important light upon history. In his Economical
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 33 
 
 Interpretation of History, Professor Rogers illustrates this 
 at much length, showing, for instance, how commerce, 
 manufactures, and agricultural productions have exercised 
 a profound influence upon the history of domestic politics, 
 diplomacy, and war. Mr. W. B. Weeden has written his 
 Economical and Social History of New England, 1620-1789, 
 for a similar purpose. He tells us that " Economy, the daily 
 order of living and fellowship, are homely elements which 
 are coming to be recognized as potent factors in the large 
 drama of history." 
 
 VIII. Books devoted to minor political communities 
 should not be omitted. Many State histories are worthless, 
 or nearly so ; others are excellent ; and while local histories 
 as a class contain a vast amount of rubbish, there are few of 
 them that have not some good material. State and local 
 histories commonly abound in anecdote, story, and incident; 
 to which it may be added that local history has its own 
 peculiar educational value. Of State histories, The Com- 
 monwealth Series deserves particular mention. These vol- 
 umes do not propose to give in detail the formal annals of 
 each member of the Union, but "to sketch rapidly and 
 forcibly the lives of those States which have had marked in- 
 fluence upon the structure of the nation, or have embodied in 
 their formation and growth principles of American polity." 
 While the different States of the Union have much in com- 
 mon, many of them present striking differences, and so illus- 
 trate different lessons. 
 
 Something more may fairly be said about local history. 
 " The old-fashioned town histories are mines of crude his- 
 toric ore, " says Mr. Weeden, " while the actual records of 
 the early time now being reproduced are invaluable. " But, 
 more than this, the student of local history has an advantage 
 similar to that enjoyed by the botanist or biologist who puts 
 a small section of the organism that he wishes to study under 
 his microscope. There is a great advantage attending look- 
 ing at history in petto. Some years ago I read with deep 
 interest the section of an ill-put-together town history, en-
 
 34 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 titled The American Revolution. The town was Torring- 
 ton, Conn. Here were quotations from the town records, 
 muster rolls of the militia companies, orders for drafts, requi- 
 sitions for supplies, reports from the seat of war, lists of 
 killed and wounded, etc., interspersed with some incident, 
 anecdote, or personal characterization. Following the tax- 
 gatherer on his rounds ; reading the frequent calls for sol- 
 diers and orders for the militia to turn out ; observing the 
 women at their heavy tasks, spinning wool and weaving 
 flax, making blankets and tents for the army, and often 
 gathering the crops or making the maple sugar ; scanning 
 the hard bill of domestic fare, breakfast without tea and 
 dinner without salt I formed a more realistic view than 
 before of the times that tried men's souls. And this suggests 
 the reflection that division, brigade, and regimental histories 
 supply interesting elements in the history of warfare that 
 are not found in general history at all, or not in much 
 abundance. 
 
 IX. From even a summary view of historical apparatus 
 graphical representations can not be omitted. Such appli- 
 ances are even more necessary in studying history than in 
 studying the existing state of things in the world. How 
 could historical geography be taught without historical 
 maps ? As Dr. Freeman says : " When a certain name as 
 applied to a country conveys the idea of a certain state of 
 things in that country, to apply that name to it at a time 
 when that state of things did not exist, at once conveys a 
 false impression ; it suggests that the state of things which 
 the name implies existed at a time when it did not exist." 
 To carry back into historic times the present meaning of 
 geographical names is what the same writer calls "bond- 
 age to the modern map." 
 
 In nothing does the historical student of to-day enjoy a 
 greater advantage over the student of former days, and even 
 of a few years ago, than in respect to historical geography, 
 and particularly in respect to historical maps. Bondage to 
 the modern map is now a voluntary and not a compulsory
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 35 
 
 servitude. Almost every new book dealing with an histor- 
 ical subject in a broad way contains one or more maps; 
 while many books, and especially those dealing with mili- 
 tary operations, have a " pocket " of maps. Good wall maps 
 for the library and the classroom are comparatively inex- 
 pensive. Historical atlases are produced in such numbers, 
 and are of such excellence and cheapness, that the student 
 is actually embarrassed to choose among them. School his- 
 tories of the United States well reflect the progress that has 
 been made in this branch of scholarship : a book without a 
 number of good maps is condemned by all competent 
 judges. 
 
 X. All this time we have been dealing with history at 
 second hand ; we have been occupied with books in which 
 the facts are not only selected by the author, but worked up 
 by him ready for use. This is not sufficient : we must go 
 back of the historian's printed page to inspect the materials 
 that he has used in his preparation. Such materials may be 
 divided into four classes. 
 
 1. Literary documents, such as laws, decisions of the 
 courts, official proclamations, orders, reports and mes- 
 sages, charters, private letters, diaries, legislative records, 
 and the like. General literature, both book and peri- 
 odical, should also be mentioned, for it not only con- 
 tains a multitude of facts, but also reflects, as official 
 documents could not do, the manners, temper, and spirit 
 of the times. 
 
 2. Monuments, inscriptions, ruins, and in fact everything 
 coming under the head of archaeology and antiquities. Even 
 the tyro knows that investigations of these subjects have in 
 recent years added greatly to our knowledge of the countries 
 of the Old World, as Assyria and Egypt, and that they have 
 created nearly all the knowledge that we have of the history 
 and condition of our own continent previous to the coming 
 of the white man. 
 
 3. Historical geography, study of the origin, meaning, 
 distribution, and changes of geographical names. This im-
 
 36 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 portant field of knowledge will be treated more fully in 
 another place. 
 
 4. Natural science, more especially ethnology, physical 
 geography, and geology. These studies join hand with 
 archaeology and antiquities. For instance, the question of 
 the length of time that particular races have occupied differ- 
 ent countries ; the question of the order in which different 
 races occupying the same country have appeared, as well as 
 the question of the antiquity of man, must be determined, 
 for the most part, by investigating the human relics that we 
 find in recent geological deposits.* 
 
 The phrase " original materials " may be understood in 
 two ways. In strictest sense, the original student discovers 
 his own materials. He goes to veritable records and monu- 
 ments, and searches for human memorials in caves and in 
 the dust of the earth. But in a secondary sense he is an 
 original student who makes good use of the materials that 
 others have discovered and have either published or de- 
 scribed. 
 
 The whole mass of printed documentary matter relating 
 to the history of the United States is enormous. Since 1789 
 everything of consequence pertaining to the National Gov- 
 ernment has been published, either at the time of the trans- 
 action or soon afterward ; the States also publish their cur- 
 rent public history ; while Congress, the States, learned 
 
 * " In most of the countries of Western Europe," says Hugh Miller, 
 " Scotland among the rest, geological history may be regarded as ending 
 where human history begins. The most ancient portions of the one piece 
 on to the most modern portions of the other. But their line of junction is, 
 if I may so express myself, not an abrupt, but a shaded line ; so that, on 
 the one hand, the human period passes so entirely into the geological that 
 we found our conclusions respecting the first human inhabitants rather on 
 what they deemed geologic than on the ordinary historic data ; and, on the 
 other hand, some of the latter and lesser geologic changes have taken place 
 in periods comparatively so recent, that in even our own country we are 
 able to catch a glimpse of them in the first dawn of history proper that 
 written history in which man records the deeds of his fellows." Popular 
 Geology ', Lecture /
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 37 
 
 societies, and enterprising publishers have given us pretty 
 much everything that throws light upon our earlier history. 
 In fact, only historical specialists have, or can have, much 
 idea of the vast treasures of such lore that have accumulated 
 in the great libraries of the country. 
 
 Another class of original materials will be found more 
 generally interesting than official documents the writings 
 of prominent actors in history and of competent observers. 
 It is not, indeed, supposed that the teachers of history in our 
 public schools will read through the numerous and bulky 
 volumes containing the writings of Washington, Franklin, 
 Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, and others of our distinguished 
 statesmen. All that is contended for is a sufficient acquaint- 
 ance with such authorities to show what they are, to reveal 
 their spirit, and to give some idea of the nature of histori- 
 cal materials. 
 
 While our country is inferior to many others in histor- 
 ical monuments, it is not wholly barren of them. The ar- 
 chaeologist finds interesting subjects of study. A majority 
 of teachers in the Mississippi Valley can form an acquaint- 
 ance with the works of the Mound-Builders ; at least, they 
 can read some of the books in which these works are de- 
 scribed, as Short's North Americans of Antiquity, and Fos- 
 ter's Prehistoric Races in the United States of America. 
 Again, the geographical names of the country Indian, 
 Spanish, French, English are found in every school atlas, 
 and no great scholarship is required to read many of their 
 lessons. From the fourth subdivision of the field the com- 
 mon student is shut out, save as he reads books written 
 to elucidate it. Professor Wright's The Ice Age in North 
 America and its Bearings upon the Antiquity of Man covers 
 this ground ; and so, in a less thorough way, does his Man 
 and the Glacial Period. 
 
 Probably I should state distinctly that it has not been 
 my aim to make out a list of books that will fully equip the 
 teacher, but rather to survey the broad field of historical 
 knowledge, and incidentally to give titles of books that well
 
 38 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 illustrate the character of the work described. Naturally 
 the question arises, How much of this field can the teacher 
 be expected to cultivate ? 
 
 In respect to the rank and file, it must be frankly ad- 
 mitted that we can not hope to see them become very accom- 
 plished historical scholars. The present state of the schools 
 and the conditions surrounding them are such as to forbid 
 large expectations. At the same time a good deal can be 
 done, and should be done, even here to raise the standard of 
 attainment. 
 
 Secondly, I have all the time been careful, in preparing 
 this outline, to keep well within the limits that an enterpris- 
 ing teacher of good ability and good habits of study, who is 
 also favorably situated, may fairly hope to reach. Such 
 teacher, although he may be discouraged at the outset, will 
 in the end be surprised to find how quickly he has skirted 
 the field, and will then be more anxious than ever to en- 
 large his plan. 
 
 No doubt the principal criticism of my scheme will be 
 that it includes original study. The bare mention that the 
 high-school teacher, and still more the teacher in the ele- 
 mentary schools, should be not merely a reader of books of 
 history but also an investigator of the material out of which 
 such books are made, will strike many minds, and perhaps 
 most minds, as a piece of extravagance. Hence it is neces- 
 sary to show that some work of the kind is perfectly feasi- 
 ble. But first we should remark upon its peculiar value. 
 
 The student of science is not permitted to content him- 
 self with facts of physics, chemistry, botany, or geology that 
 are obtained from books. He is sent to the laboratory, to 
 the field or forest, to the rocks, for the observation of real 
 facts, and, as far as possible, for experiment. The student 
 of psychology and ethics is referred to his own conscious- 
 ness, and the student of civil government to the legislature 
 and the town meeting. Why should not similar work be 
 required of students who are preparing to teach the impor- 
 tant subject of history ? As matters now stand, there is no
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 39 
 
 other study in the schools that rests so thoroughly upon a 
 basis of authority. To an extent, no doubt, this inheres in 
 the nature of the subject, but it is a criticism that can be in 
 some part overcome. 
 
 The only work in history that is analogous to the origi- 
 nal work in science that is, in schools is found in the 
 historical seminaries of the colleges and universities. The 
 method is the so-called "laboratory method." Some his- 
 torical works, and in fact many that deal with controverted 
 subjects, do indeed contain more or less argument and criti- 
 cism, with the citation of authorities, and so are a sort of his- 
 torical seminary in themselves. Of such works Winsor's 
 Narrative and Critical History of America is a conspicuous 
 example. It is to be feared, however, that the common read- 
 er too often skips these portions of the book. Critical dis- 
 cussions have no place in the early stages of instruction, but 
 afterward they are invaluable. As to the historical semi- 
 nary proper, its advantages are quite certain to continue 
 limited to a few students. Seminary work makes a large 
 demand upon the teacher as welt as upon the pupil. It is 
 not a method adapted to the wants of college freshmen; 
 such original materials as are given to students of this grade 
 of ability should be made subsidiary to a text-book or to the 
 lectures of the instructor. 
 
 But while the common teacher of history in the schools 
 of the country is shut out from the seminary room, he is not 
 shut out from original information. There is not one of the 
 four divisions of the field that he may not cultivate with 
 good results. The fact is, he is now doing some work of 
 the kind. For example, he studies the Declaration of In- 
 dependence, the Constitution of the United States, Wash- 
 ington's Farewell Address, and Lincoln's Emancipation 
 Proclamations. Why should he not largely widen this 
 field ? All the materials that he needs are accessible. One 
 of the promising signs of the times is the efforts that are 
 made to bring historical documents to the student and the 
 teacher. Such books as Poore's Charters and Constitu-
 
 40 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 tions, Preston's Documents Illustrative of American His- 
 tory, Neill's Virginia Company of London and Virginia 
 Carolorum, and Brown's Genesis of the United States an 
 extensive compilation of documents relating to the James- 
 town settlement illustrate this tendency. Durand's Docu- 
 ments on the American Revolution is another good book. 
 More expensive, and beyond the common student, is Ste- 
 vens's Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives relat- 
 ing to America. There are also valuable series of documents 
 adapted to use in the schoolroom that are within reach of 
 the poorest. The first of these series, entitled The Old South 
 Leaflets, edited by Mr. E. D. Mead, has already reached more 
 than thirty numbers. A later series, American History 
 Leaflets, Colonial and Constitutional, edited by Professors 
 Hart and Channing, may also be commended. Mr. P. L. 
 Ford's Writings of Christopher Columbus, which appeared 
 last year, was also a timely publication. 
 
 Mr. Henderson, after declaring, in the preface to his Se- 
 lect Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, that the bit- 
 terness of the struggles between the Papacy and the Empire 
 can never be comprehended by one who has not seen the 
 letters of Gregory VII, of Frederick Barbarossa, and of Boni- 
 face VIII, writes this paragraph : 
 
 And if, through reading original documents, one gains a clearer 
 insight into the truth itself, how much more critical, and how much 
 more appreciative, does one become toward modern writers. Let 
 one of my readers compare a chapter of Milman's Latin Christianity 
 with documents here given in the book on Church and State. Noth- 
 ing can be more instructive than such an exercise. One can exam- 
 ine at leisure the materials with which the historian worked his 
 methods will be clear from knowing with what he had to deal ; the 
 documents themselves will be illumined by his intelligence and 
 learning. A guide-book is only of real worth to those who are to 
 some extent familiar with the scenes described. 
 
 The teacher who has never made an excursion into the 
 field of original research can but poorly appreciate the
 
 SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 41 
 
 sense of reality and the interest that such studies impart to 
 historical knowledge. No real student would be content to 
 take Bancroft's account of the Declaration of Independence, 
 or of the Constitution of the United States. Why should he 
 be content with Prescott's, Fiske's, or Irving's account of 
 Columbus's letter to Santangel, so long as that letter is 
 within his reach ? Washington's Journal of his visit to the 
 Ohio in 1754 is better than the brilliant pages in which Mr. 
 Parkman describes that visit ; and John and Abigail Adams's 
 Familiar Letters give a much better view of certain phases 
 of the Revolutionary struggle than can be obtained from 
 the pages of any historian. 
 
 No doubt it would be impossible for most teachers of his- 
 tory to carry original studies very far. They should remem- 
 ber, however, that such studies in history, even more than 
 such studies in some other subjects, cast a light beyond 
 their immediate borders. Nor is it to be expected that such 
 teachers will make valuable additions to knowledge ; the 
 expectation is rather that, doing what they can in this field, 
 they will make their work more real, fresh, and permanent. 
 
 Perhaps too little has been said above of the value of 
 pictures and other graphic illustrations, maps excepted. 
 Well-chosen photographs, plates, casts, models, etc., can be 
 used to excellent advantage, and particularly in the early 
 stage of historical study and teaching. Pictures in a book 
 have their value ; for I cannot agree with Professor John- 
 ston, who protests that " maps in abundance " are the " only 
 legitimate embellishment of a school history." The illus- 
 trated edition of Green's Short History, which has been pre- 
 pared in accordance with the idea of its author to have 
 "English history interpreted and illustrated by pictures 
 which should let us see how men and things appeared to 
 the lookers-on of then- own day, and how contemporary ob 
 servers aimed at representing them," admirably shows what 
 can be done in this direction. This edition is a " pictured 
 page " in a double sense. 
 5
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CHOICE OF PACTS. 
 
 References. See references of Chapter II. Also Hall : Methods 
 of Teaching History (particularly Introduction, and Methods of 
 Teaching History by Dr. Adams) ; Freeman : Methods of Historical 
 Study ; Klemm, Spencer, Bain, Compayre, Fitch, and Currie : refer- 
 ences previously given ; Ransome : Elementary History of Eng- 
 land; The Journal of Education (London), February, 1891 (pp. 
 86, 87). 
 
 IN teaching history the selection of materials is of un- 
 usual importance and difficulty. Few studies present such 
 a disparity between what can be taught and what might be 
 taught. While the store of facts is practically infinite, one 
 of the ordinary Outlines or Manuals of General History, 
 and two or three similar books relating to particular coun- 
 tries, supplemented by a little general reading, is a fair 
 measure of what is accomplished under the traditionary 
 method. With a better method, the amount of information 
 imparted could be considerably increased, but still the dis- 
 parity would not be very sensibly diminished. What to 
 omit and what to include, when there is such an embarrass- 
 ment of riches, is the crucial question that tests the compe- 
 tency of author and teacher alike. 
 
 The author is the first one to grapple with the question. 
 Summoning to his aid his knowledge of the subject, of the 
 pupil's ability, of the teacher's fitness, and the amount of 
 time that will probably be given to the study in the school 
 or schools, he essays his difficult task. Where the author's 
 perplexity ceases the teacher's begins. No good teacher
 
 THE CHOICE OF FACTS. 43 
 
 attaches equal importance to all the facts that the author 
 puts in his book, no matter how good the book may be; 
 moreover, every 'good teacher goes beyond the book for facts 
 that it does not contain. He is therefore compelled to do 
 over again on a smaller scale, perhaps what the author 
 has done before him. This, at least, is the course of things 
 when instruction is given from a book. But it will simplify 
 matters to drop the author out of sight, and to speak of the 
 teacher as covering the whole ground. Their work is not, 
 indeed, just the same, but it is sufficiently so to warrant us, 
 at least for the time, in treating them as one person. By 
 what criteria shall the teacher of history be guided in his 
 choice of material ? 
 
 Before attempting to answer, it should be observed that 
 the only way to help the teacher at this point is to discuss 
 the general subject with him. No sensible teacher of his- 
 tory asks how many facts he is to teach. No two teachers 
 if good ones would teach the same number of facts, or just 
 the same facts, to the same pupil or class, and much less to 
 different classes. No sensible teacher asks what kind of 
 facts he shall teach, expecting to receive in answer a tabula- 
 tion of his material. He knows that general rules, accom- 
 panied by suitable illustrations, are the only useful answers 
 to these questions. 
 
 I. It is obvious that the first thing to be considered is 
 the stage of instruction immediately in hand. Facts are 
 the materials dealt with from first to last, but not the same 
 kinds of facts. The facts chosen, whatever the stage of 
 progress may be, must be selected with prime reference to 
 the pupil's ability to take in and assimilate them. 
 
 The facts presented in the primary stage must be particu- 
 lar, simple, and concrete. The child of elementary school 
 age is not troubled to understand the facts that occur in the 
 sphere of the home, the school, and the neighborhood ; nor 
 will he be troubled to understand similar facts in history, 
 'even if they be of a somewhat elevated character, provided 
 they are presented to him in an interesting way. The first
 
 44 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 lessons should be like the events that the child sees, hears, 
 and reads of in the living world. Thus, he will readily pass 
 from the known world of current life to the unknown world 
 of historic life. Then, in addition to being simple and par- 
 ticular, the facts should be such as in real life would attract 
 the attention and hold the imagination of the learner. It is 
 not necessary here to repeat the familiar commonplaces 
 about the early development of the perceptive and represent- 
 ative faculties of the mind. It is enough to say that children 
 of quick fancy discover a great deal in the world that is pictur- 
 esque and romantic ; that they do a vast amount of poetizing 
 and dramatizing, and that the teacher of primary history 
 who does not keep this fact in mind, and take advantage 
 of it, will seriously miss his way. The pictorial and poetical 
 elements of history should never cease to receive recog- 
 nition, since they belong to the subject-matter, but in the 
 elementary school they should be thrown into the fore- 
 ground. Again, the close relations existing between the 
 feelings and the intellectual powers should not be lost sight 
 of. Deep feeling does indeed interfere with vigorous in- 
 tellectual activity, particularly in the young; at the same 
 time a lively feeling, as of sympathy or admiration, greatly 
 stimulates interest and mental action. The things that take 
 hold of these feelings not only develop the moral nature of 
 the child but they also cling to the memory. The fact that 
 a child of a certain age is a hero-worshiper is full of mean- 
 ing on the mere didactic side as well as on the moral side. 
 
 Personality is an element of great interest to adults and 
 children alike. They are always pleased to hear about men. 
 Of this we have a familiar proof in the depraved taste for 
 mere gossip that is so common. Still further, the acts of 
 men are more interesting to the common mind than their 
 opinions and creeds. Hence it is that elementary instruc- 
 tion in history must hold closely to objective transactions. 
 The Pilgrim Fathers themselves their heroic deeds in defy- 
 ing sea and storm, hunger and cold, and a wily foe ; their 
 peaked hats, dark cloaks, and heavy swords will impress
 
 THE CHOICE OF FACTS. 45 
 
 minds that do not respond to their civil and religious ideas or 
 to the Pilgrim Compact. Then, the mind more readily seizes 
 hold of individuals than of groups of individuals. Miles 
 Standish cuts a deeper trace in the memory than the whole 
 company that landed at Plymouth. Franklin will awaken 
 interest when the Albany Congress fails to do so. Wash- 
 ington on his campaigns will hold the youthful attention 
 more closely than the Continental Congress or the Federal 
 Convention discussing and adopting resolutions. These are 
 not the only kinds of facts that history deals with ; the 
 teacher must also teach ideas and documents show what it 
 is all about. But the more abstract facts must follow those 
 that are of a concrete and objective nature. So important 
 are persons in history, that they should be made centers for 
 grouping facts, as will be explained hereafter. 
 
 In well-ordered education, so far from there being a 
 chasm between the elementary school and the secondary 
 school, the first leads up to the second by progressive ap- 
 proaches. Still, the two schools stand for stages of progress 
 in the pupil's ability and in the teacher's methods. The 
 faculties of perception, of memory, and imagination are not 
 relatively so prominent in the second stage, while those of 
 analysis, comparison, and reasoning are more prominent. 
 Secondary instruction in history, therefore, marks an ad- 
 vance, though not an abrupt advance, upon elementary in- 
 struction. This is a capital fact, not only in view of the 
 organization of material, but also in view of its selection. 
 Facts of a more general and abstract nature can now be 
 taught. Personal agents should be less prominent. The 
 conceptions of society and of the nation should be brought 
 forward. Large political transactions the acts of legisla- 
 tures, congresses, and conventions can be grasped, though 
 not as fully as at a later time. Some of the easier questions 
 and problems of history may be discussed. The bearing of 
 facts and the direction and force of historical movements 
 can be pointed out. In truth, the relations of facts are but 
 a broader view of the facts 'themselves. Here, too, will come
 
 46 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 in some of the lessons and teachings of history, political and 
 moral. Instruction need not be made quite as pictorial and 
 striking 1 as before. Finally, care should be taken in the 
 secondary school to form habits of accuracy and thorough- 
 ness in the ascertainment of facts ; the difference between a 
 fact and an opinion about it, or a conclusion drawn from it, 
 must be duly appreciated ; in other words, secondary instruc- 
 tion should lay the foundation for historical investigation. 
 
 Of the third stage of education, a few words will here 
 suffice. 
 
 The advance from the secondary school to the college is 
 not unlike the advance from the elementary school to the 
 high school or the academy. Due regard will now be paid 
 to the growth of the mind, both in the choice of materials 
 and in the methods of presentation. Facts of a more general, 
 complex, and abstract nature are in place ; also their broader 
 relations. These facts and relations will suggest still larger 
 and more difficult questions and problems. Society assumes 
 much of the prominence that, in the beginning, was ac- 
 corded to the individual man. Broader and deeper views of 
 the state will now claim attention, and history will be cor- 
 related with other subjects, as economics, constitutional 
 law, and political philosophy. No pains should be spared 
 to form right methods of study and to stimulate the spirit of 
 investigation. The time has come when the student may 
 comprehend the meaning of Professor Seeley. 
 
 In history everything depends upon turning narrative into prob- 
 lems. So long as you think of history as a mere chronological 
 narrative, so long you are in the old literary groove which leads to 
 no trustworthy knowledge, but only to that pompous conventional 
 romancing of which all serious men are tired. Break the drowsy 
 spell of narrative; ask yourself questions; set yourself problems; 
 your mind will at once take up a new attitude ; you will become an 
 investigator ; you will cease to be solemn and begin to be serious. 
 
 He can now understand that anecdotes, incidents, personal 
 facts, tales, and biographies are but the raw material of the
 
 THE CHOICE OF FACTS. 47 
 
 history that is a guide to life and a high mental discipline, 
 and by no means the whole of such material. He compre- 
 hends the words of Guizot, who, while heartily assenting 
 that history is limited to facts, denies that all facts are ma- 
 terial and visible ; holds that " there are moral, hidden facts 
 which are no less real than battles, wars, and the public 
 acts of government. Besides these individual facts, each of 
 which has its proper name," he says, " there are others of a 
 general nature, without a name, of which it is impossible to 
 say that they happened in such a year or on such a day, 
 and which it is impossible to confine within any precise 
 limits, but which are just as much facts as the battles and 
 public acts of which we have spoken." 
 
 That very portion, indeed, which we are accustomed to hear 
 called the philosophy of history which consists in showing the re- 
 lation of events with each other, the chain which connects them, the 
 causes and effects of events this is history just as much as the 
 description of battles and all the other exterior events which it 
 recounts. Facts of this kind are undoubtedly more difficult to 
 unravel ; the historian is more liable to deceive himself respecting 
 them; it requires more skill to place them distinctly before the 
 reader ; but this difficulty does not alter their nature ; they still con- 
 tinue not a whit the less, for all this, to form an essential part of 
 history. 
 
 So much in relation to the rule that requires facts to be 
 graduated according to the age and mental development of 
 the pupil. 
 
 II. Another criterion to follow in selecting material is, 
 that only characteristic facts should be taught facts that 
 mark the man, the country, the age, and serve to distin- 
 guish him or it from other men or ages. History is moral 
 knowledge, and constant deference must be paid to the 
 truth ; it is a matter of veracity. 
 
 There are two ways in which this canon may be violated 
 without teaching false facts. The first is, to teach facts that 
 are not characteristic, and so convey false impressions. At
 
 48 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 this point sound judgment and regard for truth or reality 
 are a sufficient safeguard. The other violation is, wrongly 
 to combine characteristic facts, or to teach them in dispro- 
 portion. In some respects avoidance of this error will be 
 found more difficult than avoidance of the previous one. 
 Elementary instruction in history moves above the level of 
 real life, and the pupil is likely to form the impression that 
 history is more picturesque and romantic than it really is. 
 This is especially true of children of strong and active 
 imagination. In fact, disproportion, or lack of perspective, 
 arising from various sources, is one of the familiar evils 
 attending his mode of study. However, the romance with 
 which children clothe historical personages is generally 
 soon corrected by practical experience ; while a strong dash 
 of idealism in young life is much to be desired for numerous 
 reasons. Still, the teacher needs just views and sound judg- 
 ment. 
 
 It must not be supposed that this criterion shuts the 
 teacher up to grave and sober facts alone. A bit of romance, 
 poetry, anecdote, or story, will often throw more light upon 
 a historical situation, or let you deeper into a man's heart 
 and life, than a page of careful analysis. The story of Alfred 
 and the cakes, of Bruce and the spider, of Sidney and the 
 cup of water, of Marion and the sweet potatoes, are not only 
 thoroughly characteristic, but they tell us more than a labo- 
 rious description. Who could fully describe Mr. Lincoln, 
 leaving out all the familiar stories ? 
 
 It is sometimes said, and especially by foreign critics, that 
 our country is commonplace, and lacking in the elements of 
 deep human interest. No doubt our history as a whole is 
 more practical and prosaic than that of Europe. The life 
 of Europe also is less picturesque and poetic than it was 
 in former centuries. But it is far from true that American 
 history is devoid of interest for children and youth; it is 
 rather rich in these elements. The struggles of Columbus in 
 quest of a patron, his voyages and discoveries ; the voyages 
 and discoveries of the Cabots and of Hudson; the chival-
 
 THE CHOICE OF FACTS. 49 
 
 rous, far-sighted Raleigh ; the story -telling adventurer John 
 Smith ; the Pilgrim Fathers; the Dutch traders at New 
 York ; Penn, Calvert, and Oglethorpe are all characters 
 interesting to children. The romantic search of Ponce de 
 Leon for the fountain of youth, and of De Soto for gold and 
 a powerful Indian kingdom like that of the Montezumas 
 that he might conquer, abound in picturesque and striking 
 features. The labors of Champlain in founding Canada- 
 and of the Jesuits in their zeal for the souls of the savages, 
 La Salle and the discovery of the Great West, have a per- 
 ennial attraction. The early Indian wars present interesting 
 characters and high qualities. The Revolution is rich in 
 good material. Pioneer life and the tales of the border, as 
 well as our later national struggles, may be drawn upon to 
 excellent advantage. 
 
 In that suggestive yet exasperating chapter of his Educa- 
 tion entitled What Knowledge is of Most Worth ? Mr. Her- 
 bert Spencer expresses his profound contempt for the history 
 taught thirty years ago in the schools of England. The his- 
 torical information commonly given, he said, is almost value- 
 less for purposes of guidance. Scarcely any of the facts set 
 down in the school histories give any clew to the right prin- 
 ciples of political action. The biographies of monarchs 
 throw little light upon the science of society. Familiarity 
 with court intrigues, plots, usurpations, and the like, with 
 attending personalities, aid very little in elucidating the 
 principles upon which national welfare depends. Neither 
 The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, nor all other 
 accounts of battles that history mentions, would enable the 
 voter to vote more judiciously at the next election. Battles 
 are squabbles for power. Such facts are unorganizable, and 
 can be of no service in establishing principles of conduct, 
 which is the chief use of facts ; they may amuse, but they 
 do not instruct. Proper history is mainly omitted, not only 
 from these works but also from the more ambitious ones 
 written for adults. What we are really concerned to know 
 is the natural history of events. We want all the facts that
 
 50 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 explain how nations grow and organize themselves. We 
 want as full accounts as possible about governments and 
 churches, but as little gossip about the men who have con- 
 ducted them as may be. Industrial systems and acts should 
 be delineated, and also the amusements and the morals of 
 the people as illustrated in laws, habits, proverbs, and deeds. 
 The only history that is of practical value is descriptive 
 sociology. The highest office that the historian can dis- 
 charge is to furnish the material for a comparative sociol- 
 ogy, and for subsequent determinations of the ultimate laws 
 to which social phenomena conform. The common citizen 
 lacks not only the materials for sociology, but also the very 
 conception of what it is, and all because history and related 
 subjects are badly taught. 
 
 Such is a fair summary of the views relating to history 
 presented in this celebrated essay. Considered with refer- 
 ence to colleges and universities, these views are of great 
 value ; considered with reference to primary and grammar 
 schools, they are wholly erroneous, misleading, and imprac- 
 ticable. Still further, Spencer's method would also fail in 
 the academy or the high school, although the pupil's logical 
 power has now become more developed than in the grades 
 below. 
 
 First, Mr. Spencer calls for a wholly disproportionate 
 number of abstract facts. Many of his facts are not ele- 
 mentary facts at all, but logical facts, reached by careful and 
 more or less difficult trains of reasoning. To be sure, these 
 facts and processes are very valuable and have their place, 
 but all things according to their proper measure. For all 
 stages of teaching, and especially the first and second ones, 
 too little is made of the personal element. Historical action 
 consists of the doings of men and women, and not of the 
 operations of impersonal agents or general laws. The logic- 
 al element is made too prominent, at least until the college 
 or university has been reached. Mr. Spencer assumes that 
 the common school boy possesses powers of analysis and 
 synthesis that he does not possess. Not only can not such a
 
 THE. CHOICE OF FACTS. 51 
 
 schoolboy co-ordinate and systematize the abstract concep- 
 tions supposed, but he can not even form them. He must 
 move more in the objective world of transactions, and less 
 in the subjective world of ideas. Possibly it is true that 
 descriptive sociology is the only history that has practical 
 value, although it may well be doubted; it may be true 
 and here we are on much surer ground that history teach- 
 ing does not point up to sociology as it should do ; but it is 
 absolutely certain that the teacher who begins his instruc- 
 tion with Mr. Spencer's ideal immediately in view will never 
 reach his goal. 
 
 Mr. Ransome, in the preface to his Elementary History of 
 England, commits a mistake similar to Mr. Spencer's. He 
 regards history as essentially the history of political growth ; 
 literature, anecdote, manners and customs being mere sur- 
 plusage. "The human heart is much the same," he says, 
 " whether it dresses in silk or broadcloth, and arbitrary 
 taxation is as much a grievance whether the payers wear 
 frock coats or shirts of mail. . . . Even the bloodiest of bat- 
 tles, if it lead to nothing, is less attractive to the average 
 schoolboy than the story how, through the tenacity and 
 foresight of his ancestors, he will have the privilege of 
 keeping his own money in his own pocket, unless it is voted 
 for public purposes by his accredited representatives." An 
 English reviewer exposes the serious mistake here made 
 in a few sentences that set the whole subject at once in its 
 proper light. 
 
 We have never met with the schoolboy who would rather read 
 of Scutage than the battle of Otterburn, or took more interest in 
 Benevolences than in Flodden Field. The point at issue turns on 
 the age of the pupil, and our protest is directed against any attempt 
 to teach political history history proper, if you will before the 
 age of thirteen or fourteen at the earliest. Up till this let us 
 have biography, battles, incidents, anecdotes. Herodotus precedes 
 Thucydides ; from the Lays of Ancient Rome we pass to Niebuhr 
 and Mommsen. Fortunately, Mr. Ransome is better than his the- 
 ories, and in the first few pages we have the old stories of Angles
 
 52 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 and angels, Alfred and the cakes, and the (comparatively) new story 
 of the wild duck that built her nest in one of the Roman balnea at 
 Bath. These are the parts that will stick in the memory ; and all 
 about shire-moots and town-moots, the Assize of Clarendon and the 
 Assize of Arms, will possibly gain marks, but leave no marks be- 
 hind. . . . 
 
 History for the child is to start from the present from the 
 known and visible, from the existing state and the local government 
 of the place where he lives, just as geography should start from his 
 native village and from the river and hills near by. 
 
 It is true that history has not been so taught as to yield 
 its fullest guidance value. It is also true that undue stress 
 has been laid on battles, anecdotes of distinguished persons, 
 and gossip. At the same time, these can not be dismissed so 
 contemptuously as Mr. Spencer dismisses them. To be sure, 
 many battles stand for little in the history of the race, but 
 this is by no means true of all. It would be difficult to ex- 
 aggerate the issues that hung on the battle of Marathon, the 
 invasion of Greece by Xerxes, the triumph of Rome over 
 Carthage, or the defeat of the Saracens by Charles Martel. 
 The fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks, the 
 resistance of the Dutch to Spain, the Civil War in England, 
 and the American Revolution were followed by far-reaching 
 results. Mr. Ransome's limitation of history to political 
 growth is Dr. Freeman's mistake over again. No person is 
 likely to commit the errors into which Mr. Spencer falls, 
 who has had practical experience in teaching children his- 
 tory. In this branch of education the Germans are very suc- 
 cessful, and they teach both universal and German history 
 to elementary pupils chiefly in the form of biography. 
 
 NOTE. Introduction to the Study of English History : S. R. Gardiner 
 and J. Bass Mullinger. This book, and especially Part II., entitled " Au- 
 thorities," may be strongly recommended to teachers of English history. 
 Mr. Mullinger, the author of Part II., declares his first aim to be " carefully 
 to distinguish the contemporary sources of information for each period from 
 those of later times " ; his second one to be, " wherever practicable, to sup- 
 ply such amount of comment as will enable the student to form a fairly- 
 accurate notion of each author's value as an authority."
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 METHODS OF TEACHING. 
 
 References. Hall, Freeman, Klemm, Compayre, Currie, Fitch, 
 Barnes, Gordy and Twitchell, and Davidson : previous references. 
 Bain: Education as a Science, VIII., Practical Essays, VII. (The 
 Art of Teaching); Trainer: United States History by the Brace 
 Method ; Prince : Methods of Instruction and of Organization of the 
 Schools of Germany, X. ; Foster : The Seminary Method of Original 
 Study in the Historical Sciences, as Illustrated from Church His- 
 tory ; Fling : The Academy, IV., 129, 212, (The German Historical 
 Seminary. These articles give an interesting account of the semi- 
 nary organizations and methods of Prof. Maurenbrecher, of Leipsic) ; 
 Fredericq : Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and 
 Political Science, Fifth Series, X. (Notes and Impressions concern- 
 ing Advanced Instruction in History in England and Scotland), 
 Eighth Series, V., VI., X. (The Study of History in Germany and 
 France, and The Study of History in Belgium and Holland) ; H. B. 
 Adams : Johns Hopkins University Studies, Second Series. I., II., 
 (Special Methods of Historical Study, and New Methods of Studying 
 History) ; White : Johns Hopkins Studies, Fifth Series, XII. (History 
 and Politics) ; C. K. Adams : Papers of the American Historical As- 
 sociation, IV., No. 1 (Recent Historical "Work in the Colleges and 
 Universities of Europe and America) ; Schouler : Papers of the Amer- 
 ican Historical Association, IV., No. 3 (The Spirit of Historical Re- 
 search) ; Rollins : The Academy, I., 133 (American History in Pre- 
 paratory Schools) ; Hart : id., II., 256, 306 (History in High and Pre- 
 paratory Schools) ; Burgess : id.. III., 293 (The Method of Teaching 
 College Preparatory History) ; Mrs. Barnes : id., IV., 285 (General 
 History m High Schools) ; Hudson : id., III., 120 (History and Politi- 
 cal Science) ; Salmon : id., V., VI., 310, 238 (Teaching of History in 
 Academies and Colleges) ; Winterburn : id., VI., 148 (History Work
 
 54: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 in High Schools) ; Droysen : Outline of the Principles of History, 
 translated by E. B. Andrews ; Hughes : Education, II., 410 (Topical 
 Teaching of History) ; Porter: id., III., 136 (The Study of History) ; 
 Greenwood : id., VI., 23 (Teaching History) ; Fisher, id., VI., 588 
 (Universal History) ; Judson : id., VI., 19 (Teaching History in Sec- 
 ondary Schools); Hall: id., VII., 470 (History of the Civil War, 
 What and How much should be Taught t) ; Thorpe : id., VI., 86 
 (Teaching of American History) ; Gardner : id., VIII., 547, 663, IX., 
 35, 109 (Outline Notes of the Renaissance and of the Reformation) ; 
 Lowry : id., VII., 447 (Philosophy of State and of History) ; Thorpe ; 
 id., VIII., 351 (History and Economics in Manual Training Schools) ; 
 Wallace: id., IX., 346 (Study of History through Biography); 
 Mowry : id., IX., 134 (The Teacher's Independent Study of History). 
 
 IT is quite commonly conceded by competent judges that 
 in no other schools are such substantial results reached in 
 teaching history as in those of Germany. It will help us 
 on our way to glance at the general features of the instruc- 
 tion that they furnish. 
 
 The first thing to be remarked is, that in the best of these 
 schools the teacher in the beginning is the sole agent of in- 
 struction. No room is found for a text-book, but especially 
 trained teachers conduct the pupil over a carefully prepared 
 course of study. 
 
 The second thing is, that the primary course is wholly 
 biographical ; the lessons are all narratives, tales, stories, and 
 biographies of important historical personages. At the end 
 of two years, two lessons having been given a week, it is 
 found that a large number of valuable facts have been fixed 
 in the pupil's mind ; and that the pupil, instead of finding 
 the lessons dry and tiresome, has rather found them a source 
 of positive pleasure and recreation. 
 
 At the age of twelve a step forward is taken. The teacher 
 now conducts the pupil the second time over the former 
 course, but with a somewhat different end in view ; the in- 
 dividual man falls a little into the background, while the 
 nation moves forward. For example, the subject is now the 
 story of the second Punic war not the story of Hannibal.
 
 METHODS OF TEACHING. 55 
 
 More attention is paid to historical connection, and particu- 
 larly to causal connection. The range of facts is expanded 
 and amplified. At the end of three years more the pupil, 
 being now fifteen years of age, has made two surveys of uni- 
 versal history, one smaller and one larger. While he is 
 making the second survey, the teacher gives him a little 
 pamphlet, commonly of the teacher's own preparation, a 
 mere sketch of dates and names, to help him to retain and 
 recall the main points of the oral lessons ; and this is the 
 only text-book. 
 
 The three or four years that now follow are given to en- 
 larging and supplementing the outline that has been so thor- 
 oughly inculcated. In addition the pupil may, under direc- 
 tion, take up and carefully pursue the history of his own 
 country, or some particular historical period, as the Refor- 
 mation, or of the French Revolution that is, specialization 
 in a mild form now begins. 
 
 Dr. L. R. Klemm reports the excellence of the historical 
 instruction in a school that he visited in Rhenish Prussia. 
 The method followed, which was in a C grammar, or sixth 
 grade, he thus describes : 
 
 1. A biographical narrative was given by the teacher, who spoke 
 in very simple, appropriate language, but feelingly, with the glow of 
 enthusiasm and the chest-tone of conviction. He made each pupil 
 identify himself with the hero of the story. The map was fre- 
 quently used or referred to. Bits of poetry taken from the Reader 
 were interwoven, and circumstances of our time, as well as persons 
 of very recent history, were mentioned at proper occasions. The 
 attention was breathless. 
 
 2. The story was then repeated by pupils, who were now and then 
 interrupted by leading questions. The answers were again used to 
 develop new thoughts not brought out by the first narration. Par- 
 ticularly was it cause and effect, and the moral value of certain his- 
 torical actions which claimed the attention of the teacher. To me 
 it was very instructive to see these children search for analogous 
 cases in human life as they knew it. 
 
 3. The pupils were led to search in their stores of historical
 
 56 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 knowledge for analogous cases, or cases of decided contrast. This 
 gave me an insight into the extent of their knowledge. When, for 
 instance, certain civil virtues were spoken of, they mentioned cases 
 which revealed a very laudable familiarity with history. But all 
 their knowledge had been grouped around a number of centers 
 that is, great men. That is to say, their knowledge had been gained 
 through biographies. 
 
 4. The pupils were told to write, in a connected narration, what 
 they had just learned. This proved a fertile composition exercise, 
 because the pupils had something to write about a thing that is 
 not quite so frequent in schools as it seems desirable. 
 
 The teacher who gave Dr. Klerrmi this outline also fur- 
 nished him with a statement of the principles that should 
 underlie instruction in history. 
 
 The aim should be " to nourish and strengthen all the powers of 
 the soul, interest, emotion, and volition." " The pupil's intellect 
 is increased by making him familiar with historical deeds," " by 
 affording comparisons and making distinctions, by causing keen 
 judgment and correct conclusions." "The pupil's heart is influ- 
 enced by instruction in history, because many great, sublime, noble, 
 and beautiful actions and motives are presented, which cause pleas- 
 ure and lead to imitation, unconsciously to the pupil." " The pu- 
 pil's will-power is greatly stimulated by instruction in history, be- 
 cause he is warned and inspired by truth, right, and duty, for love of 
 country and his fellow-men." 
 
 Discussing the conditions necessary to secure these ends, 
 this teacher presented the following points : 
 
 1. That the teacher of history be a person whose heart is full 
 of patriotism, and beats strongly for truth, right, and duty. 2. 
 That the instruction be not a mere recital of names and dates, of 
 battles and acquisitions of land, nor dissertations upon abstract 
 ideas and generalities, but, above all, a simple narration of deeds and 
 events, and a glowing description of persons and circumstances. 3. 
 That the teacher connect the new historical knowledge with circum- 
 stances and conditions, such as are either known to the pupils or 
 are near enough at hand to draw them into the discussion. 4. That
 
 METHODS OF TEACHING. 57 
 
 the pupil should not be allowed to remain receptive, but must be 
 induced to be active in this study. 5. That the teacher should in- 
 duce his pupils to compare similar and dissimilar actions and persons, 
 and thereby cause judgment upon cause and effect from a moral or 
 ethical standpoint, so that not merely the intellect be developed, but 
 also the heart and the will. 6. That instruction in history be brought 
 into organic connection with the study of language : for this reason, 
 reading is to be brought in as an assistant. Eecitations of patriotic 
 poems and ballads can be woven in profitably, and that geography 
 must aid history is self-evident. 
 
 To this last condition I may add that, in the case of chil- 
 dren and young persons, the poem is a most effective form 
 of teaching. Metrical composition, like other rhythmical 
 movements, takes fast hold of the mind, and all the more if 
 really poetic. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, the best 
 of the Scottish ballads, as Chevy Chase and the Battle of 
 Otterburn, and Paul Revere's Ride, may be given as ex- 
 amples. The volumes edited by Mr. Longfellow, entitled 
 Poems of Places, may be searched with good results by both 
 the teacher of geography and of history. 
 
 Such is the preparation that the German school gives for 
 that matchless work in history which is the praise of the 
 German universities. It will be seen that a much longer 
 time is given to the subject than in our schools ; but it is not 
 too long if thorough instruction is to be secured. 
 
 The Herbart-Ziller school of pedagogists, who lay such 
 great stress upon history, say instruction should begin at 
 the beginning of school life. Holding that the child's love 
 of stories is the first awakening of his mind to the historic 
 interest, they make it their first endeavor to stimulate this 
 love by systematic story -telling. The art of telling a story 
 they regard as the final test of a teacher's skill, and they 
 assign it a prominent place in normal-school instruction. 
 Still further, they have worked out a primary programme 
 in accordance with their pedagogical scheme. They have 
 arranged a number of Grimm's tales, which they make the 
 center of instruction for the first school year. These stories 
 6
 
 58 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 are to]d and retold by the teacher, reproduced item by item 
 by the children, and around them are clustered moral and 
 religious sentiments, material information, and illustrative 
 object-lessons. The next year, connected stories from Rob- 
 inson Crusoe are treated in the same manner. Then come 
 selected tales from the Old Testament, and still later selec- 
 tions from the Odyssey, the Norse Sagas, Shakespeare, He- 
 rodotus, Livy, Xenophon, and others in due order. In this 
 way the historical sense is developed and centers of interest 
 created, before technical instruction begins. 
 
 Several points occurring in this account of German 
 schools challenge consideration. The first is, that it does 
 not so much matter when the first lessons are given, provided 
 they are of the right kind. The second is, that the first con- 
 nected school lessons should relate to the pupil's own coun- 
 try or home region. Such lessons will throw a glow of in- 
 terest upon the parallel lessons in geography and stimulate 
 patriotism. The third is, that the story should be the form 
 in which the instruction is cast. Reference has been made 
 in an earlier chapter to the marked influence of history in 
 developing patriotism in the Jews. It may be added that no 
 people ever found more admirable material for such a pur- 
 pose. The stories of the Old Testament of Abraham, Joseph, 
 Moses, David, and Daniel that cling so closely to the 
 memory, are parts of their national history, and not merely, 
 as with us, moral and religious lessons. The supervising 
 authority makes the number of facts to be taught, and even 
 the particular facts, as definite as possible it would seem 
 too definite. For example, in the elementary schools of Ber- 
 lin one hundred and sixteen particular dates are required 
 to be memorized. In the elementary school little use is 
 made of the text-book. The Germans keep clearly in view, 
 as an American writer puts it, that " at least three fourths 
 of all the time spent by a boy of twelve in trying to learn a 
 hard lesson out of a book is time thrown away. Perhaps 
 one fourth of the time is devoted to more or less desperate 
 and conscious effort ; .but the large remaining portion is
 
 METHODS OF TEACHING. 59 
 
 dawdled away in thinking of the last game of ball and long- 
 ing for the next game of tag." 
 
 Because only one fourth of the time that a boy of twelve 
 spends in learning a history lesson, or any other lesson, out 
 of a book is efficacious, it does not follow that he should 
 make no use of books. The end of scholastic discipline is 
 power to get all the knowledge and truth, thought and fancy, 
 wit and wisdom, from the printed page that it holds an end 
 that can be reached only when the teacher keeps it steadily 
 in view from the beginning. Of necessity, a child's first 
 tuition is oral, but he must be progressively introduced to 
 books. Hence the teacher who persists in saving for the 
 present the time dawdled away over the book, will lose it in 
 the end. A child can learn to use books only by using them. 
 The judicious mingling of oral and book lessons is indeed 
 no easy matter. Doubtless too much stress was formerly 
 placed on book lessons ; possibly too little stress is placed 
 upon them at present. At least, a well-trained pupil twelve 
 years of age should begin to depend upon a historical text- 
 book. Of course, he has been reading books of tales, stories, 
 and the like from the time that he could first read at all. 
 
 The advantages of oral teaching are vivacity and inter- 
 est ; the disadvantages are vagueness and incompleteness. 
 The pupil studying history is almost certain to get too many 
 indefinite and general ideas, and too few fixed and definite 
 facts. This failure the German teacher seeks to overcome 
 by making the path to be trodden plain and straight, and 
 then by going over it again and again. It should be noticed 
 also that the printed outline which he puts into the child's 
 hand is the skeleton of the instruction. The disadvantages of 
 the text-book in the upper classes of the elementary schools 
 are lack of intelligence and interest a fatal defect unless it 
 can be overcome ; the advantages are the opportunity for 
 exactness and thoroughness. The two elements should be 
 thoroughly blended text-book lessons and oral illustration. 
 The extremes to be avoided are fact-cramming on the one 
 part, and flowing talk on the other.
 
 60 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 The topical method of study has gained considerable 
 currency. Discarding the text-book, the teacher prints or 
 writes on slips of paper, or puts on the blackboard, the topics 
 that form the subjects of the succeeding lessons, and then 
 sends the class to the library, or such other sources of in- 
 formation as they have at hand, furnishing them, of course, 
 the needed hints and directions regarding the choice of books 
 and their use. Then the pupils report at the next recitation, 
 sometimes orally, and sometimes in writing. It is a sort of 
 a rudimentary seminary, of which more will soon be said. 
 
 Well handled, this method has undeniable excellences. 
 It creates interest and the spirit of investigation ; it famil- 
 iarizes the pupil with the use of books and libraries ; it sup- 
 plies, so far as the use of different authorities can do so, a 
 useful check on hasty opinion and over-confidence, and is a 
 good introduction to the methods of self-culture. The evils 
 of the method are equally obvious. It is accompanied by 
 more or less aimless effort. Thoroughly worked, it con- 
 sumes much time. It is apt to land the pupil in the region 
 of vague information and general impressions rather than 
 of definite knowledge. The facts and ideas acquired are lit- 
 tle likely to be well organized or integrated in the mind. 
 On the whole, the topical method in an exclusive sense can 
 not be recommended at any stage of progress. An exclusive 
 use of it in the elementary school would be preposterous, in 
 the secondary school absurd, in the college a mistake. Still, 
 at no stage of progress after the preliminary one should it 
 be wholly discarded. Some topical work may be assigned 
 in the elementary school, more in the high school and acad- 
 emy, and still more in the college. 
 
 The principles already stated will enable us to judge of 
 the lecture. Here the first thing to be said is that the formal 
 lecture, as a regular means of instruction, should have no 
 place below the college, no matter what the subject of in- 
 struction may be. It first liquefies in vague impressions, 
 and then evaporates in talk ; or, if not, then the teacher 
 must deliver the matter so slowly that the pupil can write
 
 METHODS OF TEACHING. 61 
 
 down everything that is important, thus in effect making a 
 text-book as he goes along. As soon, therefore, as the pupil 
 is able to use a text-book to advantage, why not supply him 
 with one already prepared, making it the basis of the in- 
 struction, and adding the needed oral amplification ? 
 
 In the college the case is somewhat different. Here two 
 points may be urged in favor of the lecture. The first is, 
 that a good lecturer will generate more interest and enthu- 
 siasm than a teacher conducting book recitations, and so 
 will tend to send his students to the library to investigate 
 for themselves. The other is, that, seizing bold facts and 
 handling large generalizations, he will help the student thor- 
 oughly to unify and organize the matter which it is most 
 important for him to remember. A good lecturer can do 
 both of these things if his students have the requisite prep- 
 aration a phrase that here means considerable historical 
 knowledge, as well as mental discipline, and experience in 
 note-taking. The lecture is not the proper vehicle for con- 
 veying elementary knowledge of history. Experience often 
 shows that courses of lectures that have been taken with 
 interest and are recalled with pleasure, have left little behind 
 them save mistaken notions and vague ideas. The lecturer 
 will therefore find it extremely advantageous to put into his 
 students' hands a text-book of moderate size, running along 
 the line of his course, requiring them to read thoroughly 
 designated portions of it in advance. The book will serve 
 as a path-breaker. For example, Seebohm's Protestant Revo- 
 lution would admirably guide a course of lectures on the 
 Reformation. References to the needed authorities will be 
 given as a matter of course. Or, if the lecturer can not find 
 a hand-book to his mind, he should at least furnish his 
 students with a printed syllabus of his lectures, both to 
 assist them in breaking the ground and to furnish a mechan- 
 ism for the distribution of the matter. 
 
 Of its kind, I know nothing that is better than Dr. Alex- 
 ander Bain's essay entitled The Art of Study. I venture to 
 quote three or four short paragraphs ; save the last one, it
 
 62 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 will be seen that they have no exclusive reference to his- 
 tory : 
 
 Our first maxim is, " Select a text-book-in-chief." The mean- 
 ing is, that when a large subject is to be overtaken by book study 
 alone, some one work should be chosen to apply to, in the first in- 
 stance, which work should be conned and mastered before any 
 other is taken up. There being, in most subjects, a variety of good 
 books, the thorough student will not be satisfied in the long run 
 without consulting several, and perhaps making a study of them all ; 
 yet it is unwise to distract the attention with more than one, while 
 the elements are to be learned. In geometry the pupil begins upon 
 Euclid, or some other compendium, and is not allowed to deviate 
 from the single line of his author. If he is once thoroughly at home 
 on the main ideas and the leading propositions of geometry, he is 
 safe in dipping into other manuals, in comparing the differences of 
 treatment, and in widening his knowledge by additional theorems, 
 and by various modes of demonstration. . . . 
 
 Undoubtedly the best of all ways of learning anything is to 
 have a competent master to dole out a fixed quantity every day, just 
 sufficient to be taken in, and no more ; the pupils to apply them- 
 selves to the matter so imparted, and to do nothing else. The 
 singleness of aim is favorable to the greatest rapidity of acquire- 
 ment : and any defects are to be left out of account, until one thread 
 of ideas is firmly set in the mind. Not infrequently, however, and 
 not improperly, the teacher has a text-book in aid of his oral in- 
 structions. To make this a help, and not a hindrance, demands the 
 greatest delicacy ; the sole consideration being that the pupil must 
 be kept in one single line of thought, and never be required to com- 
 prehend, on the same point, conflicting or varying statements. Even 
 the foot-notes to a work may have to be disregarded in the first 
 instance. They may act like a second author, and keep up an irri- 
 tating friction. . . . 
 
 The subjects that depend for their full comprehension upon a 
 certain method and order of details are numerous, and include the 
 most important branches of human culture. The sciences, in mass, 
 are avowedly of this character ; even such departments as theology, 
 ethics, rhetoric, and criticism have their definite form ; and until 
 the mind of the student is fully impressed with this, all the particu*
 
 METHODS OF TEACHING. 63 
 
 lars are vague and chaotic, and comparatively useless for practical 
 application. So, any subject cast in a polemic form must be re- 
 ceived and held in the connection thereby given to it. If the argu- 
 ments pro and con fall out of their places in the mind of the reader, 
 their force is missed or misconceived. 
 
 History is pre-eminently a subject for method, and therefore 
 involves some such plan as is here recommended. Every narrative 
 read otherwise than for mere amusement, as we read a novel, should 
 leave in the mind (1) the chronological sequence (more or less de- 
 tailed) and (2) the causal sequence that is, the influences at work 
 in bringing about the events. These are best gained by application 
 to a single work in the first place ; other works being resorted to in 
 due time. 
 
 It will be observed that Dr. Bain lays down three funda- 
 mental propositions, viz. : 1. In the early days of education 
 instruction must be narrow. 2. It must be thorough. 3. 
 Only when the pupil is " thoroughly at home on the main 
 ideas,' 1 only when " one thread of ideas is firmly set in the 
 mind," only when " one single line of thoughtj" has been 
 wrought into the mental substance, should the teacher be- 
 gin to be discursive and " broaden " the work. In history, 
 what folly to fall to comparing, interpreting, and discussing 
 before the pupil has amassed a store of facts on which to set 
 his reflective faculties at work ! In dealing with the history 
 of a country or nation, the first thing to be done is to fix in 
 the pupil's mind firmly the main points an outline a 
 framework in which he can dispose and arrange minor 
 facts and details as he requires them ; or, to change the 
 figure, to provide his mind with a supply of hooks and pegs 
 on which he can hang up, in proper order and in due rela- 
 tion, new facts and ideas as he masters them. 
 
 It may be added that readers made up of lessons devoted 
 to some one subject, as geography or history, no doubt have 
 a certain use in schools. They are useful, however, as read- 
 ers rather than as geographies or histories. Experience 
 shows that ordinary reading lessons are not an effective 
 vehicle of specific instruction in any branch of knowledge.
 
 64: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 While the historical reader will supplement the regular in- 
 struction in history, it can not be made to take the place of 
 the regular text-book. 
 
 In this survey the lesson must not be overlooked. 
 The teacher should not encourage or permit the pupil to de- 
 pend upon the language of an author, save where language 
 is a real part of the substance. His business is not " to sit 
 behind a book and hear pupils say their lessons." Recita- 
 tions that closely follow the text commonly show that the 
 attention has been fixed on the words rather than on the 
 matter. A memory that lays hold of subject-matter should 
 be stimulated rather than a merely verbal memory. Now 
 and then we meet a mind that takes up everything, words 
 and matter alike, but such minds are few and far between. 
 In his teaching days General Garfield sometimes told of a 
 student of his who commanded much admiration by a recita- 
 tion of a two-and-a-half-page description of a theodolite, but 
 who showed plainly enough before the close of the hour 
 that he had merely committed to memory the words, and 
 that he had no conception of the construction, adjustment, 
 and use of the instrument that he had described with such 
 volubility. Once more, the practice of picking out of stu- 
 dents' minds the points of a lesson by special questions, and 
 especially by questions which suggest the answer, can not 
 be too strongly condemned. I recall some college students 
 who often related with much glee how their professor, sit- 
 ting behind Green's Short History, asked a halting student 
 41 Was there liberty ? " and received the prompt reply, " There 
 was liberty." 
 
 The proper method is to assign to each pupil a topic, re- 
 quiring him to develop it in his own way, and then, when 
 he has finished, to bring out by question and answer such 
 points as need further attention, unless, indeed, he has made 
 so poor a recitation that the topic should be assigned to a 
 second pupil. In this way freedom, resource, and good prep- 
 aration will be promoted. The recitations may be clumsy 
 and halting at first, but they will soon gain in fullness and
 
 METHODS OF TEACHING. 65 
 
 freedom. Accordingly, a text-book that carefully analyzes 
 the matter, especially a book that makes use of side-heads, 
 is a distinct advantage ; and if such analysis is lacking, the 
 teacher should show the class how to make one for them- 
 selves. The teacher may make out a list of topics on paper 
 to be used in conducting the recitation ; but in no case 
 should he suffer himself to become dependent upon his book. 
 The oral amplification may be given as the topics pass by, or 
 at the close of the lesson, as circumstances may determine. 
 
 Of quizzes, reviews, and examinations little need be said. 
 It can not be held that they are more or less useful in teach- 
 ing history than in teaching other subjects that are made up 
 largely of fact material. The office of such exercises in 
 brightening the memory and the imagination, and in more 
 thoroughly organizing facts that have been acquired, thus 
 constituting proper knowledge, is well understood by good 
 teachers. It should, however, be plainly stated that the 
 quiz is a necessary part of the lecture method when it is made 
 truly effective. 
 
 Before passing to the final topic, it is important to ob- 
 serve that in the choice and combination of methods a great 
 deal depends upon the teacher as well as upon the class. 
 Good lecturers sometimes fail as text-book teachers, and per- 
 haps good text-book teachers still more frequently fail as , 
 lecturers. 
 
 The Germans, deeply impressed by the value and even 
 necessity to university students of original studies, invented 
 the Seminar, as a means whereby such students could carry 
 on such studies in various branches of knowledge, history 
 included, under the direction of a competent professor. In 
 its native country it has abundantly justified its invention. 
 Translated to the United States, and baptized the " semina- 
 ry," it is justifying itself over again. Only two or three 
 things need be said about the historical seminary in this 
 place. 
 
 The first is, that its proper function lies in the field of 
 original work. From this it follows necessarily that the
 
 66 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 students admitted to it should be picked students, not only 
 mature of mind, but already well instructed in history and 
 its methods, and able by reason of practice to carry on to 
 advantage lines of independent study under general super- 
 vision. It follows also that the professor himself should be 
 a picked man, well acquainted with original sources and 
 other authorities, and capable of directing and inspiring 
 students. These points it is important to state in the plain- 
 est language, because there is reason to fear a more or less 
 general travesty of " seminary methods " the country over. 
 The lecture has already made its way into some strange 
 places, and we need not be surprised to see the seminary fol- 
 low in its wake.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE ORGANIZATION OP FACTS. 
 
 References. See previous references to pedagogical writers and 
 historical specialists. Also Guizot : History of Civilization (pas- 
 aim) ; Mace : Papers of the American Historical Association, V., Nos. 
 I. and II. (The Organization of Historical Material). On Organiza- 
 tion and Systematization, see the current text-writers on psychology. 
 
 A DISTINGUISHED French writer lately deceased, M. Taine, 
 says the word " to organize," which he dates from the Revo- 
 lution and the First Empire, "summarizes the success of 
 well-ordered and distributive reason, the vast and happy 
 effects of the art which consists in simplifying, classifying, 
 and subtracting. " No art is so necessary to the teacher, 
 either in the sphere of administration or in the sphere of in- 
 struction. I shall first explain what this art is, and then 
 make a particular application to history. 
 
 We may roughly divide school studies into two groups. 
 Those of the first group begin with certain fundamental and 
 intuitive ideas, and proceed by means of deduction. They 
 are the proper logical studies, and the best examples of them 
 are the pure mathematics. Mathematical data are defini- 
 tions and axioms, facts of the mind and not of observation ; 
 the great aim of the teacher is to point out, and of the pupil 
 to discover, the necessary relations existing between these 
 data, and so to build them, and the other truths that are dis- 
 covered on the way, into an orderly and symmetrical whole 
 called algebra, or geometry. Such, in the mathematical 
 sphere, is organization. 
 
 Studies of the second group begin with observed object-
 
 68 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 ive facts, and proceed by induction. These data are empiri- 
 cal and not logical ideas. The primal mental operations 
 are not those of intuition, conception, and reasoning, but 
 observation and memory. Books are secondary sources of 
 information, and can be understood only through a pre- 
 viously acquired store of primary and personal information. 
 The facts that we have seen explain to us the facts which we 
 hear or read. Examples of such studies are botany, zoology, 
 the natural sciences generally, geography, and history. 
 
 The successful prosecution of any one of this second 
 group of studies involves the accumulation of a large fund 
 of facts, but also something more. Facts of themselves do 
 not constitute proper knowledge ; they are at best but infor- 
 mation, and the man who possesses them in the largest 
 abundance is not necessarily the best instructed man. 
 Facts do not exist separate and alone either in Nature or 
 history ; they are always connected, and they can not be 
 understood or explained out of their connections. The 
 bones of the human body thrown loosely into a box are not 
 a skeleton ; a pile of dry plants is not an herbarium ; they 
 must be brought together and secured in their natural rela- 
 tions. The possession of a mass of botanical or geographical 
 facts, no matter how large, does not make a man a botanist 
 or a geographer ; his facts must be organized, fact brought 
 to its related fact, as bone to its related bone. In other 
 words, these studies are not wholly empirical, but partly 
 logical as well ; the studies, in fact, do not exist until the 
 many are reduced to the one, and unity is seen in diversity ; 
 until, that is, the primary data are viewed under a philo- 
 sophical aspect. We speak of the organization of knowl- 
 ledge, sometimes forgetting, perhaps, that knowledge is the 
 product of organization. Science has no place for rudes et 
 indigestas moles. 
 
 Without its power of integration or organization the 
 mind would be feeble indeed. As says Sir William Hamil- 
 ton, " We are lost in the multitude of the objects presented 
 to our observation, and it is only by assorting them in
 
 THE ORGANIZATION OF FACTS. 69 
 
 classes that we can reduce the infinity of Nature to the 
 finitude of mind." He quotes Anaxagoras, "The mind 
 knows when it subdues its objects, when it reduces the many 
 to the one " ; and remarks himself, " All languages express 
 the mental operations by words which denote a reduction of 
 the many to the one," as " synthesis," " cogitate," conceive," 
 " comprehend," u cognize," and many more. 
 
 Too much stress can not be placed on organization as es- 
 sential to real knowledge. But, further, it is as necessary to 
 its retention as to its acquirement. The memory is unable 
 to cope with much unrelated and discursive material that 
 is, facts can no more be remembered irrespective of their 
 relations than they can be understood and explained. It is 
 easier to remember two things in relation than either one 
 separately. In fact, no one thing can be remembered sepa- 
 rately. Within limits, we lighten the burden by increasing 
 it. The operations of the memory are controlled by the laws 
 of association ; and the laws of association govern the or- 
 ganization of empirical data. 
 
 These two elements run parallel throughout the study 
 of history, as throughout all other fact studies, but in quite 
 different proportions in different periods. Facts continue to 
 be the subject-matter to the end of the course ; logical ideas 
 are present at its beginning. The simplest narrative or tale 
 involves at least two facts or incidents, and so the idea of 
 time or succession. The facts of environment, or spatial 
 relation, also occur at once, and the idea of cause is not 
 long in appearing. While these ideas need not be made 
 the subject of abstract thought, and at first should not be, 
 they will nevertheless be present in the mind of the teacher, 
 and will gradually work their way into the mind of the 
 pupil. 
 
 Individual events compose a series of events ; but to un- 
 derstand the events singly, it is as necessary to have a knowl- 
 edge of the series as it is to have a knowledge of the indi- 
 vidual facts in order to understand the series. All organ- 
 ized knowledge begins with learning a certain number of
 
 70 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 facts and truths; and these must not be limited in their 
 range, but comprehensive. No individual square mile or 
 acre of the earth's surface can be explained in itself alone ; 
 no individual country, island, or continent can be thus de- 
 scribed ; to understand even the smallest geographical unit, 
 one must have some knowledge of the whole globe. The 
 moon can be described only in relation to the earth, the earth 
 only in relation to the sun, the sun only in relation to its 
 system and the heavens as a whole. No one can appreciate 
 the significance of a missing link, or even have an idea of 
 what a link is, until he has previously learned something of 
 the chain of which it is a part. We can explain the growth 
 and prosperity of a city only by taking account of the region 
 that contributes to its population and wealth. A man at 
 any particular period of his career as Cromwell when he 
 became Lord Protector, Napoleon when he assumed the im- 
 perial crown, or Lincoln when he was inaugurated President 
 is an absolute enigma, cut off from his own previous life 
 and the life of his country. The earth brings forth fruit of 
 herself, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn 
 in the ear. Thus, in all things there is an order of succes- 
 sion founded on the law formulated by Mr. Spencer : 
 " There can be no correct idea of a part without a correct 
 idea of the correlative whole." 
 
 We must learn some individual facts before we can take 
 up the series ; we must go from the individual to the gen- 
 eral, and yet the individual is never fully understood until 
 it is considered in connection with the general. Hence the 
 teaching of history involves : (1) Fixing permanently in the 
 mind those single facts that determine the general move- 
 ment, or some selected portion of it ; (2) study of the rela- 
 tions of these facts in the development of society ; (3) a more 
 thorough investigation of social and political elements, with 
 a special reference to causal relations. 
 
 This analysis corresponds in a general way to the three 
 stages of educational progress. The fact element will be 
 found in the third stage, the logical element in the first
 
 THE ORGANIZATION OF FACTS. 71 
 
 stage ; the characteristic differences being the kinds of facts 
 and relations dealt with in the different stages and the rela- 
 tive stress laid upon them. What a distinguished pedagog- 
 ist says of the acquisition of knowledge in general, is particu- 
 larly true of geographical and historical knowledge : 
 
 The elementary school will always have the character of memory 
 work stamped upon it, no matter how much the educational re- 
 formers may improve its methods. It is not easy to overvalue the 
 impulse of such men as Pestalozzi and Froebel. But the child's mind 
 cannot seize great syntheses. He bites off, as it were, only small 
 fragments of truth at best. He gets isolated data, and sees only 
 feebly the vast network of interrelation in the world. This frag- 
 mentary, isolated character belongs essentially to primary education. 
 But just as surely does secondary education deal with relations and 
 functions and processes. It is the stage of crude generalization. 
 But college education strives to superinduce on the mind the habit 
 of seeing the unity of things. The curriculum of the college is 
 therefore called the philosophical faculty, using the word " faculty " 
 in the French sense of the word faculte. * 
 
 Accordingly, the main thing that the teacher of history 
 in the primary school has to do, and largely so in the sec- 
 ondary school, is to teach facts. The facts taught in these 
 schools constitute the very foundations of the whole after 
 superstructure. While facts do not make a man a historian, 
 he cannot be a historian without them. Teachers of a 
 philosophical turn may dislike this humble work ; they may 
 speak of it contemptuously as " mere memorizing," but no 
 real educator speaks slightingly of the memory. The com- 
 mon sense of mankind rightly adjudges praise to the man 
 having a rich store of information. f 
 
 * Dr. W. T. Harris : Report of Commissioner of Education, 1888-'89, Iviii. 
 
 t The current depreciation of the memory is largely unreasonable and 
 mischievous. To exalt the logical faculties is all right; to belittle the 
 faculties ot retention and reproduction is all wrong. It is not impertinent 
 to say that if a man has a fine memory there is no reason why he should 
 be ashamed of it. Professor James may be quoted on the broader aspect of 
 this subject ;
 
 72 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 No doubt a majority of teachers have heretofore com- 
 mitted a serious mistake at this point. They have striven 
 by sheer force of repetition to crowd as many facts as pos- 
 sible into the pupil's mind. Nor were these facts always by 
 any means well chosen. They paid little attention to the 
 pupil's power of assimilation, and perhaps still less to the 
 organization of what they taught. They largely lost the 
 meaning of facts, the stream of thought, the life of the ac- 
 tion, the interest of the story. Such teaching is unspeak- 
 ably dry and uninteresting, and is worse than no teaching 
 at all. It is far better to leave the child to such spontane- 
 ous interest in history as may spring up within him, than to 
 blunt the edge of his mind with mere tables of dates and 
 other indigestible material. The "philosophy of history" 
 may be a large phrase for the elementary teacher, but what 
 will lead up to it should find a place in the elementary 
 school. 
 
 Things must be done in their proper time and according 
 to their just measure. The old teachers whom I have criti- 
 cised are not so far out of the way as those new ones who 
 teach nothing that is definite or particular, but waste their 
 time and effort in the vain endeavor to impart general views 
 and large relations for which their pupils are not prepared. 
 It is folly to speak of the relations existing between facts that 
 the pupil does not know ; to mention cause and effect until 
 the antecedent and consequent have been grasped ; to seek 
 to organize materials that have never been gathered. With 
 
 " No one probably was ever effective on a voluminous scale without a 
 high, degree of this physiological retentiveness. In the practical as in the 
 theoretic life, the man whose acquisitions stick is the man who is always 
 achieving and advancing ; whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time 
 in relearning what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold their 
 own. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a Walter Scott any example, 
 in short, of your quarto or folio editions of mankind must needs have 
 amazing retentiveness of the purely physiological sort. Men without this 
 retentiveness may excel in the quality of their work at this point or at that, 
 but will never do such mighty sums of it, or be influential contemporane- 
 ously on such a scale." Psychology, vol. i, p. 660.
 
 THE ORGANIZATION OF FACTS. 73 
 
 relations, as such, the teacher of history has nothing to do. 
 Relations are no more history than the tendons which hold 
 his bones together are a man's anatomy. 
 
 It is also necessary to observe that the organization of 
 knowledge is not the same thing as discoursing about its or- 
 ganization. Either of these things may be present without 
 the other. The wise teacher will put facts in their proper 
 relations from the very first stage of his work ; he will di- 
 rect the attention of the pupil to relations progressively as 
 the pupil is ready to receive them ; he will give them the 
 largest place when he comes to deal with methods of his- 
 torical investigation. 
 
 At the end of this chapter I may state the categories or 
 principles with reference to which historical facts should be 
 grouped or organized : 
 
 1. Time, or the chronological relation. 
 
 2. Place, or the geographical relation. 
 
 3. Cause and effect, or the causal relation. 
 
 This is exhaustive of the subject. However, as the per- 
 sonal element is so prominent, it will be wise, particularly in 
 elementary work, to divide the third category, and to group 
 such facts as conspicuously admit of it with reference to per- 
 sonal agents. Two cautionary remarks should be added. 
 
 The first is, that generalization must not be thrust out of 
 its place. Such a work as Colonel Dodge's Bird's-eye View 
 of Our Civil War, or Lavisse's General View of the Political 
 History of Europe, is not a book for the beginner : a com- 
 plete conspectus represents the end of historical study. 
 
 The second remark is, that the logical element in history 
 must not be suffered to override the fact element. This is a 
 point of no small danger, particularly in advanced study. 
 Hamilton observes that the tendency to generalize our 
 knowledge '' is not only an effective means of discovery, but 
 likewise an abundant source of error," illustrating the ob- 
 servation with numerous examples of the substitution of 
 theory and hypothesis for fact. Guizot tells us, in a passage 
 7
 
 74 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 that I shall quote at length in another place, that " nothing 
 tortures history more than logic." Some one has perti- 
 nently observed that " a child has a healthy appetite for 
 facts ; he likes action and story " ; the child should there- 
 fore be suitably served with facts, action, and story while 
 he craves them, postponing theorizing until the time comes 
 for theories. 
 
 There are three questions that may be asked about every 
 historical fact, besides the question what it is in itself, viz. : 
 "When was it?" " Where was it ?" "Why was it?" And 
 the teacher's success in a large degree will turn on the skill- 
 ful handling of these questions.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY : CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 References. The best practical suggestions on the handling of 
 dates are found in the pedagogical writers. Wells has good re- 
 marks ; see also Schaff and Carlyle, previous references. Freeman : 
 Pour Lectures on European History and The Unity of History. 
 For a division of our own history, The Epochs of American His- 
 tory Series may be commended. The numerous chronological 
 schemes, charts, and dictionaries of dates give information rather 
 than method. On the science of chronology and chronological sys- 
 tems, the articles on those subjects in the cyclopaedias may be con- 
 sulted. 
 
 HISTORY is dynamic, not static. It is action or move- 
 ment. Hence the historian has by no means discharged his 
 function when he has inventoried historical facts as they 
 existed at a given time, or described a particular situation. 
 He does indeed sometimes give such an inventory or descrip- 
 tion, but this he does on account of something that has gone 
 before or of something that is to follow after. 
 
 All action or movement is in time. Without time the 
 very idea is impossible. The mere facts of history as facts 
 could be inventoried without regard to time, like the facts 
 of geography or chemistry, and thus treated they might 
 have a certain value ; but such an inventory would not be 
 history. There would be no life or action, no development 
 or evolution, no progress or becoming. Chronology has 
 therefore been called one of the two eyes of history. 
 
 The practical conclusion which we reach is, that the 
 teacher of history must pay attention to time relations and
 
 76 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 to dates. But what dates ? how many dates ? and how shall 
 the dates be taught ? Before attempting answers to these 
 questions, we must pay attention to some preliminary 
 matters. 
 
 The child's first lesson in chronology is the formation of 
 the ideas expressed by the words " before " and " after," or 
 the relation of succession. He learns that some things are, 
 that others were, and afterward generalizes these ideas as the 
 present and the past. His next lesson is to mark more 
 definitely the relation of past events to the present ; he now 
 struggles with the question, How long ? He becomes famil- 
 iar with the phrases " this morning," " yesterday," " a week 
 ago," and the like, slowly finding out their meaning by per- 
 sonal experience. At first the statements that Solomon 
 lived twenty-five hundred years ago, Julius Caesar two thou- 
 sand years ago, and Washington a century ago, mean little 
 more than that these men are now dead, and that they died 
 in the order named. Practically, you might as well say 
 that they lived twenty-five years, twenty years ago, and one 
 year ago. The steps by which the child makes his way 
 along this chronological path should be analyzed. 
 
 1. The succession of one's bodily sensations, as hunger 
 and thirst and weariness, the order of outward events, and 
 the train of his ideas, are his first time measures. Rosalind 
 is a good psychologist when she tells Orlando that time trots 
 hard with a young maid between the contract of her mar- 
 riage and the day it is solemnized, that he ambles with a 
 priest who lacks Latin and a rich man who has not the 
 gout, that he gallops hard with a thief to the gallows, and 
 stands still with lawyers in their vacations. That is, time 
 moves at a more rapid pace with those whose minds are 
 fully occupied, provided the occupation is not disagreeable. 
 But when events have passed into memory the rule changes ; 
 the time limits within which we can recall many events or 
 thoughts seem widely separated, and vice versa. But these 
 mental time measures are too vague and misleading to an- 
 swer practical purposes. Still, they are never wholly aban-
 
 THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 77 
 
 doned. A man without a watch lost in the forest, or work- 
 ing in a field on a cloudy day, takes account of just such ex- 
 periences. 
 
 2. The next thing is the adoption of some fixed measure 
 or measures. These are found in Nature : the day, the Latin 
 for which means '' shine," the month, or moon, which signi- 
 fies " measurer," and the year, which in Latin is a ring or cir- 
 cle. Then, we make artificial divisions or multiples of these 
 natural measures : the hour, minute, and second, the week, 
 the Olympiad, the jubilee, the decade, and the century. 
 Artificial changes are also made in the units themselves : 
 thus the lunar and the calendar months do not coincide, and 
 the solar year and the civil year are not quite of the same 
 length. 
 
 Experience only can teach an individual the real mean- 
 ing and application of these measures. While the succes- 
 sions of sensation and ideas can by no means take the place 
 of definite time standards, they are just as essential to un- 
 derstanding them as experiences of color and sound are to 
 an understanding of the color and sound vocabularies. 
 Thus, life alone enables us to form the conception of his- 
 tory. 
 
 The process just described is similar to that by which a 
 man measures distance with his eye. He learns by observa- 
 tion that commonly about so many objects are seen in a 
 mile or on an acre of ground ; looking upon an expanse 
 stretched out before him he recognizes once, twice, or thrice 
 that number of objects within certain limits ; and then, ob- 
 serving or assuming that the objects thus presented are 
 scattered about as thickly as he is accustomed to see them, 
 he concludes that the distance is one, two, or three miles, or 
 the surface one, two, or three acres. Or, if he thinks the 
 objects now presented are closer or less close together, he 
 makes the necessary allowance. To tell a person who has 
 always lived within the four walls of a house that one place 
 is a hundred miles from another gives him nothing more 
 than verbal information ; but if he has ridden across the
 
 78 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 country on the cars, and has thus formed some empirical dis- 
 tance measures, the language will mean something to 
 him. 
 
 3. The next step in the evolution of a system of chronol- 
 ogy is to fix upon a starting point from which to measure. 
 Every child makes the present his first chronological era ; 
 he counts backward. For the purposes of history, there are 
 two futal objections to this mode of procedure : one is, that 
 the place of beginning is constantly changing ; the other, 
 that it violates the order of histoi-ical movement by requir- 
 ing the mind to go up-stream. Hence we must transport 
 ourselves into the past. The Jews count from the creation 
 of the world, Christians from the birth of Christ, Moham- 
 medans from the night of the Prophet from Mecca. In 
 every such case the starting point or the era is purely arbi- 
 trary, and may rest upon a mistaken notion. In fact, Christ 
 was born four years before the beginning of the Christian 
 era, as fixed by the authors of our system of cbronology. 
 
 4. Having provided ourselves with a set of standards, or a 
 measuring line duly divided and marked, and adopted a base 
 line, we are now ready to measure and to mark the distances 
 of the events that we wish to locate, both from the base and 
 from one another. Wrought out in due form such a scheme 
 is called a system of chronology, which may be defined as an 
 arrangement or exhibit of various events that have occurred 
 in history, deemed important, in the order of their succes- 
 sion, with the intervals of time from one to another and 
 from the era previously agreed upon suitably designated. A 
 chronological chart has therefore been aptly compared to a 
 geographical map. The era corresponds to the prime merid- 
 ian ; the centuries, years, and days to the ordinary meridians. 
 The value of the chart and of the map alike depends less 
 upon the choice of an era or prime meridian and the length 
 of the measures employed than upon the carefulness and 
 accuracy with which the details are worked out. If a date 
 is lost, then the event for which it stands can no more be 
 definitely fixed with reference to other events than we can
 
 TilE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 79 
 
 locate the fabled islands of the Atlantic with reference to 
 Europe and America. 
 
 It thus becomes quite clear that a chronological scheme 
 is essential to accurate history. Thus, the meaning of the 
 phrase, "chronology is one of the two eyes of history," be- 
 comes manifest. Such a scheme is one of the three machines, 
 so to speak, that the student uses to assort and place his facts. 
 Entering a mail car attached to a Michigan Central train 
 bound westward from Detroit, you see a clerk standing be- 
 fore a group of boxes, each one appropriately marked and 
 the whole looking much like a cabinet of open drawers, en- 
 gaged in " throwing v mail. With astonishing dexterity he 
 throws the proper pieces to the boxes marked Ypsilanti, Ann 
 Arbor, Jackson, etc. Similarly a chronologist tosses into 
 the boxes of his chronological scheme the events, men, ideas, 
 institutions, and doctrines that he comes upon in the course 
 of his studies. The veteran student has his scheme ready 
 made ; the neophyte makes his scheme as he accumulates his 
 facts. Perhaps it is needless to say that much time and care 
 are consumed in its fabrication, and that the teacher should 
 lend the pupil intelligent co-operation. Such is a system 
 of scientific chronology. Such a system, more or less defi- 
 nitely worked out, every historical student must have, but 
 it would be a great mistake to suppose that such a system 
 rigidly adhered to or followed is either a necessary or a wise 
 expedient. There are other elements to be considered in as- 
 sorting and organizing historical facts. 
 
 Chronology proper takes notice of time only : it pays 
 no heed to either place or cause and effect. The chronologist 
 arranges facts, no matter where they may come from or 
 how disconnected they may be, in the strict order of succes- 
 sion. His scheme is therefore wholly artificial, wholly ex- 
 ternal to the facts themselves. The lines that he draws 
 across his chart are no more parts of history than the merid- 
 ians and parallels drawn upon a map are parts of the 
 earth's surface. There are such things as geographical and 
 causal relations, such things as the unity and continuity
 
 80 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 of history determined by these relations, from which it 
 follows that, if the method of the chronologist is rigidly ad- 
 hered to, the highest form of history possible would be a 
 chronicle. 
 
 Here we come to the important question, How should his- 
 tory be written and studied ? Historians have followed 
 three methods the external, the internal, and a combina- 
 tion of these two. 
 
 The mere annalist sets events down by years, in the order 
 of their occurrence. Livy's History of Rome some editor 
 arbitrarily divided into decades, or groups of ten books each, 
 for the sole reason that the first, twenty-first, and thirty -first 
 books marked the beginnings of important periods and are 
 opened by short introductions. The Magdeburg Centurists 
 and their imitators divided the history of the Church into 
 centuries. Even the learned Mosheim followed that method 
 in his Ecclesiastical History. The century method is more 
 rational than the decade method ; still it often compels a 
 total disregard of internal connections, while forcing facts 
 that are unrelated into a mechanical union. Moreover, 
 besides doing violence to subject-matter, all such methods 
 cramp the powers of the writer and of the student. They 
 are no more a part of history than a diver's armor is a part 
 of the diver. 
 
 Other writers have adopted the internal method, follow- 
 ing as a criterion the genetic development of thought and 
 events. These writers make use of the period, the age, and 
 the epoch in assorting and arranging their facts. The rela- 
 tions of these divisions of time are not definitely determined. 
 The period is most frequently employed, and it alone need 
 be considered in this discussion. 
 
 The great advantage of the period is, that the term does 
 not connote a fixed length of time, like year, decade, or 
 century. Some periods are long, some short. It is rarely 
 possible to tell in years how long a period is ; still it has a 
 beginning and an end, and is marked by certain features 
 giving it a unity that makes it possible for the mind to grasp
 
 THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 81 
 
 it as a whole. These features may be religious, political, or 
 military, or a blending of various elements. The Protestant 
 Reformation was a political, a national, an intellectual, and 
 an economical movement as well as a religious one. Ob- 
 viously, therefore, the conception of the period is essential 
 to the right interpretation of history. 
 
 The disadvantages of the strict internal method are no 
 less obvious than its advantages. It is too subjective, setting 
 at naught all relations but those of internal connection. It 
 fails to bring facts into relation that lie outside of the chain 
 of cause and effect. It runs in special channels, leaving out 
 of account parallel but unrelated series of facts. It gives 
 us a searching inward look but is deficient in breadth of 
 view. What is more, it has no definite means of marking 
 time or of measuring historic intervals. In fact, left to it- 
 self the internal method is helpless to keep track of its own 
 results or to preserve them in any definite form. More than 
 this, it is even limited in its account of development. Time 
 is of the essence of history ; and there is no escaping the 
 questions, " When ? " and " How long ? " 
 
 Happily the two methods do not absolutely exclude each 
 other ; each completes the other, and the student must there- 
 fore secure the advantages both of the external and the in- 
 ternal method. The student of history, in contradistinction 
 to the chronologist, does not stand in front of a cabinet of 
 boxes each of the same capacity, marked " first," " second," 
 and " third " ; he stands rather before a series of posts 
 marked 1096, 1453, 1492, 1517, 1607, 1688, 1776, 1861, etc., and 
 throws his facts to them. These dates mean the first Cru- 
 sade, the fall of Constantinople, the discovery of America, 
 the Reformation, Jamestown, the English Revolution, the 
 American Revolution, and our Civil War. They stand 
 prominent in the periods into which the student has found it 
 convenient to divide history. In other words, he associates 
 a multitude of facts with leading dates like those that have 
 been mentioned. The events so associated are of course 
 those that do not require, for common purposes, a closer
 
 82 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 identification. The historian will indeed mark as clearly as 
 possible the time when Columbus went to Lisbon, to the 
 Gold Coast, and to Spain, and the dates of his second, third 
 and fourth voyages, as well as of many other voyages ; but 
 the general student, or reader at least, will find it sufficient 
 to set up the year 1492, and to group many minor facts 
 around it. In this way the great dates of history, and not a 
 mere scheme of artificial compartments, control the group- 
 ing of events. In this way dates mark periods. In this way 
 we satisfy many of the demands of both chronological ex- 
 actness and of internal connection. 
 
 To a considerable extent the historical period meets the 
 demand of history. Even well-educated men are often un- 
 able to do more than to place facts in their proper period, or 
 to throw them into their own group ; history could be 
 written without a more definite chronology than this, but it 
 would be defective. Hence it becomes necessary to mark as 
 closely as we can the beginning and the end of periods. 
 Still, we must remember that the dates fixed upon for this 
 purpose are after all partly arbitrary and artificial. His- 
 tory is an evolution ; it is marked by unity and continuity, 
 and we can not divide it into periods in the exact manner of 
 a surveyor cutting up a field into village lots. We call 1517 
 the beginning of the Eeformation, for example, but we are 
 not unaware that this is giving that year a certain factitious 
 importance. 
 
 The observation last made leads to the broader one, that 
 it has been a common fault of historians to draw their lines 
 of demarcation both too straight and too heavy. Human 
 progress is not made by leaps and bounds, but by slow and 
 sometimes imperceptible stages ; and the great periods of 
 history are separated from one another by lines sometimes 
 almost imperceptible, and always wavy and shaded. Rome 
 did not fall in a day any more than it was built in a day. 
 Accordingly, as a matter of fact the firmest lines that we 
 are able to draw are often largely a matter of mental con- 
 venience. What M. Compayre says of one class of institu-
 
 TI1E TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 83 
 
 tions is true of a vast number of others : " It is necessary, in 
 the first place, to discard the prejudice that the first univer- 
 sities of the Middle Ages were born suddenly, in a day, at 
 a precise moment, whose date it would be possible to fix 
 exactly." This truth the evolutionists have taught us so 
 thoroughly that some historical writers now seem disposed 
 to go too far in disregarding historical periods. 
 
 We Americans sometimes divide our own history into 
 three grand divisions, viz. : 
 
 The Colonial Period, 1607-1775, marked by our depend- 
 ence upon England. 
 
 The Revolutionary Period, 1775-1789, marked by the 
 struggle for independence and the various attempts to or- 
 ganize our political system. 
 
 The Constitutional Period, extending from 1789 to the 
 present day. 
 
 It must not be supposed that such divisions as these are 
 like those of the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. 
 A given historic field may be divided, and be well divided, 
 in quite different ways. Much depends upon the judgment 
 of the author or teacher, and upon his immediate purpose. 
 Every one of the periods just given may, for certain pur- 
 poses, be broken up with advantage. The first one may be 
 divided into the period of discovery, the period of coloniza- 
 tion, and the period of colonial life. The second one may 
 be divided into the continental and the confederate periods, 
 March 1, 1781, forming the point of division. The third one 
 may be divided into the period of foreign relations extend- 
 ing to 1820, the period of economic questions to 1845, and 
 the period of the slavery controversy to 1869. Or the pe- 
 riods may be divided with reference to particular facts or 
 questions, as the third one with reference to the ascendency 
 of political parties. 
 
 To recognize the features that characterize the different 
 periods, and so to distinguish them, calls for much knowl- 
 edge and judgment. 
 
 Sometimes the century and period have a general corre-
 
 84 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 spondence. The French Revolution is said, in a general way, 
 to mark the close of the last century. Again, a man is de- 
 scribed as belonging, by his mental character, to the six- 
 teenth century or to the eighteenth. But, apart from such 
 correspondences, the century is an exceedingly useful scale 
 for the arrangement and retention of historical facts. It is 
 often sufficient for practical purposes to refer an event to its 
 century : as the first Crusade to the close of the eleventh, 
 the discovery of America to the close of the fifteenth, the 
 planting of the first English colonies in America to the be- 
 ginning of the seventeenth. Besides, some facts, as a war or 
 revolution occupying considerable time, can not be referred 
 to a particular year. 
 
 We also classify historical matter with reference to dy- 
 nasties, reigns, and administrations. The divisions of time 
 that are thus named are sometimes natural and sometimes 
 artificial divisions of history. Some of them are the mere 
 incidents of succession, but others stand for ideas, policies, 
 and great accomplished facts. The Norman dynasty marks 
 the last subjugation of England. We speak of the Eliza- 
 bethan and the Victorian Ages of English literature. The 
 accession of William III to the throne of England had 
 much significance. In the United States the inaugura- 
 tion of Presidents has sometimes marked new measures, 
 as those of Jefferson, 1801 ; Jackson, 1829 ; and Lincoln, 
 1861. 
 
 But even when it is not thus marked off, as commonly it 
 is not, the administration serves a useful purpose. The 
 leading facts occurring in it can be associated with the Presi- 
 dent, he with them. The twenty administrations, count- 
 ing the double administrations as units, may be likened to a 
 cabinet of twenty boxes, or to a bookcase containing an 
 equal number of shelves on which books may be so placed 
 that they can be readily found when wanted. For many of 
 the facts that he requires, the administration is as small a 
 division of time as one needs. The common man is content 
 to know that President Jackson vetoed the Bank Bill, that
 
 THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 85 
 
 President Jefferson was the father of the embargo, that the 
 Oregon question was settled in the time of Polk, aiid the 
 Northeastern boundary in that of Tyler. Hence, it is one 
 of the duties of the teacher of the elementary history of the 
 United States to teach the pupil his " administrations " thor- 
 oughly. 
 
 The methods already described will not answer the defi- 
 nite purposes of instruction in history. The teacher must 
 face the questions : How many, and what dates ? and, How 
 to teach them ? 
 
 The year will commonly suffice, but not always : 1492 is 
 hardly definite enough for the discovery of America, or 1776 
 for the Declaration of Independence. The date of John 
 Cabot's landfall, June 24, 1497, is important by reason of 
 its relations to the pretended landfall of Vespucius, June 6, 
 1497, and the genuine one of Columbus, October 4, 1498. 
 For the rest, years alone will answer for all the voyages of 
 American discovery that need be taught : Ponce de Leon's 
 discovery of Florida, 1513 ; De Soto's expedition, 1539 ; Ver- 
 razzano's exploration of the coast, 1524 ; Cartier's voyages to 
 the St. Lawrence region, 1534, 1535, 1540 ; Hudson's visit to 
 the Hudson and the Delaware, 1609, etc. 
 
 Since the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock 
 fixes Forefathers' Day, the date should be exactly given, De- 
 cember 22, 1620. But years will do for all the other first 
 settlements. Indeed, the pupil may well congratulate him- 
 self if, later in life, he can recall the years of a few of the 
 more prominent ones : Jamestown, 1607 ; New York, 1613 ; 
 Boston, 1630 ; Hartford, 1634 ; Providence, 1635 ; Philadel- 
 phia, 1682. 
 
 The periods of conflict between the English and the 
 French in North America should be carefully marked off, 
 as follows : 
 
 Charles First's War, 1627-1630, in which the English 
 seized Port Royal and Quebec, but only to yield them up 
 again on the conclusion of peace. 
 
 King William's War, 1689-1697, marked by several In-
 
 86 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 dian forays against the English settlements, and by two un- 
 successful attempts to reduce Canada. 
 
 Queen Anne's War, 1702-1713, in which the English again 
 captured Port Royal (and retained it thenceforth), and in 
 which they again put forth fruitless efforts to reduce Canada. 
 
 King George's War, 1744-1748, famous for the capture of 
 Louisburg and the island of Cape Breton, which, however, 
 were given up to France at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 
 
 The French and Indian War, 1754-1763, at the close of 
 which France transferred to England her possessions on the 
 continent north of the English colonies and east of the 
 Mississippi, except the small portion of Louisiana east of the 
 river that went to Spain. 
 
 In dealing with the military operations and political 
 events falling within these limits, it would be commonly 
 quite sufficient to assign them to their respective periods. 
 A few, however, should be definitely taught : as the seizure 
 of the Forks of the Ohio by the French, 1754 ; the fall of 
 Quebec, 1759 ; and the Treaty of Paris, 1763. 
 
 In dealing with the War of Independence, the teacher 
 will be somewhat more definite. But even here months 
 and days will, as a rule, either uselessly encumber the mem- 
 ory or be speedily forgotten. April 19, 1775, marking the 
 beginning of the war, and October 10, 1781, marking the 
 surrender of Yorktown, are the most important. 
 
 In dealing with military operations that are parts of cam- 
 paigns, and particularly when the stage is crowded, it is gen- 
 erally best to refer them to these larger movements. With 
 our Civil War, for example, the teacher should make out 
 for his own guidance, or adopt, a scheme of all such opera- 
 tions as may properly be called campaigns, not omitting their 
 time limits and interior relations. It will suffice here to 
 remark, in addition, that a few definite dates must content 
 the pupil and the teacher alike. 
 
 Carlyle remarks upon the discrepancy existing between 
 our manner of observing things and their manner of oc- 
 curring :
 
 THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 87 
 
 The most gifted man can observe, still more record, only the 
 series of his own impressions ; his observation, therefore, to say noth- 
 ing of its other imperfections, must be successive, while the things 
 done were often simultaneous ; the things done were not a series, 
 but a group. It is not in acted as it is in written history : actual 
 events are no wise so simply related to each other as parent and off- 
 spring are ; every single event is the offspring not of one but of all 
 other events prior or contemporaneous, and will in its turn combine 
 with all others to give birth to new ; it is an ever-living, ever-work- 
 ing chaos of being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth 
 from innumerable events. . . . All narrative is, by its nature, of 
 only one dimension; only travels forward toward one or toward 
 successive points ; narrative is linear, action is solid. 
 
 The difficulty is a real one ; it can be overcome but par- 
 tially, and that only as the result of discipline. Even if he 
 occupies the most eligible place on the whole field, a com- 
 manding' general can not see all the turns and stages of a 
 battle, although they may lie within the scope of his eye- 
 sight ; he ranges back and forth, looks first to one part of the 
 field and then to another, sees some things done and some 
 that have been done, uses his ears as well as his eyes, and by 
 the employment of all his faculties observation, inference, 
 memory, and imagination constructs a measurably com- 
 plete view of the battle as a whole. Not unlike this is the 
 position of a student of history who seeks to comprehend the 
 whole action that is taking place on any large historic field. 
 He can see but one thing at a time ; his mind moves in column 
 and not in line, and it is only by following a given series 
 a certain distance, and by frequently going back to bring up 
 the parallel series, and by much exercise of his co-ordinating 
 faculties, that he finally comes to see the action, as it were, in 
 group. A master of historical composition even can not 
 drive two, and much less three or four, series of events 
 abreast ; and in nothing does he use his skill to better pur- 
 pose than in choosing halting places for the column that he 
 had pushed on in the van, while he brings up the columns 
 that have fallen into the rear. Thus again we reach a reason
 
 8 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 why the child's first lessons in history must he stories chosen 
 with large reference to simplicity of action. 
 
 The questions, How many and what dates shall I teach ? 
 have continually receded before us. The fact is, no person 
 can definitely answer this question for another, or even for 
 himself, until he is in the presence of his class. The teacher 
 who demands definite answers, or feels the need of them, 
 thereby confesses his unfitness to teach the subject. All 
 that I can say, in addition to what I have said, is to offer 
 a few practical remarks. 
 
 1. Too many dates are sometimes taught, and bad judg- 
 ment is often shown in their selection. Some teachers seem 
 to think that pounding dates into a child's mind is the main 
 thing to be done. In fact, the over-emphasizing of chronol- 
 ogy has hitherto been one of the serious defects of history 
 teaching. Accordingly, it can not be too plainly stated that 
 a dictionary of dates is not a history. If the chronologist 
 were a historian, no form of literary composition would be 
 easier, whereas it is a high literary art. Clio sits by right 
 in the circle of the Muses. " To be a really great historian," 
 Lord Macaulay remarks, " is perhaps the rarest of intellect- 
 ual distinctions." 
 
 Dates are not the skeleton of history, as is sometimes 
 said ; they are not even its articulations. The American 
 Revolution turns on the battle of Lexington, somewhat as 
 the human arm " turns " on the ball-and-socket joint of the 
 shoulder ; the date, April 19, 1775, merely marks the time of 
 the transaction, unless, indeed, it is conceived of as the trans- 
 action itself. 
 
 2. The opposite mistake is sometimes made. The time 
 when an event occurs is dismissed with the contemptuous 
 remark, " A mere date. " Now, while facts are the staple of 
 history, they do not become history until they are properly 
 worked up or organized. It has already been insisted that 
 the teacher must constantly regard those relations that con- 
 trol such organization time, place, and causation. Fur- 
 thermore, in the early stage of instruction time should be
 
 THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 89 
 
 more emphasized than the other two principles, or, at all 
 events, than the third one. It is true that time relations, as 
 antecedent and consequent, may be taught irrespective of 
 dates ; still, it will be found that, unless a sufficient number 
 of dates are fixed in the mind to keep facts in their places, 
 they will straggle about in the most vagrant fashion. It is 
 more important to remember this fact, because the doctrine 
 of evolution, which has so much modified methods of study- 
 ing history, tends to fix attention on the development as a 
 whole, or on the stages into which it is divisible. To a de- 
 gree this method meets the ends of history, but by no means 
 wholly so. The time when an event occurs is sometimes as 
 important as the event itself ; and in general there can be 
 no useful comparison of historical facts without reference to 
 dates or measurably definite periods of time. It is a fault 
 for a writer to sprinkle his pages too thickly with B. o.'s 
 and A. D. 's ; but to leave the reader in doubt as to the time 
 relations of facts, or to compel him to infer them from the 
 drift of the narrative because the dates are too sparse, is quite 
 as serious a mistake. 
 
 It does not follow that a pupil should not learn a date 
 because he does not comprehend its full historical signifi- 
 cance or have definite ideas of the distance of the event from 
 the base line or from some other event. Such ability as this 
 is acquired but slowly. The prodigious significance of the 
 great dates of history continually grows upon the minds of 
 veteran scholars. 
 
 3. Much depends upon the particular subject with which 
 the teacher is dealing. As in geography we are content 
 with general ideas of distant countries, and especially of 
 large countries, while we require much more definite knowl- 
 edge in dealing with the near, and especially our own coun- 
 try ; so in history we do not expect, save in special work, 
 the detail in dealing with Grecian or Roman history that 
 we require in English history, and much less in the history 
 of the United States. The purpose of the writer or teacher 
 also has a direct bearing upon the question, whether he is 
 8
 
 90 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 dealing with the subject in an elementary or a thorough 
 manner. 
 
 4. The important dates are the ones to teach those that 
 stand to the whole historic movement in a relation similar 
 to that of the superior articulations to the human body. 
 These important dates should be fixed in the mind exactly 
 or approximately as firmly as possible, and other dates be 
 arranged with reference to them as antecedent or conse- 
 quent. It is not so important to know the day on which 
 the second Continental Congress convened or adjourned as 
 it is to know the day that it assigned to the United States a 
 separate position among the nations of the world. 
 
 5. the age of pupils, their advancement in study and 
 particularly in history, and the time that is to be given to 
 the subject, are all to be considered. Here, however, the cri- 
 teria already laid down for the selection of historical facts 
 in general apply in full force. 
 
 Nothing but a knowledge of the subject taught, and of 
 the conditions attending the pupils or the class, and good 
 judgment, will enable the teacher to decide how many and 
 what dates to teach. The attempt has been made to present 
 the principal considerations that bear on the two questions, 
 and to illustrate some methods of procedure. The compe- 
 tent teacher can desire nothing more. The Germans, or 
 some of them, do indeed go further. In the Berlin course of 
 study sixty-three dates are required to be taught in the sec- 
 ond class of the elementary schools, and fifty-three in the 
 first class ; one hundred and sixteen in all, or about six new 
 dates a month. 
 
 6. Still another suggestion may prove useful. The his- 
 tory of one country may serve as a general chronological 
 guide for the history of others. Thus, after she assumed a 
 leading position in the Mediterranean, Rome should be made 
 the point of observation from which to survey the history 
 of that whole basin. "What was going on in Carthage at 
 the time when Pyrrhus invaded Italy ? " " in Greece in the 
 days of the Second Punic War ? " " in the East in the days
 
 THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY: CHRONOLOGY. 91 
 
 of Pompey or Julius Caesar ? " For the general American 
 student, England should be the standard for Europe, at least 
 after the Norman Conquest. " Who ruled in France in the 
 time of Richard the Lion-hearted ? " " What was the state 
 of Prussia in the early part of the reign of George III ? " 
 
 The connections of English history and American his- 
 tory are of the first importance. At particular times the 
 same may be said of French history and American history. 
 What went on here often finds its explanation in what went 
 on there. The great outburst of interest in American plant- 
 ing that occurred toward the close of the sixteenth century, 
 best represented by Raleigh, had for one object the curbing 
 of the power of Spain. The same may be said of the more 
 successful efforts made at the opening of the ensuing cen- 
 tury. James I, Charles I, and Charles II were the authors 
 of the most celebrated colonial charters. Cromwell, James 
 II, and William III each has a status in American history. 
 The general policy pursued by George III, that brought on 
 the Revolution and led to the division of the British Empire, 
 had its English side. Then the foreign policy established 
 by Washington, the embargo, the acquisition of Louisiana, 
 the War of 1812, in their causes, all run deeply into Eu- 
 ropean affairs. Hence the parallelism of American dates 
 and European dates must be observed. No other great 
 power now existing has developed with such little disturb- 
 ance from the outside as the United States, owing to the 
 remoteness of the American Continent from the Old World ; 
 but their history, and especially down to 1815, is constantly 
 conditioned by European history.
 
 CHAPTER VIH. 
 
 THE PLACE RELATION : GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 References. See Chapter X. 
 
 SINCE history is action or movement, it involves the idea 
 of place as well as of time. An action or event, as the very 
 phrase suggests, must take place somewhere as well as some- 
 time. In purely subjective history neither element is prom- 
 inent, and both may be practically left out of the account. 
 Dealing with a man's thought or feeling merely, we do not 
 pay much attention to the time when or to the place where 
 he carried it on. But when thought becomes will and will 
 expresses itself in action that is, the very moment that his- 
 tory becomes objective the two elements distinctly appear. 
 Hence geography is the second of the two eyes of history. 
 
 The historical bearings or relations of geography may be 
 considered under two aspects, the static and the dynamic. 
 First, geography furnishes history its sphere or theater of 
 action. This is a purely spatial relation. Thus considered, 
 it has nothing to do with producing or modifying the ac- 
 tion ; it merely provides the ground where historic forces 
 act and bring about their results. But, secondly, geography 
 is a historical cause of great potency and value. Tempera- 
 ture, humidity, and food directly affect a man's physical and 
 mental character, and so his life. Heat and cold, wet and 
 dry, a diet of rice and a diet of train oil, are immediate his- 
 torical factors. Still further, these agents also affect him 
 through his occupations, his pastimes, his activities, and his 
 wants still more powerfully, and so are mediate historical 
 factors of great value. The historian must take account of
 
 THE PLACE RELATION: GEOGRAPHY. 93 
 
 food supply, the occupations of men, industries, and com- 
 merce, all closely related to natural conditions. He must 
 account for the location, the growth, and the character of 
 cities, and the construction of lines of transportation and 
 travel. What powerful factors in American history are In- 
 dian corn, the cotton belt, the fisheries, the forests and coal 
 fields, the oil regions, and the gold and silver mines I Mili- 
 tary operations, it is almost unnecessary to remark, are large- 
 ly governed by physical conditions. Gettysburg gave the 
 National and Confederate armies a field of battle ; by its re- 
 lations and peculiar conformation this field exerted a great 
 influence upon the battle itself. The shores of Massachusetts 
 Bay gave the Puritans an opportunity to do something ; 
 they also determined to a degree what they did and what 
 they could do. These two aspects of geography are never 
 practically separated ; neither one is ever wanting in real 
 history ; but the causal element, as we shall see hereafter, is 
 a variable quantity. 
 
 Since the two aspects are always practically united, some 
 might think it better to consider them together in such a 
 discussion as the present one. However, there are certain 
 advantages that attend handling them separately. Accord- 
 ingly, I shall treat the purely place relation in the present 
 chapter, leaving physical environment to be considered 
 more fully hereafter. 
 
 Life gives to matter its highest value, and wherever uni- 
 versal death prevails the interest of the mind can not be per- 
 manently maintained. If the moon be what we are assured 
 it is, even an astronomer, could he visit it, would wander 
 over its surface much as we walk over a bed of cinders or a 
 field of lava. The earth is most interesting when consid- 
 ered in relation to its human uses. Geography provides 
 man his sphere of life, and then finds its highest interest, 
 not in its deserts or crags, its glaciers or canons, but in its 
 human elements. Political geography is nothing but a 
 form of applied history. Then the two elements together 
 make up the interest of travel. To assign to the physical
 
 94: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 elements and historical elements of a country or locality 
 their relative degrees of value would be impossible, espe- 
 cially as the ratio would not be the same with all persons ; 
 similarly we can not nicely separate between current and 
 historical life ; but there is little doubt that the majority of 
 men attribute more or less interest to Nature that properly 
 belongs to humanity, and also some interest to contempo- 
 rary life that belongs to past time. Men toil and suffer to 
 visit countries and places having little living interest. The 
 Holy Places attract pilgrims because they have been made 
 holy by devoted and self-denying lives. Moses is greater 
 than Mount Sinai, Abraham than Palestine, Jesus than the 
 Lake of Galilee. It is very true that back of the event lie 
 causes, thoughts, feelings, and activities ; but there is a cer- 
 tain tendency to look for them, and also the event itself, in 
 the locality. 
 
 There are still other reasons for emphasizing geography 
 in connection with history. Historical events that are not 
 located by the pupil are neither understood nor remem- 
 bered. History that is read without due attention to its 
 theater is too much like an imaginary account of similar 
 transactions in the moon. Hence, the teacher must bring 
 the pupil's history down out of the clouds and rest it on the 
 ground and in the water. Thomas Carlyle once wrote to 
 one of his nephews : 
 
 As to subjects for reading, I recommend in general all kinds 
 of books that will give you real information about men, their works 
 and ways, past and present. History is evidently the grand sub- 
 ject a student will take to. Never read any such book without a 
 map beside you ; endeavor to seek out every place the author 
 names, and get a clear idea of the ground you are on ; without this 
 you can never understand him, much less remember him. Mark 
 the dates of the chief events and epochs ; write them ; get them 
 fixed into your memory chronology and geography are the two 
 lamps of history. 
 
 Careful study of a good map is the next best thing to 
 visiting a historical locality in person. To a certain ex-
 
 THE PLACE RELATION: GEOGRAPHY. 95 
 
 tent geography and history are but one study ; and the 
 effort now made in schools to study them in close connec- 
 tion is worthy of all praise. Thus the memory is wholly 
 dependent upon the associating activities of the mind. 
 Without them nothing could be retained and nothing could 
 be learned. Besides, contiguity of space is one of the most 
 powerful of these activities. In view of these facts we 
 need not enlarge upon the importance of the place element 
 in history. 
 
 The student of history might adopt a method similar to 
 that of the chronologist : he might use the geographical 
 divisions of a country or state as a cabinet of boxes for 
 the distribution of his facts. If the theater under considera- 
 tion is small, something quite like this must be done ; but 
 generally a less artificial method is to be preferred. 
 
 When an important fact belongs to a notable place, the 
 association is effected without difficulty. The Declaration 
 of Independence and the Federal Convention of 1787 easily 
 attach themselves to Philadelphia. If the event is less im- 
 portant or the place is less notable, the association is not 
 so easy. In fact, properly to connect events and places is 
 by no means the least part of the student's task. However, 
 to associate each fact that should be remembered with its 
 own definite locality is much like associating it with its own 
 definite year, the folly of which was commented upon in 
 the last chapter. We may borrow a useful hint from that 
 discussion : we may throw our facts to districts of country, 
 to cities or towns, or to marked natural features, much as 
 we before threw them to periods of time. 
 
 For example, the subject of study is the Mexican War. 
 Before taking this up as a series of military operations, it 
 should be viewed in its causes and general conditions. The 
 following factors should be mentioned : the geographical 
 relations of Mexico and the United States previous to the 
 war their long and irregular boundary, extending from 
 the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean ; the disputed strip of 
 territory lying between the river Nueces and the Rio Grande,
 
 96 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 a dispute that grew out of the Texas annexation ; the pos- 
 session hy Mexico of the vast region now comprising Cali- 
 fornia, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, and parts 
 of Colorado and Wyoming, none of it thickly populated 
 and most of it waste and uncultivated, none of it known to 
 contain metals, but much of it fertile and productive ; the 
 California coast and San Francisco Bay the eagerness of the 
 American statesmen who were then in the ascendant, and of 
 a large share of the people, particularly at the South, to gain 
 a Southwestern accession of territory and to widen the front 
 of the republic opening upon the western ocean, as well as 
 their determination to maintain the national claim to the 
 left bank of the Bio Grande. All these factors should be 
 duly emphasized, and particularly the enlarging and aggress- 
 ive habit of the American people. " Indemnity for the past 
 and security for the future " was a favorite battle-cry from 
 the beginning of the struggle. These factors being duly 
 recognized, it will be readily seen that the military events 
 fall into four main series : 
 
 I. The Rio Grande Frontier. In the spring of 1846 Gen- 
 eral Taylor fought and won the battles of Palo Alto and 
 Eesaca de la Palma, and drove the Mexicans from the east 
 side of the river. Later he invaded Mexico, winning im- 
 portant victories at Monterey and Buena Vista. The pupil 
 should locate all these actions and mark their relations ; but 
 if he can permanently associate them with the Rio Grande, 
 placing them on their appropriate sides of the river, nothing 
 more need be desired. 
 
 II. California. At the beginning of the war there was 
 an American squadron on the Pacific coast, and also an 
 armed exploring expedition. In the course of the summer 
 of 1846 this squadron, successively commanded by Commo- 
 dores Sloat and Stockton, and the explorers under Colonel 
 Fremont, seized the principal towns of Upper California 
 and reduced the whole province under American control. 
 In general it will be sufficient to assign the several small 
 engagements that took place simply to California.
 
 THE PLACE RELATION: GEOGRAPHY. 97 
 
 III. New Mexico. The same summer General S. W. 
 Kearney marched from the Missouri River across the plains 
 by the old Santa Fe trail, and subjugated all New Mexico 
 without fighting a battle. Kearney then departed for Cali- 
 fornia, but Colonel Doniphan, who was left in command, 
 marched south into Mexico, capturing the city of Chihuahua 
 and the country adjacent. He did not, however, accom- 
 plish his purpose of effecting a junction with General Tay- 
 lor at Monterey. 
 
 These successes placed the Americans in possession of 
 the territory that they coveted and that they were deter- 
 mined to hold. From this time on the war was waged on 
 their part to compel the Mexicans to consent to peace on 
 that condition. In fact, the victories of Monterey and 
 Buena Vista were a part of this later policy. Our Govern- 
 ment was determined that the left bank of the Rio Grande 
 and San Francisco Bay should never return to their old 
 owners. 
 
 IV. General Scott's Campaign against the City of Mex- 
 ico. In this campaign Vera Cruz was the first objective 
 point, because it was the key to the most direct road lead- 
 ing from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mexican capital. This 
 city, together with the fortress of San Juan de Ulloa, fell 
 before a combined naval and military attack in March, 1847. 
 and soon after the advance upon the capital began. Cerro 
 Gordo was won in April, and the campaign culminated in 
 the Valley of Mexico in August and September. As before, 
 the student should follow the army map in hand ; but it 
 will suffice for him permanently to associate Cerro Gordo 
 with Vera Cruz, and all the operations in the Valley with 
 the Capital City. 
 
 In many cases all practical purposes will be answered by 
 associating events with some city or town, or feature of 
 country, even although considerable distance intervene. 
 Further on a chapter will be given to the Revolutionary 
 War ; but here it may be pointed out that all the important 
 events of that struggle may be referred to a few centers, to
 
 98 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 be grouped and associated. These centers, or, at all events, 
 the most important of them, are Boston, Long Island Sound, 
 Lake Champlain, Montreal, Quebec, Saratoga, New York, 
 Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah, and the waters of Vir- 
 ginia. Or if it be thought that this is giving too much lati- 
 tude, then New Jersey and North and South Carolina may 
 be added. West of the mountains, East Tennessee and the 
 Illinois and Wabash country should not be overlooked. 
 With Boston may be associated Lexington and Concord, 
 the beleaguer of the city, Bunker Hill, the assumption of 
 command by Washington, the fortification of Dorchester 
 Heights, and the evacuation of the city. With Philadelphia 
 may be associated the early Congresses, the Declaration of 
 Independence, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, the occu- 
 pation of the city by General Howe, Germantown, Valley 
 Forge, and the evacuation of the city by the British. Such 
 groupings can be worked out with more or less detail as cir- 
 cumstances may determine, and may be rendered the more 
 effective by writing them out upon the blackboard and hav- 
 ing them copied into notebooks. 
 
 That geographical facts are much better understood, and 
 much more readily retained by the mind, when grouped and 
 clothed with a human interest that the same is true of his- 
 torical facts when grouped and rested on their geographical 
 supports are commonplaces. Full play for the invention 
 of the teacher is given in the effort to group and associate 
 the facts. 
 
 The system of waters to which we are admitted by the 
 strait between Cape Charles and Cape Henry is one of the 
 most interesting, both geographically and historically, in 
 our whole country. These waters have been the theater of 
 important and interesting events in the three great epochs 
 of our history : Discovery and Colonization, the Revolution, 
 and the Civil War. One or two places and three or four 
 characters become at once centers around which all the his- 
 torical facts that need be taught can be grouped. First, we
 
 THE PLACE RELATION: GEOGRAPHY. 99 
 
 have Jamestown, Captain John Smith, Powhatan, and Po- 
 cahontas; secondly, Yorktown, Washington, Rochambeau, 
 and Cornwallis; thirdly, Washington and Richmond, Lin- 
 coln, Grant, Davis, and Lee. 
 
 The history of Lakes George and Champlain and the 
 river Richelieu presents three or four interesting groups of 
 facts. Champlain, the Father of Canada, appeared on the 
 shore of the lake bearing his name, surrounded by the wild- 
 ness of Nature, in the year 1609. In the middle of the 
 last century these waters and their shores were a main thea- 
 ter of the French and Indian War. There rise up before us 
 Fort William Henry, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and the 
 wilderness fortresses of less degree ; the battlefields of Lake 
 George, William Henry, and Ticonderoga; the figures of 
 Montcalm, Abercrombie, Lord Howe, and Amherst. Twenty 
 years later came the army sent from Canada to separate the 
 New England States from the other States. Now we catch a 
 view of the fields of Bennington, Still water, and Saratoga ; of 
 Burgoyne and Gates, Schuyler, Stark, and Arnold. Thirty- 
 seven years later, in the last year of the War of 1812, came 
 Provost and Downie, attempting, like Burgoyne, to split the 
 Union, and, like him, failing in their purpose. 
 
 Then, the Delaware will always be associated with great 
 events : as Penn's treaty with the Indians, the Continental 
 Congress, the British occupation, and the Federal Conven- 
 tion; and with great characters, as Penn, Dr. Franklin, and 
 Washington. 
 
 Groupings of historical figures and scenes around geo- 
 graphical centers make these centers instinct with life and 
 motion, while the centers themselves, binding the figures 
 and scenes together, give them a new permanence and solid- 
 ity. The teacher will find it an excellent exercise to group 
 a series of essays around one of these centers excellent for 
 the purposes of language as well as of geography and his- 
 tory. Suppose we take for illustration the Champlain Val- 
 ley. One essay will do for Champlain and the discovery 
 of the lake; a dozen can be assigned to the men and the
 
 100 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 events of the French and Indian War ; the same number to 
 the Revolution. The whole can be called "Lake Cham- 
 plain in History." Of course, not many centers of historical 
 activity can be treated in so thorough a way ; some can be ; 
 while the pupil will carry the method and the habit of 
 mind thus created to other facts and to other subjects.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HISTORY. 
 
 References. Flint: The Philosophy of History in France and 
 Germany (the Introduction contains a good general account of the 
 development of the idea) ; Bunsen : Outlines of the Philosophy of 
 History (compendious General Introduction); Montesquieu: The 
 Spirit of Laws; Buckle: The History of Civilization in England 
 (Vol. I., Chap. I.) ; Draper : The History of the Intellectual Develop- 
 ment of Europe, I. ; Guizot : History of Civilization ; Lecky : The 
 Political Value of History; Froude: Short Studies of Great Sub- 
 jects (I., Is History a Science? II., Scientific Method applied to 
 History), The Educational Review, V., (Inaugural Lecture as Regius 
 Professor of Modern History at Oxford) ; Goldwin Smith : Lectures 
 on the Study of History (I., An Inaugural Lecture, II., III., On the 
 Study of History, IV., On Some Proposed Consequences of the Doc- 
 trine of Historical Progress, V., The Moral Freedom of Man) ; La- 
 visse : General View of the Political History of Europe ; Dabney : 
 Papers of the American Historical Association, V., No. III. (Is His- 
 tory a Science!) Harris: id., V., No. III. (The Philosophical As- 
 pect of History). 
 
 THE Greek thinkers made two kinds of knowledge, em- 
 pirical and philosophical knowledge of phenomena and 
 knowledge of causes. They also called these two forms of 
 knowledge the knowledge that and the knowledge why. 
 Perhaps it is needless to say that the second is much the 
 higher kind of knowledge ; we do not fully know a thing 
 until we can explain it or account for it. Furthermore, the 
 mind refuses to he satisfied with mere facts ; it asks Why ? 
 and Wherefore ? as well as What ? and does not rest until it 
 has discovered the reason and the law of things.
 
 102 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Savages, while differing from civilized men in the meth- 
 ods that they use and in the results that they reach, still 
 deal with causes. They think themselves surrounded hy 
 occult influences and mysterious powers. 
 
 In the midst of Nature [it has been said] the Indian knew noth- 
 ing of her laws. His perpetual reference of her phenomena to oc- 
 cult agencies forestalled inquiry and precluded inductive reasoning. 
 If the wind blew with violence, it was because the water-lizard, 
 which makes the wind, had crawled out of his pool ; if the lightning 
 was sharp and frequent, it was because the young of the thunder- 
 bird were restless in their nest ; if a blight fell upon the corn, it was 
 because the Corn Spirit was angry ; and if the beavers were shy and 
 difficult to catch, it was because they had taken offense at seeing the 
 bones of one of their race thrown to a dog.* 
 
 At the opposite pole of thought are the conceptions of 
 unity, law, and order which constitute the core of modern 
 science and philosophy. 
 
 The advance from the stage of savage thought to the 
 stage of scientific thought, as respects the physical world, 
 and still more as respects the moral world, cost man a pro- 
 digious effort ; in fact, the conceptions of law, order, and 
 unity are not yet as firmly fixed hi the second as they are in 
 the first. Spiritual phenomena are more elusive and less 
 easy to grasp ; while we are here called upon to deal with 
 one of the hardest questions of philosophy, viz., the adjust- 
 ment of man's free will to universal causation, a question 
 that happily falls outside the limits of the present discus- 
 sion. 
 
 The notions of historical uniformity and progress were 
 but feebly and vaguely discerned in antiquity. In his Gen- 
 eral History Polybius rose to the conception of the univer- 
 sal, as his title shows. The problem that he set for him- 
 self to solve was " how, in the short space of fifty-three years, 
 all the known parts of the earth were reduced beneath the 
 
 * Parkman : The Jesuits in North America, Ixxxviii.
 
 CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HISTORY. 103 
 
 power of a single state. . . . The most useful part of his- 
 tory," he wrote, " is the knowledge of what passed before 
 and after every great event, and especially of the causes that 
 produced it. ... It is not possible to obtain an entire view 
 and knowledge of the whole of things from particular his- 
 tory." Christianity was based upon the ideas of the spiritual 
 unity of the whole race and of a providential plan, and so 
 prepared the way for juster views of the scope of history. 
 The Middle Ages, so far from advancing the philosophy of 
 history, rather introduced new and hard elements into the 
 main problem. Froissart, the author of the pictured page 
 of chivalry, caught a glimmer of the larger bearings of 
 things. " If I were merely to say such and such things hap- 
 pened at such and such times," he wrote, " without entering 
 fully into the matter, which was grandly horrible and dis- 
 astrous, this would be a chronicle, but no history." Pascal, 
 in the seventeenth century, worked out his celebrated anal- 
 ogy of the race to the individual : 
 
 The whole succession of human beings throughout the whole 
 course of ages must be regarded as a single individual man, continu- 
 ally living and continually learning ; and that shows how unwar- 
 ranted is the deference we yield to the philosophers of antiquity ; for, 
 as old age is that which is most distant from infancy, it must be 
 manifest to all that old age in the universal man should not be 
 sought in the times near his birth, but in the times most distant 
 from it. Those whom we call the ancients are really those who lived 
 in the youth of the world and the true infancy of man ; and as we 
 have added the experience of the ages between us and them to what 
 they knew, it is only in ourselves that is to be found that antiquity 
 which we venerate in others. 
 
 At the middle of the last century Montesquieu wrote his 
 epoch-making book The Spirit of Laws, in which he strongly 
 set forth the doctrine of human progress through the opera- 
 tion of general causes. His philosophy of history has 
 been summed up by a competent hand in the statement 
 that " the course of history is, on the whole, determined by 
 general causes, by widespread and persistent tendencies, by
 
 104 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 broad and deep undercurrents, and only influenced in a 
 feeble, secondary, and subordinate degree by single events, 
 by definite arguments, by particular enactments, by any- 
 thing incidental, isolated, or individual."* Turgot, philoso- 
 pher and statesman, was the author of the saying so often 
 quoted in connection with the American Revolution, u Colo- 
 nies are like fruits, which cling to the tree only until they 
 ripen. " However, Herder, who wrote near the close of the 
 last century, is commonly accounted the real founder of the 
 philosophy of history, f 
 
 By short steps and slow, philosophical ideas have been 
 introduced into the field of historical research. Educated 
 men now accept the fact of a grand moral order ; or, in 
 other words, they recognize the sway of law over the 
 thoughts, feelings, and actions of men, and so over history. 
 Tennyson expresses the optimistic phase of this view in the 
 familiar lines : 
 
 Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
 And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the 
 suns. 
 
 There is, indeed, a serious dispute over the question how 
 
 * Flint : The Philosophy of History, London, 1874, p. 105. I am indebted 
 to this writer for several references and quotations. 
 
 t " Whenever we speak of society as an organism, whenever we con- 
 ceive of languages, customs, laws, institutions, arts, literatures, and religions 
 as organic growths, whenever we regard the whole life of man intellect- 
 ual, moral, and physical as a gradual development, we are adopting a 
 mode of thought of which our race had no inkling before the last third of 
 the eighteenth century, and which was first proclaimed in the immortal 
 Fragments of the youthful Herder. ' This, to be sure, is a madman or a 
 genius ! ' exclaimed Wieland. ' He is at any rate the only one for whom it 
 is worth my while to publish my ideas,' said Lessing. Now the message 
 with which this youthful prodigy electrified his contemporaries is the Ger- 
 man contribution to human thought, and animating principle of its move- 
 ments from that day to this. It consists in the substitution of fieri for 
 facere of spontaneous evolution for intentional institution as leading 
 conception in the study and interpretation of human society and human 
 civilization." DR. J. G. SCHURMAN.
 
 CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HISTORY. 1Q5 
 
 far scientific ideas can be extended in history. Some writers 
 regard historical facts as so fixed and certain, and the laws 
 of historical development as so definite, as to justify them in 
 calling history a science ; others insist that this is going too 
 far, some even denying that there is such a thing as the phi- 
 losophy of history. To a considerable extent this con- 
 troversy is about words and names, and not about facts ; at 
 least, the writers who deny that there is a science or even a 
 philosophy of history, as well as those who affirm the reality 
 of one or the other, hold stoutly to historical causation. 
 Even Mr. Froude, who regards history merely as a drama, 
 admits that it does teach that right and wrong are true dis- 
 tinctions. 
 
 It is in the doctrine of causation that we find the value of 
 history as a guide and a discipline. Rightly led, the student 
 does not struggle with a mass of disconnected and meaning- 
 less facts, but pursues his work under the guiding principles 
 of unity and order. The conduct is shaped and the intellect 
 disciplined by grasping the fact that like events follow like 
 causes. The pupil learns the law that whatever a man or a 
 nation sows, that must be reaped, which is the very begin- 
 ning of historical wisdom. He sees the consequences of free- 
 dom, of slavery, of war, of tyranny and oppression, of na- 
 tional prodigality and wastefulness. He learns that there is 
 no universally best form of government, but that the form 
 which is best in a given case depends upon the history and 
 the genius of the people, and that that is best relatively 
 which best expresses the national life. He does not learn to 
 accept the lines 
 
 For forms of government let fools contest ; 
 Whate'er is best administered is best ; 
 
 or the lines 
 
 How small, of all that human hearts endure, 
 That part which kings or laws can cause or cure ; 
 
 but he does learn that the springs of human well-being, both 
 9
 
 IOC HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTOHY. 
 
 individual and national, lie deep in the character, history, 
 and environment of men. He learns that political institu- 
 tions are the results of general causes, and that they grow, 
 and are not merely made. He learns that a republican gov- 
 ernment like our own is closely dependent upon a high 
 stage of intelligence and virtue. He sees that a nation's 
 civilization is characterized by a certain unity ; that educa- 
 tion, morals, politics, and social life are not distinct and 
 separate phenomena, but are closely related. More than 
 this, he discovers that nations are dependent upon one an- 
 other ; that no one country has totally separate interests, 
 but that the good of one and the good of all are more or less 
 closely bound up together. 
 
 He learns the facts so well stated by Mr. Lecky relative 
 to the great permanent forces that are steadily bearing 
 nations onward to improvement or decay : 
 
 The strongest of these forces are the moral ones. Mistakes in 
 statesmanship, military triumphs or disasters, no doubt affect 
 materially the prosperity of nations, but their permanent political 
 well-being is essentially the outcome of their moral state. Its foun- 
 dation is laid in pure domestic life, in commercial integrity, in a 
 high standard of moral worth and of public spirit, in simple habits, 
 in courage, uprightness, and self-sacrifice, in a certain soundness 
 and moderation of judgment, which springs quite as much from 
 character as from intellect. If you would form a wise judgment of 
 the future of a nation, observe carefully whether these qualities are 
 increasing or decaying. Observe especially what qualities count for 
 most in public life. Is character becoming of greater, or less, impor- 
 tance f Are the men who obtain the highest posts in the nation men 
 of whom in private life and irrespective of party competent judges 
 speak with genuine respect f Are they men of sincere convictions, 
 sound judgment, consistent lives, indisputable integrity! or are 
 they men who have won their positions by the arts of a demagogue 
 or an intriguer ; men of nimble tongues and not earnest beliefs 
 skillful, above all things, in spreading their sails to each passing 
 breeze of popularity f Such considerations as these are apt to be 
 forgotten in the fierce excitement of a party contest ; but if history 
 has any meaning, it is such considerations that affect most vitally
 
 CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HISTORY. 107 
 
 the permanent well-being of communities, and it is by observing 
 this moral current that you can best cast the horoscope of a nation. 
 
 This is not an inappropriate place to point another les- 
 son of history, one presented by Lord Bacon in his essay On 
 Innovations. These, he truly tells us, are " the births of 
 time." " Time," he says, " is the greatest innovator." Also : 
 "It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations 
 would follow the example of Time itself ; which indeed in- 
 novateth greatly, but quietly and by degrees scarce to be 
 perceived." This is the lesson of patience and of watchful- 
 ness. It by no means follows that certain causes will not 
 produce good results because they do not appear at once, 
 or that other causes will not produce evil results because 
 they do not immediately declare themselves. " The move- 
 ments of Providence," says Guizot, " are not restricted to nar- 
 row bounds ; it is not anxious to deduce to-day the conse- 
 quence of the premises it laid down yesterday. It may de- 
 fer this for ages, till the fullness of time shall come. Its 
 logic will not be less conclusive for reasoning slowly. Prov- 
 idence moves through time, as the gods of Homer through 
 space it makes a step, and ages have rolled away." 
 
 In a word, our student becomes familiar with some of 
 the many valuable lessons of history, for it is impossible to 
 pursue intelligently the facts without getting something of 
 their meaning. He finds also, to quote Mr. Lecky again, 
 that history " is one of the best schools for that kind of rea- 
 soning which is most useful in practical life. It teaches 
 men to weigh conflicting probabilities, to estimate degrees of 
 evidence, to form a sound judgment on the value of authori- 
 ties. . . . History is largely concerned with the kind of 
 probability on which the conduct of life depends." 
 
 Accident, or what Frederick the Great called u King Haz- 
 ard," has played an important part in history. Mr. Lecky's 
 question in regard to Mohammed, Charles Martel, and Wash- 
 ington and Napoleon is quoted in another place. The same 
 writer affirms that the course of European history would
 
 108 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 have been very different if Hannibal had taken and de- 
 stroyed Rome after Cannae, or if France, instead of the Re- 
 gency and the two succeeding Louises had been under such 
 sovereigns as those of the elder house of Orange, or the 
 Great Elector, or Frederick the Great. We can not even 
 imagine in what channels history would have run if Oliver 
 Cromwell had fallen at Edgehill instead of John Hampden, 
 Wallenstein at Liitzen instead of Gustavus Adolphus, or 
 Napoleon at Marengo instead of Desaix. The part that 
 caprice plays in history is at once serious and amusing. 
 After observing that love, the cause of which is an " I know 
 not what," moves princes, armies, the entire world, Pascal 
 adds : " If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole 
 face of the earth would have been changed" ; and Mr. Green, 
 remarking upon the "equable serenity" with which the 
 Duke of Marlborough met the " pettiness of the German 
 princes, the phlegm of the Dutch, the ignorant opposition 
 of his officers, the libels of his political opponents," says : 
 " There was a touch of irony in the simple expedients by 
 which he sometimes solved problems which had baffled cabi- 
 nets. The King of Prussia was one of the most vexatious 
 of the allies, but all difficulty with him ceased when Marl- 
 borough rose at a state banquet and handed him a napkin." 
 
 Some words of caution must be added. The writer or 
 the teacher of history should not use his theme as a vehicle 
 for conveying favorite ideas or doctrines. It is not his main 
 duty to teach moral lessons directly or to explain social or 
 political philosophy. On the other hand, he is to tell his 
 story as it was as Carlyle puts it, " he is to come at some 
 picture of the thing acted." What happened? is his first 
 question, truthful narration his first duty. Bacon wrote, 
 in the Advancement of Learning : " It is the true office of his- 
 tory to represent the events themselves, and to leave the ob- 
 servations and conclusions thereof to the liberty and faculty 
 of every man's judgment." Causes, reasons, and theories 
 must in no case be put in front of the facts. Moreover, the
 
 CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HISTORY. 109 
 
 logical faculty may be employed with altogether too much 
 freedom. These significant sentences come to us from that 
 profound historical scholar, Guizot : 
 
 It must not. however, be supposed that a bad principle radically 
 vitiates an institution, nor even that it does it all the mischief of 
 which it is pregnant. Nothing tortures history more than logic. 
 No sooner does the human mind seize upon an idea, than it draws 
 from it all its possible consequences, makes it produce in imagina- 
 tion, all that it would in reality be capable of producing, and then 
 figures it down in history with all the extravagant additions which 
 itself has conjured up. This, however, is nothing like the truth. 
 Events are not so prompt in their consequences as the human 
 mind in its deductions. 
 
 Let it be once admitted that the main function of the his- 
 torian or teacher is to inculcate moral, political, or religious 
 lessons, and no one can tell what distortion of facts would 
 follow. The historian can not be too full of reverence for 
 what Carlyle called the "verities." 
 
 The caution must be made still stronger in the case of 
 elementary history. Here the influence of the teacher may 
 be peculiarly warping, as the pupil is little more than wax 
 in his hands. Besides, at this stage of progress the main 
 thing in hand is to amass materials that may be worked up 
 afterward. 
 
 Once more, the philosophy should be incidental rather 
 than obtrusive ; it should follow the examples. A tale well 
 told points its own moral and adorns itself. History is use- 
 ful as a guide only when it is truly narrated. Its very first 
 moral lesson is to teach the truth. Accordingly, the 
 teacher, to adopt another's words, " should have the genuine 
 historical instinct, the true enthusiasm to know what hap- 
 pened ; he should be fond of the story for its own sake, and 
 be in love with things not merely for what they were, but 
 simply because they were."
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 
 
 References. Reclus : The Earth and its Inhabitants, with Nu- 
 merous Illustrations and Maps (Europe 5 vols., Asia 4 vols., Af- 
 rica 4 vols., Oceanica 1 vol., North and South America 4 vols. The 
 last four volumes are entitled, British North America ; Mexico, Cen- 
 tral America, and the West Indies ; The United States, and South 
 America), The Earth, a Descriptive History of the Phenomena of 
 the Life of the Globe, The Ocean, Atmosphere, and Life, being the 
 Second Series of a Descriptive History of the Life of the Globe ; 
 Guyot : Earth and Man ; Montesquieu : The Spirit of Laws (Books 
 XIV.-XVIIL); Buckle and Draper: titles before given (passim); 
 Bryce : The Contemporary Review, XLIX. (History and Geography) ; 
 Mackinder: Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, IX., 
 New Series (On the Scope and Methods of Geography) ; Freeman : 
 Historical Geography of Europe (Introduction); Curtius: History 
 of Greece (Book the First, I., Land and People) ; Thirlwall : History 
 of Greece (I., Geographical Outlines of Greece) ; Dr. W. Smith : A 
 History of Greece (Introduction) ; Lanciani : Ancient Rome in the 
 Light of Recent Discoveries (II., The Foundation and Prehistoric 
 Life of Rome) ; Goldwin Smith : Lectures and Essays (The Great- 
 ness of the Romans, The Greatness of England. These essays, first 
 published in The Contemporary Review, are excellent) ; Taine : 
 History of English Literature (Introduction), Art in Greece; Green: 
 A Short History of England, The Making of England, A Short 
 Geography of the British Islands ; Huxley : Physiography ; Mill : 
 The Realm of Nature, An Outline of Physiography (XVII., Man in 
 Nature); Shaler: Introduction to the Narrative and Critical History 
 of America, IV. (Physiography of North America), Nature and Man 
 in America (both excellent); Burgess: Political Science and Con- 
 stitutional Law (Book 1., Chap. II., The Present Geographical Dis- 
 tribution of Nations and Nationalities, III., National Political
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 
 
 Character, IV., Conclusions of Practical Politics from the Forego- 
 ing Considerations in regard to Physical, Ethnical, and Political 
 Geography, and National Characteristics); Mahan: The Influence 
 of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, The Influence of Sea Power 
 upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. (A distin- 
 guished foreign critic has called the author of these works the cre- 
 ator of the philosophy of naval history.) 
 
 THE reciprocal influence of Man and Nature is one of the 
 hard subjects with which modern scientists and philosophers 
 are called upon to deal. The action of Nature and the reac- 
 tion of man, or, as some might prefer to state it, the action 
 of man and the reaction of Nature, are the questions that it 
 presents for answer. While it is not necessary that the 
 teacher of history should deal with these questions on their 
 speculative side, it is necessary for him to recognize the 
 principal physical factors. 
 
 Naturally, the first of these factors to attract attention 
 was climate, the influence of which on the character and 
 history of nations was recognized by the Greek thinkers. 
 This recognition is well illustrated by the passage, hereafter 
 quoted, in which Aristotle points out the contrast between 
 Asia and Europe. However, the Greek writers never worked 
 out the subject. 
 
 Bodin, who died in 1596, was apparently the first modern 
 writer to investigate the historical influence of physical 
 causes, as well as the first to vindicate the claim of all reli- 
 gious confessions in a state to equal political toleration. Di- 
 viding nations into northern, middle, and southern, he in- 
 vestigated with much fullness of knowledge how climate and 
 other geographical conditions affect the bodily strength, the 
 courage, the intelligence, the humanity, the chastity, and, 
 in short, the mind, morals, and manners of peoples ; what 
 influence mountains, winds, diversities of soil, etc., exert ; 
 and elicited a great number of general views, some of which 
 are false, but some also true.* 
 
 * Flint : Philosophy of History, p. 74
 
 112 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 In the Spirit of Laws, published in 1748, Montesquieu 
 sought to explain how laws are related to manners, climates, 
 creeds, and forms of government. He laid great stress on 
 the physical factors in civilization, and is sometimes said to 
 have originated the doctrine of climates. Five of his books 
 bear titles that indicate, in a general way, the range of his 
 inquiries : Of Laws as relative to the Nature of Climate ; In 
 what manner the Laws of Civil Slavery are relative to the 
 Nature of the Climate ; How the Laws of Domestic Slavery 
 have a Relation to the Nature of the Climate ; How the 
 Laws of Political Servitude have a Relation to the Nature of 
 the Climate ; Of Laws in the Relation that they bear to the 
 Nature of the Soil. Although he trenches upon the practi- 
 cal denial of the freedom of man, he still checks himself, 
 arguing that laws also bear a relation to the principles which 
 form the general spirit of the morals and customs of a na- 
 tion that is, the principles of human nature. 
 
 This leads to the observation that here we meet two di- 
 vergent lines of thought. The question at issue is the ad- 
 justment of the material and the spiritual elements of his- 
 tory. In general, it may be said that students of physical 
 science, and others who have formed similar habits of 
 thought, dealing mainly with Nature, are led to emphasize 
 the material element ; while philosophers and metaphysi- 
 cians, dealing mainly with the mind, tend to emphasize the 
 spiritual element. 
 
 Mr. Buckle pushed the naturalistic theory to its farthest 
 limit. He denied all freedom to man, and made climate, 
 food, soil, and the general aspects of Nature the supreme 
 and ultimate historical causes. For example, he attributed 
 the superstition of Italy, Spain, and Portugal to earthquakes 
 and volcanic eruptions, and the Calvinistic theology of Scot- 
 land to the rocks and mountains of the country and the sur- 
 rounding ocean waste.* 
 
 Dr. J. W. Draper wrote his History of the Intellectual 
 
 * History of Civilization in England, vol. i, p. 29, 88, 89 ; vol. ii, p. 126.
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. H3 
 
 Development of Europe, Civil Polity in America, and His- 
 tory of the Civil War, on the naturalistic theory. 
 
 M. Taine laid great stress upon soil, sky, sea, climate, 
 and food as factors in the intellectual and literary history 
 of England ; in fact, he wrote his History of English Litera- 
 ture on what he called scientific lines. This distinguished 
 writer was accustomed to refer historical results to race, en- 
 vironment, and the time. 
 
 The distinguished scholar and diplomatist, Mr. George 
 P. Marsh, handled the subject in his Man and Nature, now 
 better known under the title, The Earth as modified by Hu- 
 man Action. He undertook to " indicate the character and 
 extent of the changes produced by human actions in the 
 physical conditions of the globe, to point out the dangers of 
 undue interference with the spontaneous arrangements of 
 the organic or inorganic world, to suggest the possibility 
 and importance of the restoration of harmonies that have 
 been disturbed, and incidentally to illustrate the doctrine 
 that man is, in both kind and degree, a power of a higher 
 order than any of the other forms of animated life, which, 
 like him, are nourished at the table of bounteous Nature.'* 
 Without discussing his subject in its speculative bearings, 
 Mr. Marsh accumulates a mass of most interesting facts 
 showing that man can waste and repair Nature, and that 
 he is rather her master than her slave. 
 
 It is very easy to exaggerate the value of either the hu- 
 man or the natural factor in history, and very hard to as- 
 sign to either its just and appropriate influence. The fact 
 is, neither one is a constant quantity ; both vary with coun- 
 try, race, and time. 
 
 The general subject has not been introduced for discus- 
 sion on its speculative side, but merely to pave the way for 
 some examples of physical causation. First, however, it 
 should be observed that Nature exerts upon man two kinds 
 of influence. How far climate, food, soil, and the general 
 aspects of Nature affect his mind and character directly, we 
 have no means of determining ; but it is obvious that the
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 direct effect of such agents is much less than the indi- 
 rect effect. Through the social wants and activities 
 that they create and modify, through man's occupations 
 and pleasures, through his general habits, they exert 
 upon him a profound influence from his cradle to his 
 grave. The sum total of such influence is known as en- 
 vironment. 
 
 Professor Bryce, discussing with much learning and 
 acuteness the relations of history and geography, divided 
 the general subject of environment into three groups of 
 factors, all closely related : 
 
 I. The influences that are due to the configuration of the 
 earth's surface that is to say, to the distribution of land and 
 sea, the arrangement of mountain chains, table-lands, and 
 valleys, the existence of rivers, and the basins which they 
 drain. Nothing can be more evident than that these facts 
 almost wholly controlled the early movement of races, such 
 as migration, and that they powerfully affect military opera- 
 tions, the character and extent of conquests, the size and the 
 boundaries of states, the location and character of cities, the 
 direction, kind, and abundance of facilities for travel and 
 transportation, the presence or absence of harbors, and mari- 
 time commerce, growth of military and naval power, the 
 development of special industries, and many other things of 
 the greatest interest. 
 
 Dr. Draper remarks that Europe is geographically a pen- 
 insula, and historically a dependency of Asia. The plains of 
 Central and Northern Asia are prolonged through Central 
 Europe to the German Ocean and the Baltic ; the average 
 height of the larger continent is 1,132 feet above the level of 
 the sea, of the smaller one 671 feet ; from the Pacific to the 
 Atlantic Ocean, north of the great central east-and-west 
 mountain axis, a distance of more than 6,000 miles, an army 
 could march without having to encounter any elevation of 
 more than a few hundred feet ; with an abundance of springs 
 and head waters, but without any stream capable of offering 
 a serious obstacle, this tract has a temperature well suited to
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. H5 
 
 military operations ; it coincides practically with the annual 
 isothermal line of fifty degrees, keeping just north of the 
 limit of vine production in which physical facts Dr. Draper 
 finds the reasons why the Oriental hordes have again and 
 again poured themselves over Europe. 
 
 The Spanish Peninsula has a marked geographical char- 
 acter, as any one who will look at its mountain and river 
 systems, its plains and forests on a map, can see ; and this 
 character has given a marked individuality to Spanish war- 
 fare from the earliest times, as well as influenced its history 
 in many other important ways. Spain is a hard country to 
 subdue, an easy one to defend as witness its history in the 
 days of Hannibal, of Sertorius, and of Napoleon and Well- 
 ington. Perhaps no book of history was ever written that 
 better illustrates the influence of geography and topography 
 upon the conduct of war than Napier's History of the War 
 in the Peninsula and the South of France. Guerrilla war- 
 fare, it is worth observing, found its name, if indeed it did 
 not originate, in Spain. The name dates from the great con- 
 test just mentioned. " The term guerrilla" says Dr. Lieber, 
 " is the diminutive of the Spanish word guerra, and means 
 petty war that is, war carried on by detached parties, gen- 
 erally in the mountains " a kind of war to which the coun- 
 try is especially adapted. 
 
 The position and configuration of England, her insular 
 character and relations to the continent, the distribution of 
 her river valleys and uplands, and the relations of these 
 features to one another and to the seashore, have had a 
 prodigious influence upon English history and character. 
 How potent these natural factors were in the German con- 
 quest of the island, Mr. Green has admirably shown in his 
 Short History of England, and still more fully in his Mak- 
 ing of England. Mr. Mackinder well observes that the sec- 
 ond of these books is largely " a deduction from geographical 
 conditions of what must have been the course of history." 
 It may be remarked that if the study of English history 
 could be accompanied by the study of such a book as Mr.
 
 116 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 and Mrs. Green's Short Geography of the British Islands, it 
 would be a very great advantage. 
 
 II. The influences which belong to meteorology and 
 climate, meaning thereby the conditions of heat and cold 
 under which a race of men develops itself with the amount 
 of rain and the recurrence of drought. The winds also play 
 their part. These agents directly affect man's health, 
 strength, and mental character ; while indirectly, through 
 soil and fertility, with which they are so closely connected, 
 they almost wholly control his occupations. It is no acci- 
 dent that great peoples and states have never appeared be- 
 yond the polar circles or within the tropics, or that the main 
 historical movement has been confined to the north temper- 
 ate zone. The Greek genius was largely indebted to the 
 physical influences under which it was developed. " Mild 
 and clement is our atmosphere," says Euripides ; " the cold 
 of winter is for us without rigor, and the arrows of Phoebus 
 do not wound us." 
 
 A people formed by such a climate [says M. Taine, to whom I 
 am indebted for the quotation] develops faster and more harmoni- 
 ously than any other ; man is neither prostrated nor enervated by 
 excessive heat, nor chilled or indurated by severe cold. He is 
 neither condemned to dreamy inactivity nor to perpetual labor ; he 
 does not lag behind in mystic contemplation nor in brutal barbar- 
 ism. Compare a Neapolitan or a Proven9al with a man of Brit- 
 tany, a Hollander, or a Hindoo, and you will recognize how the 
 mildness and moderation of physical nature endow the soul with 
 vivacity, and so balance it as to lead the mind thus disposed and 
 alert to thought and to action. 
 
 Thucydides observed that thought was the only peculiar- 
 ity of the Athenians. 
 
 III. The third class of elements that make up environ- 
 ment are the productions which a country offers to human 
 industry. Here we inventory mines, quarries, the products 
 of wells and springs, field and forest, fisheries of all kinds, 
 and animals both wild and domesticated. Professor Bryce
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. H7 
 
 illustrates how a narrow range of productions fatally re- 
 stricts progress in the arts and refinements of life, by in- 
 stancing Iceland. The race is of admirable quality, but the 
 country produces nothing save a few sheep and horses, and 
 some sulphur ; it has not even fuel, except such driftwood as 
 is cast upon its shores. He adds that if the highest European 
 races were placed in Central or Northern Asia they would 
 find it almost impossible to develop a high type of civiliza- 
 tion for want as well of fuel as of the sources of commercial 
 wealth. Before entering upon that industrial stage in which 
 she has distanced all other countries, England had reached 
 a high stage of agricultural development ; she has now ac- 
 quired such a momentum that she could possibly survive as 
 an industrial nation the exhaustion of her mineral wealth ; 
 but she could never have emerged from the agricultural 
 state and attained her present industrial, commercial, and 
 financial standing without her abundant supplies of tin, 
 copper, iron, and coal. In the earlier period the center of 
 her population, power, and wealth lay in the south, where 
 the richest agricultural districts are found ; but in the pres- 
 ent period this center has moved northward, where exist the 
 sinews of manufacturing and commerce. Geological maps 
 and maps showing the distribution of population, of wealth, 
 and even of political parties, are very significant when 
 studied in relation. Eastern Yorkshire and western Lan- 
 cashire are strongly conservative in politics ; western York- 
 shire and eastern Lancashire tend to radicalism ; the eastern 
 part of the one county and the western part of the other are 
 mainly agricultural districts, where the influence of the 
 upper classes and of the farmers is decisive, while within 
 these limits lies a great manufacturing, mining, and trad- 
 ing population, with wit, education, and radical opinions. 
 " Those jvho examine Lancashire schools are struck," says 
 Professor Bryce, " by the difference between the sharpness 
 of the boys in the east Lancashire hill country and the slug- 
 gishness of those who dwell on the flats along the coast be- 
 tween Liverpool and Morecambe." The mines of Lanca-
 
 11 3 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 shire called manufactures into being and created trade ; and 
 these factors, with all that they imply, have changed the 
 region from a fastness of Toryism into a hive of Radicalism. 
 So true is it, as Mr. Green says, that " history strikes its roots 
 in geography ; for without a clear and vivid realization of 
 the physical structure of a country the incidents of the life 
 which men have lived in it can have no interest or mean- 
 ing. Through history again politics strike their roots in 
 geography, and many a rash generalization would have been 
 avoided had political thinkers been trained in a knowledge 
 of the earth we live in, and of the influence which its vary- 
 ing structure must needs exert on the varying political tend- 
 ency and institutions of the peoples who part its empire be- 
 tween them." 
 
 The foregoing illustrations will make plain Professor 
 Bryce's very useful distinctions. At the same time, the ele- 
 ments into which he resolves environment are always more 
 or less mixed up in history ; and since it requires some skill 
 to separate them, it will be better, in teaching the elements of 
 the subject, not to attempt careful analysis but to handle the 
 factors in groups. Some illustrations of this method may 
 be presented. 
 
 Mr. Buckle points out that the growth of civilization is 
 possible only in countries having a class of men who possess 
 the time, the disposition, and the means to observe and to 
 investigate the various subjects upon which such growth 
 depends, as the facts of Nature and the laws of the human 
 mind. But a class of men in the possession of leisure, dis- 
 position to study, and opportunity to study, can exist only in 
 countries where there is a sufficient accumulation of wealth 
 to free them from the necessity of constant physical toil. 
 Obviously, if every man is intensely absorbed in the struggle 
 for physical existence, society can not move forward. 
 Thirdly, the accumulation of wealth depends upon natural 
 factors ; soil and climate condition the rewards of labor, cli- 
 mate conditions the energy and constancy of labor. Hence, 
 fourthly, those countries were sure to become the earliest
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. H9 
 
 seats of civilization where Nature provided good opportuni- 
 ties for the accumulation of wealth, and so the material pos- 
 sibility of study and mental progress. Finally, he remarks 
 that such conditions existed in Hindostan and in Egypt, in 
 Central America, in Mexico, and in Peru, countries that be- 
 came early if not the earliest seats of civilization on their 
 respective continents. Herodotus called Egypt the gift of 
 the Nile. The Nile Valley is a thick deposit of the richest 
 soil, which the annual overflow of the river constantly re- 
 plenishes ; the rainless sky and the equable temperature 
 make continuous labor possible, while the river furnishes 
 the source of natural or artificial irrigation. The early hus- 
 bandman was assured good harvests and abundant food, and 
 thus the first condition of progress was secured. 
 
 Greece affords one of the best illustrations of the effect of 
 environment upon historical development. The psycho- 
 logical effects of the sky and atmosphere have already been 
 mentioned. The geniality of the climate tends to modera- 
 tion in eating and to the use of light clothing, necessities 
 that the country well supplied ; as a result, man was not 
 compelled to undergo grinding toil to procure the means of 
 material subsistence, and so was left with time to indulge 
 the disposition to investigate, which all the influences that 
 played upon him tended to create. The country is a penin- 
 sula, or rather a complex of peninsulas, the whole singularly 
 pierced by gulfs and bays, as well as crossed and recrossed 
 by mountain ranges, and so divided into a great number of 
 small plains and valleys, each more or less cut off from the 
 others, at the same time that it lies open to the sea. At no 
 point is the traveler far from the seashore, and at few points 
 is he out of sight of the great mountain mass of Parnassus, 
 which occupies such an important place in Greek history. 
 It is said to be very difficult for one who has never visited 
 Greece to realize the diminutive scope of its geography. At- 
 tica and JEigvasi together contain no more than seven hun- 
 dred and fifty square miles of territory, and in antiquity 
 they never had a population exceeding half a million people.
 
 120 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 In addition to this remarkable accessibility from tbe sea, 
 attention must be drawn to the larger geographical relations 
 of Greece to the islands, large and small, that surround it 
 on all sides except the north ; to the not distant shores of 
 Thrace, of Asia Minor, of Africa and of Italy ; to the Black 
 Sea, to the Nile, and to the Mediterranean. In these factors 
 scholars have found causes of the most prominent features 
 of the Greek mind and life ; the wonderful mental gifts of 
 the people, their seafaring, trading, and colonizing habits, 
 their free, adventurous spirit, and especially their political 
 institutions, and the whole form and spirit of their public 
 life. In her early history Greece contained about as many 
 independent states as she had definite units of territory, plain 
 or valley ; a state of things that resulted in a free and vigor- 
 ous political life, marked by intense patriotism and local 
 spirit, but tending to division and strife, to the lack of gen- 
 eral political ideas, to internal war, to what the Germans 
 call particularism, and Americans States-rights, and so to 
 eventual weakness. The final result was, since these divis- 
 ive and separatist tendencies could never be overcome, that 
 Greece became a prey to internal faction and external force. 
 Environment, first by contributing to the creation of the 
 people, and then to the direction and control of their activ- 
 ity, certainly had much to do with causing the brilliant de- 
 velopment and early decadence of the Grecian race. It was 
 no miracle and no accident that the first European civiliza- 
 tion, and in some respects the greatest European civilization, 
 sprang up in Greece. 
 
 As a rule, the location of cities has been controlled by 
 what Mr. Mackinder happily calls "geographical selection." 
 Two excellent examples of such selection may be borrowed 
 from that writer. On the northeast of the Ganges Valley 
 lie the vast Himalayas, practically impassable to man ; on 
 the northwest is the Sulaiman range, pierced by passes 
 through which numerous conquerors have entered India 
 from the uplands of Iran. Parallel with the Sulaiman is the 
 Thar, or great Indian Desert. Between the desert and the
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 121 
 
 Himalayas the fertile belt is closely contracted, forming a 
 pass that affords the only approach to the valley at that ex- 
 tremity. Close to the eastern end of this pass, at the head of 
 the Ganges navigation, stands Delhi, the natural center of 
 commerce and the natural base of military operations in all 
 that region. At its eastern extremity the valley is very in- 
 accessible, owing to the absence of natural harbors and tc 
 the heavy surfs that beat upon the shore. But the mouth 
 of the river is a great water-gate for the interior, and here 
 on the Hoogly, at the intersection of ocean and river trans- 
 portation, a natural base of naval and military operations, 
 the British have built up Calcutta. The fertility of the 
 Ganges Valley is proverbial ; at its extremities are found 
 the two gates of India, and it is quite in the nature of things 
 that these gates are held by the cities of Delhi and Calcutta. 
 
 Alexander located the city that bears his name at the in- 
 tersection of the Mediterranean and Nile commerce, having 
 particularly in view the control of the most southern of the 
 old lines of communication between the Indies and the West. 
 For many centuries Alexandria was the grand depot from 
 which the Indian goods were distributed throughout the 
 Mediterranean basin. Constantinople is the gate both to the 
 Black Sea and the ^Egean, both to southeastern Europe 
 and northwestern Asia, according as you approach it from 
 the one direction or the other. This city also sits upon one 
 of the old channels of Eastern commerce. 
 
 Study of the cities of Italy is peculiarly interesting. 
 Rome was probably founded by shepherds, who, moved by 
 volcanic disturbances or by an insufficiency of pasture lands, 
 or by both, descended with their flocks and herds from 
 their ancestral seats on the Alban Hills into the extensive 
 and fertile plain watered by the Tiber and encircled by 
 mountains and the sea that has long been known as the 
 Campagna. Coming to the conspicuous group of hills and 
 ridges near the river, they seized and fortified the Palatine, 
 which best met their need of a dwelling place and a protec- 
 tion. Livy describes Rome as situated on healthy hills, by a 
 10
 
 122 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 convenient river, equally adapted to inland and maritime 
 commerce, the sea not too far off to prevent a brisk inter- 
 national trade, or so near as to expose it to the danger of a 
 sudden attack from foreign vessels ; a site right in the cen- 
 ter of the peninsula a site made, as it were, on purpose to 
 allow the city to become the greatest in the world. No whit 
 inferior were the military and political advantages of the 
 site. 
 
 In the first place [says Professor Gold win Smith], her position 
 was such as to bring her into contact from the outset with a great 
 variety of races. The cradle of her dominion was a sort of ethno- 
 logical microcosm. Latins, Etruscans, Greeks, Campanians, with 
 all the mountain races and the Gauls, made up a school of the most 
 diversified experience, which could not fail to open the minds of the 
 future masters of the world. How different was this education 
 from that of a people which is either isolated, like the Egyptians, or 
 comes into contact perhaps in the way of continual border hostility 
 with a single tribe ! ... In the second place, the geographical cir- 
 cumstances of Rome combined with her character would naturally 
 lead to the foundation of colonies, and of that colonial system which 
 forms a most important and beneficent part of her empire. 
 
 The great change in their circumstances wrought a grad- 
 ual change in the character of the primitive shepherds and 
 their descendants. They took on one that better suited their 
 new position. Planted as they were in a meeting place of 
 nations, brought into close and constant competition with 
 the strongest peoples of Italy, the Romans developed those 
 practical, industrial, and business habits, and those military 
 and political virtues that finally gave them universal empire. 
 Rome made the Romans quite as much as the Romans made 
 Rome. Hidden away in some out-of-the-way place, there is 
 not the slightest reason to think that they would ever have 
 made a name in history. All roads led to Rome before the 
 first one had been built. 
 
 It is interesting to observe the relations of the principal 
 cities of Northern Italy to the great valley of the Po on the
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 123 
 
 one side and to the mountain passes that connect the Penin- 
 sula with Central and Western Europe on the other. Turin 
 commands the approach to the Mont Cenis Pass from the 
 south. Milan, which has as changeful a history perhaps as 
 any city in Europe, stands almost in the mouths of the Sim- 
 plon and St. Gothard passes. Verona is at the opening of 
 the Brenner. It is difficult to imagine a state of things in 
 Northern Italy other than complete barbarism in which 
 Milan would not be an important city. At first one might 
 not detect the hand of geographical selection in the case of 
 Venice. Still, under the extraordinary circumstances of the 
 times in which it was founded its site was happily chosen. 
 In his course of destruction, Attila obliterated many towns, 
 including the colony of Aquilia, which stood at the head of 
 the Adriatic, in some such relation as Trieste stands to-day. 
 The homeless inhabitants of Aquilia sought refuge among 
 the islands formed by the detritus brought down to the gulf 
 by the network of rivers that rise in the Alps and that dis- 
 charge themselves on that shore. This immigration was 
 the beginning of Venice. Shut in by the sea, cut off from 
 the land, protected by her inaccessibility, favored in later 
 times by the Eastern Empire, and planted on what was 
 long the best route for the conveyance of the rich products 
 of Indian commerce to Central and Western Europe, Venice 
 slowly raised her obscure head above the mud of the la- 
 goons, developed a population rich in practical talents and 
 in genius, and won and long held a foremost place among 
 the powers of the world. 
 
 Not to mention other writers, both Mr. Green and Mr. 
 Mackinder have graphically described the physical factors 
 that contributed to the founding of the great British me- 
 tropolis, in the position of which lay whole volumes of Eng- 
 lish history. " That many causes conspire to maintain the 
 greatness of London," says Mr. Mackinder, " is a fact to be 
 marked. It is the secret of its persistent growth from the 
 earliest times. The importance of the given geographical 
 features varies with the degree of man's civilization. A
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 city which depends on one physical advantage may fall at 
 any moment. A single mechanical discovery may effect 
 the change." In connection with London, Green's Short 
 Geography and Huxley's Physiography may be studied 
 with much advantage. 
 
 Geographical selection is easily recognizable in the loca- 
 tion of the large cities of our own country. New York has 
 clearly demonstrated its superiority to all other points on 
 the Atlantic coast as a great mart of trade. At the time of 
 the Revolution both Boston and Philadelphia had about 
 the same population, but once connected with the West 
 by a great line of internal communication, the Erie Canal, 
 its extraordinary growth began. It should have been per- 
 fectly apparent from the first opening up of the Great 
 West to the light of civilization, that whenever that vast re- 
 gion should become the seat of empire, there would be a 
 great center of population, trade, and wealth at the head of 
 Lake Michigan, at or near where Chicago stands. San 
 Francisco is only the redemption of Nature's pledge that a 
 great city would spring up at the Golden Gate whenever the 
 Pacific Slope should really come into the possession of civ- 
 ilized men. 
 
 In such a sketch as the present one the sea calls for little 
 more than casual mention. That it modifies climate, chang- 
 ing temperature and distributing moisture, and so bringing 
 fertility of soil ; that it affects the character and habits and 
 the pursuits of men and nations; that it yields rich harvests 
 of wealth to the industry of man furs, fish, pearls, sponges, 
 corals, ivory, amber, salt, oil, and chemicals ; that it furnishes 
 the great highways of commerce and of war, and opens 
 to the statesman and jurist a whole volume of questions that 
 profoundly affect human progress these are commonplaces. 
 The influence of sea currents, of the trade winds and the 
 monsoons upon human society, is suggested, if not worked 
 out, in every book of physical geography. On the maritime 
 and naval side history does full justice to the theme. Wit- 
 ness such volumes as those of Captain Mahan's The Influ-
 
 PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 125 
 
 ence of Sea Power upon History, and The Influence of Sea 
 Power upon the French Revolution and Empire. 
 
 In the British Islands we have the most notable example 
 of the effect of insular conditions, physical and human, 
 upon civilization. Speaking of the special political attri- 
 butes of an island, Professor Goldwin Smith finds that it is 
 likely to be settled by a bold and enterprising race, devoted 
 to political liberty ; that the spirit of freedom and independ- 
 ence of this race is likely to be intensified by the very pro- 
 cess of migration ; that the island is likely to be free from 
 invasion, and so be left to develop in its own way ; that its 
 isolation tends in the same direction, and that an insular 
 position gives birth to commerce and calls out the corre- 
 sponding elements of political character. Add to these attri- 
 butes the climate of Great Britain, its agricultural and min- 
 eral resources, and its relations to the continent of Europe 
 and the Atlantic Ocean, and we have the principal natural 
 factors that have contributed to its greatness. Here are the 
 causes, in great degree, of England's vast colonial empire. 
 It may be observed, too, that no one can imagine in what 
 different directions English history would have run had the 
 country been trampled under the feet of invading armies, 
 like France, Germany, or Italy, as to some extent must 
 have been the case had not the English Channel prevented. 
 
 What has been said in this chapter is but a meager treat- 
 ment of a great subject. It will, however, serve to ex- 
 plain the stress that historians place on environment, and 
 also emphasize the observations of a distinguished living 
 scholar : 
 
 A national history, as it seems to us, ought to commence with 
 a survey of the country or locality its geographical position, cli- 
 mate, productions, and other physical circumstances as they bear 
 on the character of the people. We ought to be presented, in 
 short, with a complete description of the scene of the historic 
 drama, as well as with an account of the race to which the actors 
 belong. In the early stages of its development, at all events, man 
 is mainly the creature of physical circumstances ; and by a system-
 
 126 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 atic examination of physical circumstances we may to some extent 
 cast the horoscope of the infant nation as it lies in the arms of 
 Nature. 
 
 Still, we can not too much emphasize the fact that en- 
 vironment does not make the nation or build the city. 
 Geographical selection points the way, but man does the 
 work. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to disregard the direc- 
 tions. Read Macaulay's eloquent description of Tyre, built 
 on a bare rock in the midst of the sea ; of Venice, rising out 
 of the lagoons of the Adriatic ; of Amsterdam, reared upon 
 a desolate marsh covered with fog. Then there is St Peters- 
 burg, that Tsar Peter built in a swamp inundated by the 
 Neva, by the tide, and by on-shore storms. Much stress 
 must also be placed on what Mr. Mackinder calls " the mo- 
 mentum acquired in the past. . . . Milford Haven, in the 
 present state of things, offers far greater physical advan- 
 tages than Liverpool for the American trade ; yet it is im- 
 probable that Liverpool will have to give way to Milford 
 Haven, at any rate in the immediate future. It is a case 
 of vis inertia." The location of our National capital was 
 the effect of causes that no longer exist ; at present it is very 
 far from satisfactory to large portions of the country ; but 
 there is not the slightest probability at present of some 
 Western city taking the place of Washington. Chicago 
 may not have been the best site for the great center of col- 
 lection and distribution at the head of Lake Michigan ; but 
 it has acquired such momentum, that not even its total 
 destruction could now effect a change so long as the site 
 remains inhabitable.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 
 
 References Aristotle: The Politics (VII. 7) ; Flint: The Philos- 
 ophy of History in Germany and France (Introduction); Guizot, 
 History of Civilization ; Lecky : History of the Rise and Influence of 
 the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (Introduction), The Political 
 Value of History; Carlyle: Heroes and Hero Worship; Buckle, 
 Draper, Bryce, Mackinder, and Lavisse, as before. 
 
 Marsh : The Earth as Modified by Human Action (Introduction). 
 
 IT must not be supposed that environment alone accom- 
 plishes any historical result. Environment acts upon and 
 through man, contributing to the formation of his character 
 and conditioning 1 his activities. In the truest sense, Nature 
 is not an historical cause at all. History is not primarily 
 a study of circumstances, but of the human agents that 
 exist and act among circumstances ; not a study of envi- 
 ronment, but of what man does acting under environment. 
 Hence the paramount importance of the topics to be pre- 
 sented in this chapter. 
 
 Human nature sums up the main historic causes and 
 agents ; the native and universal qualities of the race, the 
 complex of characters that mark man off from inferior 
 creatures. Sagacious as are some species of animals, we 
 have no difficulty in distinguishing the works of man from 
 their works the ant, the bee, or the beaver. How human 
 nature originates whether it is the product of development 
 from an inferior nature, as the evolutionists tell us, or the 
 product of an original creative act, subsequently modified 
 by external conditions is a question quite apart from our
 
 128 DOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 present purpose. The main fact is, that man, irrespective 
 of his origin, is the subject of history. Although hedged 
 about with metes and bounds, he is capable within certain 
 large limits of rising above circumstances or conditions and 
 of asserting a lordship over Nature. Man, then, is the start- 
 ing point in studying history. The teacher need not indeed 
 begin with psychology, or with a theory of human nature ; 
 moreover, since this is constantly assumed and generally 
 understood, formally to introduce it on every occasion would 
 be the merest pedantry ; still, there are times when some 
 analysis may be profitably indulged in, as in inquiring into 
 the causes of the slave trade and of wars of conquest. These 
 remarks premised, we may enter upon a more detailed ex- 
 amination of our subject. 
 
 I. How far race character and national character are due 
 to native inherent qualities, and how far to environment, is 
 a hard question, but fortunately one that lies outside of our 
 present field. Certainly they are among the most potent 
 of historical causes. In a celebrated passage Aristotle 
 pointed out the obvious contrast between the repose of Asia 
 and the energy of Europe. After speaking of the number 
 of citizens of a state, he proceeds to speak of what should be 
 their character : 
 
 This is a subject which can be easily understood by any one who 
 casts his eye on the more celebrated states of Hellas, and generally 
 on the distribution of races in the habitable world. Those who 
 live in a cold climate and in [northern] Europe are full of spirit, 
 but wanting in intelligence and skill ; and therefore they keep their 
 freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of 
 ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and 
 inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are al- 
 ways in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, 
 which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in charac- 
 ter, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues 
 free, and is the best governed of any nation, and, if it could be 
 formed into one state, would be able to rule the world. There are 
 also similar differences in the different tribes of Hellas ; for some of
 
 HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 
 
 them are of a one-sided nature, and are intelligent or courageous 
 only, while in others there is a happy combination of both qualities. 
 
 Summing up the teachings of Baron Montesquieu, Pro- 
 fessor Flint tells us that 
 
 Every civilized people is pervaded by a common spirit, which is 
 in fact but another word for the whole of its civilization, and which 
 is the substance of its life, the chief source of its actions, carrying 
 along with it those who are unconscious of it and those even who 
 wish to resist it, incapable of being changed otherwise than slowly 
 and by the concurrence of many agencies, and feebly modifiable by 
 laws, while so profoundly operative on them as to be able to make 
 them either honored or despised. 
 
 The national character of the Jews, the Greeks, and the 
 Komans the first religious, the second philosophical and 
 literary, and the third practical and legal in their genius 
 are historical factors of the greatest value and consequence. 
 Such factors should be studied both with reference to the 
 causes that produce them and the effects that they them- 
 selves produce. Hereafter we shall have occasion to speak 
 of the Spanish, French, and English characters as they re- 
 veal themselves in early American history. 
 
 II. To analyze the genius of the age what the German 
 calls the Time Spirit showing what it is, how it comes, 
 and why it goes is no easy task. That it exercises a con- 
 trolling power, subordinate only to race and national char- 
 acter, can not be doubted. Great events can not be accom- 
 plished until the world is ready for their accomplishment. 
 The New Testament teaches that the greatest event in human 
 history, the most supernatural, demanded a long previous 
 preparation : when the fullness of time was come, God sent 
 forth his Son. At one time the dogmatic spirit, at another 
 time the scholastic spirit, at a third the spirit of classical an- 
 tiquity, and then again the rationalistic or modern spirit, 
 has swayed the minds of men. 
 
 The Time Spirit creates the age. Some things can be done 
 but once. The world will not see the Crusades repeated.
 
 130 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 The mediaeval cathedrals, which, as has been said, "often 
 rose out of towns which were then little better than collec- 
 tions of hovels, with but small accumulations of wealth, and 
 without what we now deem the appliances of civilized life, 
 and that also mark the highest ascent of man's spiritual na- 
 ture above the realities of his worldly lot," can not be dupli- 
 cated. We do not anticipate new migrations of nations like 
 those that broke up the Roman Empire, and a second age of 
 maritime discovery is impossible. 
 
 The spirit of the age is not the creature of chance, but is 
 the product of causes that may in part be discovered. For 
 example, as one has observed, every great change of belief 
 in Europe has been preceded by a great change in its intel- 
 lectual condition ; the success of any opinon has depended 
 less upon the force of its arguments or the ability of its ad- 
 vocates than upon the predisposition of society to receive it, 
 while this predisposition results from the intellectual type 
 of the age. Men do new things because they want to do 
 them, and they cease doing them because they have come to 
 feel more interest in something else. So they change their 
 opinions, not so much because they are convinced by formal 
 arguments of the unsoundness of the old and of the sound- 
 ness of the new, as because they grow out of the old and 
 grow into the new. 
 
 III. Individual genius is an historic cause. To adjust 
 the great man and his time is almost as difficult as it 
 is to adjust free will and universal causation. How far 
 is the great man a cause, how far an effect ? At this 
 point two divergent tendencies of thought present them- 
 selves. 
 
 Carlyle emphasizes in the strongest manner individual!' 
 ties, and denounces the opposite tendency as machine- like 
 and degrading. He sneers at all attempts to account for 
 the great man, as to show that he is a product of the times, 
 and maintains that universal history, " the history of what 
 man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the his- 
 tory of the great men who have worked here." His doc'
 
 HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN'; HISTORY. 
 
 rtrine is that "history is the essence of innumerable biogra- 
 phies." 
 
 Mr. Buckle is perhaps the best representative of the 
 counter tendency. He makes almost nothing of individ- 
 ualities, denies the fact of free will, and resolves history 
 into a necessary sequence, the action of general causes. 
 The reasons by which writers of this class maintain their 
 view within the political sphere, Mr. Lecky thus summa- 
 rizes : 
 
 In the sphere of politics a similar law prevails, and the fate of 
 nations largely depends upon forces quite different from those on 
 which the mere political historian concentrates his attention. The 
 growth of military or industrial habits ; the elevation or depression 
 of different classes ; the changes that take place in the distribution 
 of wealth ; inventions or discoveries that alter the course or charac- 
 ter of industry or commerce, or reverse the relative advantages of 
 different nations in the competitions of life ; the increase and still 
 more the diffusion of knowledge ; the many influences that affect 
 convictions, habits, and ideals, that raise or lower or modify the 
 moral tone and ! type all these things concur in shaping the des- 
 tinies of nations. Legislation is only really successful when it is 
 in harmony with the general spirit of the age. Laws and statesmen 
 for the most part indicate and ratify, but do not create. They are 
 like the hands of the watch, which move obedient to the hidden 
 machinery behind. 
 
 The truth lies between these two extremes. Both in- 
 dividualiti^s and general causation play important parts in 
 history. Peter the Hermit must preach the Crusade, Luther 
 must lift up the banner of the Reformation, Napoleon must 
 lead the armies of the Revolution ; but, on the other hand, 
 the world must be ready for Peter the Hermit, for Luther, 
 and for Napoleon, or he will accomplish little or nothing. 
 Certainly the mere effervescence and fermentation of so- 
 ciety in itself leads to nothing useful and permanent. The 
 crusading spirit did not preach the Crusade, mere reforming 
 tendencies did "not nail the theses to the church door or con- 
 front Charles V at Worms, the Revolution as a Zeitgeist
 
 132 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 did not overrun and conquer all Western and Central Eu- 
 rope. Carlyle, in his hero worship, scouts the very condi- 
 tions that make the hero possible ; Buckle, in his devotion 
 to history as a science, overlooks the hero altogether. " The 
 times," says Carlyle, '' have indeed called loudly enough for 
 the great man. and he has not answered." To which Mr. 
 Buckle might reply with equal truth, " The great man has 
 indeed called loudly enough to the times, and the times have 
 not answered." M. Com pay re tells us very truly that "the 
 most brilliant personality can do nothing if the society in 
 which it finds itself is not propitious, if circumstances do not 
 second its action." Guizot very properly makes great men, 
 as Charlemagne and Alfred, one of the elements of civiliza- 
 tion in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Europe was 
 laboring to emerge from her barbarous condition. 
 
 While emphasizing the force of main historical currents, 
 Mr. Leclcy still assigns an important place to " men of 
 genius, who are commonly at once representative and crea- 
 tive. They embody and regulate the tendencies of their 
 time, but they also frequently materially modify them, and 
 their ideas become the subject or the basis of the succeeding 
 developments." He observes further that men like Bacon* 
 Descartes, and Locke " have introduced peculiar habits of 
 thought, new modes of reasoning, new tendencies of in- 
 quiry," thus giving a powerful causal impulse first to the 
 higher literature and then to the more popular writers ; and 
 also that, since invention and material change create intel- 
 lectual influences since a railroad, for example, can not be 
 laid down without an intellectual result "it is probable that 
 Watt and Stephenson will eventually modify the opinions of 
 mankind almost as profoundly as Luther or Voltaire." Mr. 
 Lecky also tells us that, " though there are certain streams of 
 tendency, though there is a certain steady and orderly evolu- 
 tion that it is impossible in the long run to resist, yet indi- 
 vidual action and even mere accident have borne a very 
 great part in modifying the direction of history." He avows 
 the opinion that if Mohammed had been killed in one of his
 
 HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 133 
 
 first skirmishes, Mohammedanism, with its prodigious con- 
 sequences, would have been unheard of ; also the opinion 
 that if Charles Martel had been defeated at the battle of 
 Tours, the course of European history would have run in 
 very different channels ; and asks, finally, what the result 
 would have been " if, at the French Revolution, the supreme 
 military genius had been connected with the character of 
 Washington rather than with the character of Napoleon." 
 
 Without entering further into the speculative discussion 
 of the subject, we shall altogether miss the mark unless we 
 recognize the force and value of the leaders of mankind, 
 who are genuine historic causes of great potency. The his- 
 tory of no country more forcibly illustrates the regular and 
 orderly flow of historical causation than our own ; but it is 
 impossible to conceive what our history would have been 
 without Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Marshall, Lin- 
 coln, and Grant. 
 
 Among the potent causes that act in history in war, 
 politics, religion, industry, and trade ideas and sentiments 
 must be assigned a high rank. Under every historical 
 movement can be found some human factor that transcends 
 mere physical causation. Even the most repulsive political 
 and military struggles can be made intelligible by referring 
 them to human motives. Armies have sometimes been 
 counted the playthings of kings, and war their pastime. 
 But the lines 
 
 But war 's a game which, were their subjects wise, 
 Kings would not play at 
 
 is only partly true. Ambitious rulers have much to answer 
 for, but war has not often been mere ruthless slaughter, 
 killing for the sake of killing ; on the contrary, state poli- 
 cies or national ideas are almost always more or less in- 
 volved. Rome and Carthage contested the supremacy of 
 the Mediterranean Sea ; they represented antagonistic ideas 
 and policies, and the best interests of mankind demanded 
 that Rome should triumph. The rule of England in India,
 
 134 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTQBY. 
 
 harsh as it sometimes seems, promotes the well-being of 
 the people, and autocratic Russia is fulfilling a mission in 
 Central Asia. The destroyers Alaric and Attila embodied 
 the ideas and the passions of the societies that produced 
 them, and from which they derived their power. Napoleon 
 was the child of the Revolution ; Emerson says of him that 
 he succeeded because he was surrounded by little Napoleons, 
 who saw in him only their own aims and desires. " Gen- 
 erally speaking," says Von Moltke, " it is no longer the am- 
 bition of monarchs which endangers peace ; the passions of 
 the people, its dissatisfaction with interior conditions and 
 affairs, the strife of parties, and the intrigues of their leaders 
 are the causes. " 
 
 Now, it is the business of the historian, and of the teacher 
 of history, to bring the ideas, sentiments, and passions that 
 act in human affairs to the surface, and to make them intel- 
 ligible. Why could not Rome and Carthage live at peace ? 
 What did the Hohenstaufen emperors stand for, and what 
 were the ideas of their foes south of the Alps ? When we 
 pass from wars to campaigns and battles, we are still con- 
 fronted by ideas, only the teacher must now be careful not 
 to weigh the pupil down with an excess of details. To 
 teach wars, campaigns, marches, and battles merely as facts 
 is very unprofitable employment. Great military com- 
 manders have always been men of great minds, and the im- 
 provement of weapons, the perfection of army organization, 
 and the extension of transportation facilities and means of 
 supply are constantly making war more and more a matter 
 of science. Not Richard the Lion-hearted, but Count von 
 Moltke is the typical soldier of our times. Then the teacher 
 of military history should recognize the difference between 
 strategy and tactics : the first is the name of movements 
 that bring armies together on the field of battle, the second 
 of movements on the field itself. As a rule these smaller 
 movements should be left to fall out of sight, for they will 
 not be remembered ; commonly it is sufficient to grasp a 
 battle as one transaction, but sometimes a brilliant manoeu-
 
 HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 
 
 vre, a gallant charge, a stubborn defense, will seize the im- 
 agination and fix the whole action in the mind. 
 
 Such are some of the larger forces that act in history. 
 All or nearly all of them may be separated into parts or 
 elements, but it best answers the present purpose to handle 
 them as units. They also interact, to a degree are mutual 
 causes and effects, and they all work together toward one 
 grand result. 
 
 The relations of the two great groups of historic factors 
 are very much a question of time and development. " With 
 each advance of intellectual power, the dependence [of man] 
 upon environment becomes more and more intimate, for 
 with that intelligence the creature seeks beyond itself for op- 
 portunities to gratify its desires. " So says Professor Shaler. 
 Professor Bryce presents a different view : 
 
 Man in his early stages is at the mercy of Nature. Nature does 
 with him practically whatever she likes. He is obliged to adapt 
 himself entirely to her. But in process of time he learns to raise 
 himself above her. It is true he does so by humoring her, so to 
 speak, by submitting to her forces. In the famous phrase of Bacon, 
 Natura non nisi parendo vincitur, Nature is not conquered except 
 by obeying her ; but the skill which man acquires is such as to make 
 him in his higher stages of development always more and more in- 
 dependent of Nature, and able to bend her to his will in a way that 
 aboriginal man could not do. He becomes independent of climate, 
 because he has houses and clothes ; he becomes independent of winds, 
 because he propels his vessels by steam ; to a large extent he be- 
 comes independent of daylight, because he can produce artificial 
 light. 
 
 Mr. Mackinder takes the same view : 
 
 The relative importance of physical features varies from age to 
 age, according to the state of knowledge and of material civilization. 
 The improvement of artificial lighting has rendered possible the ex- 
 istence of a great community at St. Petersburg. The discovery of 
 the Cape route to India led to the fall of Venice. The invention of 
 the steam engine and the electric telegraph have rendered possible 
 the great size of modern states.
 
 136 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Touching the last point it may be observed that the 
 American Union probably could not have attained its pres- 
 ent proportions, and certainly could not have held perma- 
 nently together if it had attained them, had these two great 
 inventions never been made. 
 
 Thus, in his savage state man is a feeble slave, cowering 
 at the feet of Nature, his foster mother ; while in a state of 
 high civilization he obtains a mastery and lordship over her. 
 Unfortunately, this lordship is not always beneficently as- 
 serted. Man shows his power in destruction as well as in 
 construction. Mr. Marsh reminds us that more than one 
 half the extent of the Roman Empire, " including the prov- 
 inces celebrated for the profusion and variety of their spon- 
 taneous and their cultivated products, ... is either deserted 
 by civilized men and surrendered to hopeless desolation, or 
 at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and popu- 
 lation." Both history and architectural remains testify to 
 a population, wealth, and power in Northern Africa, the 
 Greater Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, 
 and many other provinces of Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, and 
 parts even of Italy and Spain to which they are now and 
 long have been utter strangers. More definitely, the learned 
 author finds the causes of this state of things, partly in 
 geological agents that man can not resist or guide, partly in 
 ignorant disregard of the laws of Nature, as the consequences 
 of war, misrule, tyranny, and despotism. "Man can not 
 struggle at once," he says, " against crushing oppression and 
 the destructive forces of inorganic Nature. When both are 
 combined against him, he succumbs after a shorter or a 
 longer struggle, and the fields he has won from the primeval 
 wood relapse into their original state of wild and luxuriant 
 but unprofitable forest growth, or fall into that of a dry 
 and barren wilderness." We may sum up in the words of 
 M. Lavisse : 
 
 Nature has written on the map of Europe the destiny of certain 
 regions. She determines the aptitudes and hence the destiny of a
 
 HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 137 
 
 people. The very movement of events in history creates, moreover, 
 inevitable exigencies, one thing happening because other things have 
 happened. On the other hand, Nature has left on the map of Eu- 
 rope free scope to the uncertainty of various possibilities. History 
 is full of accidents, the necessity of which cannot be demonstrated. 
 Finally, there exists free power of action, which has been exercised 
 by individuals and nations. Chance and freedom of action oppose 
 alike the fatality of Nature and the fatality of historical sequence. 
 To what extent each of these four elements has influenced history 
 cannot be determined with exactness. 
 
 This chapter concludes the formal discussion of the or- 
 ganization of historical events. A word of caution may 
 here be of service. By an organization of facts with refer- 
 ence to any one of the three categories, is to be understood 
 a view of the facts under that aspect. Thus we obtain the 
 three phases under which the facts may be considered ab- 
 stracted from one another. The teacher should promote 
 such abstraction in due time and according to just measure, 
 because it will give distinctness to the three aspects, and 
 will cause the facts to be better understood and especially 
 to be better remembered. But it is not meant that the facts 
 should be taught three times over in three different ways, 
 and that the pupil should be left with three different his- 
 tories of the same country, man, or period in his mind. 
 History is a unit, and as a unit it must be studied. The 
 student must take the facts as they come to him time, 
 place, and cause all at once. While the teacher, for the 
 reasons given, must lead the pupil to step aside and view 
 the facts under the three relations that is, cause him to 
 exercise the faculty of analysis on the relations he must 
 remember that the final stage of any completed mental 
 action is not analysis, but synthesis, and that the student, 
 when he dismisses a subject, should have integrated the 
 materials with reference to the three canons should see 
 the action solid, just as it occurred. 
 
 11
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 
 
 References, The Duke of Argyll: lona; Morison: Macaulay 
 (English Men of Letters Series) ; Bryce : English Historical Review, 
 vol. vii, page 497 (Edward Augustus Freeman); Fiske: Atlantic 
 Monthly, January, 1893 (Edward Augustus Freeman) ; Morley : Crit- 
 ical Miscellanies, Second Series (France in the Eighteenth Century) ; 
 Stanley: Historical Memorials of Canterbury; Maeaulay: Essays 
 (Mackintosh's History of the Revolution of 1688) ; Trevelyan : Life 
 and Letters of Lord Macaulay (Chaps. VII, XI) ; Freeman : Methods 
 of Historical Study ; Seeley : Macmillan's Magazine, vol. xlv, page 
 43 (A Historical Society), id., vol. xlvii, page 76 (On History Again), 
 The Expansion of England, Second Series (History and Politics); 
 Schouler : Magazine of American History, vol. xviii, page 326 (His- 
 torical Grouping). 
 
 His Grace the Duke of Argyll, commenting upon those 
 objects of interest so dissimilar in kind, the two neighboring 
 islands, lona and Staffa "lona dear to Christendom for 
 more than a thousand years ; Staffa known to the scientific 
 and curious only since the close of the last century "ob- 
 serves that " the aspects of Nature will always be more gen- 
 erally attractive than the history of man. ... It requires," 
 he says, " no previous knowledge, and no preparation of the 
 memory or the imagination, to be impressed by Fingal's 
 Cave. The great hall of columns standing around their 
 ocean floor and sending forth in ceaseless reverberations the 
 solemn music of its waves is a scene which appeals to every 
 eye, which all can understand, and which none are likely to 
 forget. . . . With lona it is very different. Its interest lies
 
 THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 139 
 
 altogether in human memories. The stranger must bring 
 with him the knowledge and the reflection which alone en- 
 able him to enjoy what is of real interest in the associations 
 and in the appearance of the place." These observations, 
 the appositeness of which will not be questioned, happily 
 suggest a contrast between history and science. Whether 
 the student of the one division of knowledge requires a larger 
 preparation than the student of the other, we need not curi- 
 ously inquire. It is certainly true that the observation and 
 interpretation of the memorials of human life are less easy 
 and congenial to the natural mind than the like processes in 
 respect to the external world, and that the pursuit of history 
 calls for a preparation quite different from that of science. 
 
 The qualities that make the successful teacher are not dif- 
 ferent from the qualities that make the successful historian. 
 That great master of historical learning, Bishop Stubbs, said 
 the author of A Short History of the English People, 
 u possessed in no scanty measure all the gifts that contribute 
 to the making of a great historian. He combined, so far as 
 the history of England is concerned, a complete and firm 
 grasp of the subject in its unity and integrity with a won- 
 derful command of details and a thorough sense of perspec- 
 tive and proportion. In him the desire of stating and point- 
 ing the truth of history, was as strong as the wish to make 
 both his pictures and his arguments telling and forcible. And 
 then, to add still more to the debt we owe him, there is the 
 wonderful simplicity and beauty of the way in which he 
 tells his tale." The more the items in this bill of particu- 
 lars are considered, the more will their justness and compre- 
 hensiveness appear. They are, grasp of the subject in its \ 
 unity and integrity, command of details, sense of perspec- ' 
 tive and proportion, desire to state and point the truth, and 
 ability to tell a tale in a simple and pleasing manner. 
 
 Grasp of the subject in its unity and mastery of de- 
 tails are closely related. Manifestly, a subject can not be 
 unified until its elements have been studied. Still, the two 
 powers are not necessarily equal in the same mind ; one
 
 11-0 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 person may be distinguished by the number and variety of 
 facts that he has accumulated, another by the completeness 
 with which he has brought them into one general view. 
 The emphasis should be placed with primary reference to 
 the stage of progress that the pupil has made. In element- 
 ary work the main thing is the acquirement of facts, in ad- 
 vanced work more attention is paid to their organization. 
 
 Sense of perspective and proportion directly involves the 
 truth of history. Any year or period in a man's life must 
 be seen in connection with his life as a whole. The man 
 himself must be viewed in his relations to other men. And 
 so it is with a city or a state. An age must be treated as a 
 part of the whole historical movement before and after. If 
 these familiar rules are disregarded, there is no telling what 
 perversion and distortion will follow. 
 
 Desire to state and point the truth hardly needs the em- 
 phasis of a single word. History is moral knowledge ; 
 rightly handled, it is one of our best moral disciplines and 
 guides, while the critical arguments adduced to settle dates 
 and places and other facts lead to conscientious mental hab- 
 its, although in a moral sense they may be the least weighty 
 elements to be considered. 
 
 Ability to tell a tale in a pleasing way is of prime impor- 
 tance to the teacher as well as to the writer of history. The 
 word " story " is " history " abbreviated. From the days of 
 Herodotus and Xenophon to the days of Macaulay* and 
 Green, the historians who have been most read have been 
 
 * A writer who justly contends that Macaulay's greatest power is his 
 mastery of historical narrative says : " The interest of the story as a story is 
 kept up with a profound and unsuspected art. The thread of the narrative 
 is never dropped. When transitions occur and no writer passes from one 
 part of his subject to another with more boldness and freedom they are 
 managed with such skill and ease that the reader is unaware of them. A 
 turn of the road has brought us in view of a new prospect ; but we are not 
 conscious for a moment of having left the road. The change seems the 
 most natural thing in the world." Morison ; Macaulay, Men of Letters 
 Seriet.
 
 TUB TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 
 
 those who have best told their tale. Nowhere is style more 
 important. For our purpose history that is not interesting 
 is not history at all. There is, indeed, another class of his- 
 torians : writers who criticise and argue, men like Stubbs 
 and Freeman who have rendered invaluable service to the 
 cause of truth ; but these writers are little known save to 
 scholars and students. In the university historical criticism 
 and discussion should be very prominent, in the college and 
 secondary schools less prominent ; while in elementary 
 ,work, no matter where done, narration should monopolize I 
 { the minds of both pupil and teacher. 
 
 The principal mental qualities required to teach history 
 according to this model are easily discovered. They are a^ 
 retentive memory, logical power to analyze and group facts, 
 enthusiasm for the subject, sound judgment, clear insight i 
 into character and life, devotion to truth, persistence, vivid/' 
 imagination, and a copious supply of clear and simple lan- 
 guage. Only one or two of these qualities call for particu- 
 lar comment. 
 
 In few studies is an enthusiastic interest in the subject so 
 necessary to the teacher. Its presence or absence will com- 
 monly determine whether the pupil or class finds the history 
 lesson a dull grind or a pleasant exercise. 
 
 Historical insight depends intimately on human sympa- 
 thy. You can not understand a man unless you can get at 
 his point of view. You need not embrace his opinions or 
 approve his actions, but you must be able, at least measurably, 
 to think and to feel with him. It is because he is richly 
 gifted with this power that the great historian is able to 
 transport us to distant lands or remote ages, to surround us 
 with new scenery, and to make us live a life different from 
 our own. It is partly owing to the same cause that the his- 
 torian is so apt to lose himself in his hero and become an 
 apologist. 
 
 We must now sketch some of the more important divi- 
 sions of knowledge with which it is desirable that the teacher 
 of history should be acquainted.
 
 14:2 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 First, mention may be made of practical current lite. 
 The maxims, " We reason from what ~we know," and " We 
 proceed from the known to the unknown," nowhere find a 
 more direct application than here. It is a commonplace 
 that the child's political knowledge and training begin with 
 observing facts around him the policeman, the magistrate, 
 the school board, and the town council. It has been said 
 that when Macaulay " wants to make you understand a 
 thing, he compares it with that which existed in his own 
 day. The standard of the present is always with him." 
 Historians have often been men of affairs. Xenophon and 
 Caesar were soldiers, Polybius and Clarendon statesmen. 
 Enlarging on this thought, Macaulay says Sir James Mack- 
 intosh and Charles James Fox had one eminent qualifica- 
 tion for writing history : 
 
 They had spoken history, acted history, lived history. The turns 
 of political fortune, the ebb and flow of popular feeling, the hidden 
 mechanism by which parties are moved, all these things were the 
 subjects of their constant thought and of their most familiar con- 
 versation. Gibbon has remarked that his history is much the better 
 for his having been an officer in the militia and a member of the 
 House of Commons. The remark is most just. We have not the 
 smallest doubt that his campaign, though he never saw an enemy, 
 and his parliamentary attendance, though he never made a speech, 
 were of far more use to him than years of retirement and study 
 would have been. If the time that he spent on parade, and at mess 
 in Hampshire, or on the Treasury-bench and at Brookes during the 
 storms which overthrew Lord North and Lord Shelburne, had been 
 passed in the Bodleian Library, he might have avoided some inac- 
 curacies ; he might have enriched his notes with a greater number 
 of references ; but he never would have produced so lively a picture 
 of the court, the camp, and the senate house. 
 
 Professor Bryce justly tells us that the vivid sense of 
 reality which pervades Dr. Freeman's books is largely due 
 to the keen interest that he took in public affairs, foreign 
 even more than domestic. " He was fond of illustrating 
 features of Roman history from incidents he had witnessed
 
 THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 143 
 
 in taking part in local government as a magistrate, and in 
 describing the relations of Hermocrates and Athenagoras 
 at Syracuse he drew upon observations which, as he told his 
 friends, he made in watching the discussions of the Hebdom- 
 adal Council at Oxford." Dr. Freeman himself attributes 
 the failure of some of the German writers to understand the 
 ancient democracies to the fact that they had no first-hand 
 knowledge of free institutions. 
 
 On many matters of historical learning an Englishman an Eng- 
 lishman on either side of the Ocean is better fitted to judge than 
 a German. A Swiss or a Norwegian may judge of the workings of 
 free constitutions in old Greece, in Italy, in any other land, because 
 he, like the Englishman, has daily experience of their working in 
 his own land. But these things are mysteries to German profes- 
 sors, because they are mysteries to German statesmen also. The 
 German scholar simply reads in a book of things which we are al- 
 ways looking at and acting in. He, therefore, utterly fails to under- 
 stand many things at Athens, or Rome, or anywhere else, which 
 come to us like our A, B, C. 
 
 Mr. Bancroft was an active participant in public affairs ; 
 while Mr. Parkman made ready for his remarkable delinea- 
 tions of wilderness life when passing through the expe- 
 riences that he has recorded in The Oregon Trail. The 
 fact is, no recluse no mere scholar toiling in his cabinet 
 although he may heap up historical learning, can write real 
 history. Nor can a person who is out of touch with current 
 life teach real history. No doubt Macaulay's method is a 
 somewhat dangerous one ; but for the child there is no other 
 method ; and we must depend upon later comparison and 
 reflection to correct mistakes.* 
 
 * Mr. John Morley, discussing the relative value of political preparation 
 and literary preparation for writing history, makes some remarks that are 
 equally pertinent to the teacher : 
 
 " It is indeed plain on the least reflection that close contact with political 
 business, however modest in its pretensions, is the best possible element in
 
 144 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 As respects the advantages that arise from contact with 
 living events, American teachers are peculiarly favored. 
 In our democratic society all public affairs are open to every 
 eye. There is no country in the world where the teacher 
 can get closer to the currents of public life. 
 
 Argument is not necessary to show that the teacher of 
 history should be a student of the science of government. 
 Political economy also and moral science lie close at hand. 
 
 The relations of geography and history have been con- 
 sidered in another place. In addition to studying the theater! 
 ;' of history in books and maps, it is desirable that the historian/ 
 i should visit it in person. Thackeray said of Macaulay : " He 
 reads twenty books to write a sentence ; he travels a hun- 
 dred miles to make a line of description. " Macaulay himself 
 tells us that when in Eome he went to the Tiber, to the spot 
 where the old Pons Sublicius stood, and looked about to see 
 how his Horatius, then well advanced, agreed with the topog- 
 raphy. His biographer tells us that he saw Glencoe in 
 rain and in sunshine ; that he paid a second visit to Killie- 
 krankie ; that he spent two full days at Londonderry, taking 
 pains to sketch a good plan of the streets, walking alone or 
 in company four times round the walls of the city for which 
 he was to do what Thucydides had done for Platea. Many 
 great historians have been tireless students both of geog- 
 raphy and topography. 
 
 It is very true that the average teacher of the history of 
 
 the training of any one who aspires to understand and reproduce political 
 history. Political preparation is as necessary as literary preparation. 
 There is no necessity that the business should be on any majestic and im- 
 perial scale. To be the guardian of the poor in an East-End parish, to be 
 behind the scenes of some great strike of labor, to be an active member of 
 the parliamentary committee of a Trades Council or of the executive com- 
 mittee of a Union or a League, may be quite as instructive discipline as 
 participation in mightier scenes. Those who write concrete history, with- 
 out ever having taken part in practical politics, are, one might say, in the 
 position of those ancients who wrote about the human body without ever 
 having effectively explored it by dissection." Critical Miscellanies : f ranee 
 in the Eighteenth Century.
 
 THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 14.5 
 
 the United States will find it impossible to visit in person much 
 of the historic ground with which he deals. But even a few 
 spots well seen assist in understanding others that have not 
 been seen. A few days spent intelligently in the Lake 
 George region, on the field of Gettysburg, at Chattanooga, 
 or Atlanta, will be of permanent advantage in more ways 
 than one. Personal knowledge of the ground gives a won- 
 derful sense of reality to historical knowledge. Roman or 
 Grecian history is never again the same thing to a person 
 who has made a visit to Rome or Athens. Professor Good- 
 win says : " I can conceive of no better preparation for en- 
 thusiastic work than to spend eight months in the study of 
 Greece itself, in viewing her temples and learning the secrets 
 of their architecture, and in studying geography and history 
 at once by exploring her battlefields, her lines of communi- 
 cation through the mountain passes, and the sites of her fa- 
 mous cities." And still another has said : "You can stand 
 on Mount Pentelicus and study history by the hour." 
 
 To the teacher of ancient history, or of the history of 
 modern Europe, some knowledge at antiquities jj ff"y- 
 pensable. Dr. Freeman attached high value to architecture 
 as a handmaid of historical research. He is said to have 
 acquired a wonderfully full and exact knowledge of the 
 most remarkable churches and castles in England, as well 
 as considerable skill in sketching them. By the end of his 
 life he had accumulated a collection of thousands of draw- 
 ings, made by himself, of notable buildings in France, Ger- 
 many, Italy, and Dalmatia, as well as in the British Islands. 
 Painting and statuary, as well as philology, bear on many 
 historical problems. A knowledge of antiquities is valu- 
 able. Never before has there been so much interest as now 
 in the old Peruvians, in the Aztecs, in the Red Indians, and 
 in the Mound Builders. Then in dealing with these subjects 
 some knowledge of ethnology, or the science of races, is 
 necessary. 
 
 Dean Stanley, whose own historical writings derive a 
 vivid sense of reality from his enthusiastic study of geogra-
 
 146 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 phy, topography, and historical monuments, says in his lec- 
 ture on Edward the Black Prince : " Every one who has 
 endeavored to study history must be struck by the advan- 
 tage which those enjoy who live within the neighborhood 
 of great historical monuments. To have seen the place 
 where a great event happened ; to have seen the picture, the 
 statue, the tomb of an illustrious man, is the next thing to 
 being present at the event in person, to seeing the scene with 
 our own eyes." 
 
 The introduction to the revised edition of A Short His- 
 tory of the English People, written by Mrs. Green since her 
 husband's death, sheds a flood of light upon the processes by 
 which the mind of its author was formed. It also illus- 
 trates admirably the value to the student of history of 
 participation in real active life, as well as personal study 
 of the historical localities and monuments that lie about 
 him. 
 
 John Richard Green was born at Oxford in 1837, and 
 when eight years old was sent to Magdalen Grammar 
 School, then held in a small room within the precincts of the 
 college. 
 
 The Oxford world about him was full of suggestions of a past 
 which very early startled his curiosity and fired his imagination. 
 The gossiping tales of an old dame who had seen George III drive 
 through the town in a coach and six, were his first lessons in history. 
 Year after year he took part with excited fancy in the procession 
 of the Magdalen choir boys to the College tower on May Day, to 
 sing at the sun-rising a hymn to the Trinity, which had replaced the 
 mass chanted in pre-Reformation days, and to " jangle " the bells in 
 recognition of an immemorial festival. St. Giles's fair, the " beating 
 of the bounds," even the name of " Pennyfarthing Street," were no 
 less records of a mysterious past than chapel or college or the very 
 trees of Magdalen Walk ; and he once received, breathless and awe- 
 struck, a prize from the hands of the centenarian president of the 
 college, Dr. Routh, the last man who ever wore a wig in Oxford, a 
 man who had himself seen Dr. Johnson stand in the High Street 
 with one foot on either side of the kennel that ran down the middle
 
 THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 147 
 
 of the way, the street boys standing round, " none daring to inter- 
 rupt the meditations of the great lexicographer." . . . 
 
 His curiosity soon carried him beyond Oxford ; and in very early 
 days he learned to wander on saints' days and holidays to the 
 churches of neighboring villages, and there shut himself in to rub 
 brasses and study architectural moldings. 
 
 At sixteen he read Gibbon, and from that moment the 
 enthusiasm of history took hold of him. 
 
 His first historical efforts were spent on that which lay immedi- 
 ately about him ; and the series of papers which he sent at the same 
 time to the Oxford Chronicle, on Oxford in the Last Century, are 
 instinct with all the vivid imagination of his later work, and tell 
 their tale after a method and in a style which was already perfectly 
 natural to him. He read enormously, but history was never to him 
 wholly a matter of books. The town was still his teacher. ... He 
 has left an amusing account of how, on a solemn day which came 
 about once in eight years, he marched with mayor and corporation 
 round the city boundaries. He lingered over the memory of St. 
 Martin's Church, the center of the town life, the folk-mote within 
 its walls, the low shed outside where mayor and bailiff administered 
 justice, the bell above which rang out its answer to the tocsin of the 
 gownsmen in St. Mary's, the butchery and spicery and vintnery 
 which clustered round in the narrow streets. " In a walk through 
 Oxford one may find illustrations of every period of our annals. 
 The cathedral still preserves the memory of the Mercian St. Prides- 
 wide ; the tower of the Norman Earls frowns down on the waters 
 of the Mill ; around Merton hang the memories of the birth of our 
 Constitution; the New Learning and the Reformation mingle in 
 Christ Church ; a grind along the Marston road follows the track 
 of the army of Fairfax ; the groves of Magdalen preserve the liv- 
 ing traditions of the last of the Stuarts." 
 
 And later, when he had left Oxford to enter on the work 
 of a curate in one of the poorest parishes of East London, 
 Mr. Green still continued his studies. Here he made what 
 most men would have thought inconveniences, and even 
 obstacles, help him on his way. Touching in 1869 on the 
 causes of the unpopularity of English history, he wrote :
 
 148 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 There is hardly a better corrective for all this to be found than 
 to set a man frankly in the streets of a simple English town, and to 
 bid him work out the history of the men who have lived and died 
 there. The mill by the stream, the tolls of the market place, the 
 brasses of its burghers in the church, the names of its streets, the 
 lingering memory of its guilds, the mace of its mayor, tell us more 
 of the past of England than the spire of Sarum or the martyrdom 
 of Canterbury. 
 
 This final extract bears still more closely on the histo- 
 rian's need of personal participation in real life, especially 
 if he essays the history of a people. 
 
 To the last he looked on his London life as having given him his 
 best lessons in history. It was with his church wardens, his school- 
 masters, in vestry meetings, in police courts, at boards of guardians, 
 in service in chapel or church, in the daily life of the dock-laborer, 
 the tradesman, the costermonger, in the summer visitation of chol- 
 era, in the winter misery that followed economic changes, that he 
 learned what the life of the people meant as perhaps no historian 
 had ever learned it before. Every drive, every railway journey, 
 every town he passed through in brief excursions for health's sake, 
 added something to his knowledge. 
 
 Of course Mr. Green studied historical documents pro- 
 foundly, but he never could have used the materials gathered 
 by such study as he did use them had it not been for the 
 deep insight into the life of the people that he had gained 
 by personal experience. 
 
 It must be frankly admitted that there is no city on this 
 side of the ocean that can compare with Oxford as a center 
 of historical interest. No city of ours has the mediaeval 
 architecture, the memorable localities, the venerable cere- 
 monies and commemorations, the historical associations 
 reaching back a thousand years, the edifices, pictures, and 
 monuments that make so much of the interest and charm 
 of Oxford. The same may be said of our country as a 
 whole. In England you are never out of sight of some 
 interesting village, city, or battlefield ; some hall, castle,
 
 THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 149 
 
 church, or cemetery, college or chapel, famous in history, 
 poetry, or song ; some hill, mountain, or heath invested with 
 tale or legend ; some spot forever identified with a man re- 
 membered in war or statesmanship, letters or patriotism, 
 science or religion ; some shrine to which the feet of Eng- 
 lish-speaking men turn from all over the world. It is only 
 the older parts of our country that can show even a blush 
 of interest like this. Faneuil Hall and the State House in 
 Philadelphia are invested with associations dear to Ameri- 
 cans ; but these associations are too young, even if there 
 were no other reasons, to permit these places being equalized 
 with Runnymede and Westminster. Since it is only in in- 
 ferior minds that familiarity breeds contempt, the quick- 
 minded student can not fail to find advantages in England, 
 and in old countries generally, that are denied in a new and 
 immature country like our own. It is not due alone to the 
 fact that our old States have hitherto held the colleges and 
 libraries, the wealth, and the men of leisure, so essential to 
 the production of great historical works, that our Bancrofts, 
 Irvings, Prescotts, Motleys, and Parkmans have belonged to 
 them ; the inspiration and enthusiasm of history belong to 
 historical societies. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that American teachers are 
 shut up to books and libraries. Young as our country is, it has 
 a history, and every year is adding the charm that only time 
 can furnish. We may be poor in legend and in ballad, in 
 chronicle and story, in poetry and romance, as compared 
 with England, Scotland, or Switzerland ; but we have made 
 a beginning, and these rich elements will grow. The an- 
 nals of Indian warfare, whether they relate to the first plant- 
 ing of civilization on these Western shores, or to the still 
 longer and more fiercely contested struggle by which the 
 Great West was wrested from savage men, contain sources of 
 interest that Europe can not match ; the leading events of the 
 Revolution are fast taking their place with the great events 
 that led to the final establishment of liberty in England ; 
 while the Civil War, the whole world has already come to
 
 150 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 see, was necessary to the destruction of slavery and the uni- 
 fication of the Republic. The extraordinary growth of his- 
 torical studies in our country since the War is partly due to 
 causes that have operated in other countries ; partly to the 
 lessons of the War, which turned us back to its causes and 
 the nature and development of political institutions ; partly 
 to the fact that we now have vastly more history to study, 
 and are compelled to read much of the old history in a 
 new light. The main fact is that there are numerous 
 places, scattered over our land, where the historical spirit 
 may feed its fires. These will gain in interest as time goes 
 on. Writing of the Virginia side of the Potomac, opposite 
 Washington, in 1862, Hawthorne said : 
 
 The fortifications so numerous in all this region, and now so 
 unsightly with their bare precipitous sides, will remain as historic 
 monuments, grass-grown and picturesque memorials of an epoch of 
 terror and suffering : they will serve to make our country nearer, 
 dearer, and more interesting to us, and afford fit soil for poetry to 
 root itself in ; for this is a plant which thrives best in spots where 
 blood has been spilled long ago, and grows in abundant clusters 
 in old ditches, such as the moat around Fort Ellsworth will be a 
 century hence. It may seem to be paying dear for what many will 
 reckon but a worthless weed ; but the more historical associations 
 we can link with our localities, the richer will be the daily life that 
 feeds upon the past, and the more valuable the things that have 
 been long established.* 
 
 The near past that bounds our view our very youth 
 has a compensating advantage. Our history lies in the 
 open day. The fact that we have few unsolvable problems 
 may blunt the edge of curiosity, but it affords a greater 
 probability of ascertaining the truth. That our country 
 offers to the scholars of the world the only example of a 
 large group of independent colonies, planted and developed 
 under new and strange conditions, attaining the propor- 
 tions of vigorous commonwealths, then asserting their in- 
 
 * The Atlantic Monthly, vol. x, p. 49.
 
 THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 151 
 
 dependence and forming an indissoluble Union, afterward 
 attaining under a free constitution a foremost place among 
 the nations of the earth every step of the whole evolution 
 lying in the clear sunlight of knowledge is a fact which 
 these scholars are sure to appreciate more and more as time 
 goes on. Witness the monumental works of Dr. Von Hoist 
 and Professor Bryce. 
 
 The value of wide acquaintance with general literature 
 to the teacher call not well be overestimated. Such ac- 
 quaintance not only yields anecdotes, incidents, and tales 
 that fail to find their way into formal history, but they 
 show us a multitude of facts after they have been touched 
 by the imagination of the poet or the novelist. Here are 
 inexhaustible materials for illustration. No person could 
 properly teach the history of England and Scotland to a 
 child, unless he knew something of the old minstrelsy. In 
 the same field Scott's novels are indispensable. In our own 
 country such materials do not exist in equal abundance, 
 owing to our youth ; but Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, 
 and Cooper are only less important to the teacher than 
 Parkman, Fiske, and Bancroft. 
 
 In the short preface to his compilation of Poems of 
 Places, Longfellow writes a paragraph about travel that, 
 with slight change in the wording, is just as applicable to 
 history. 
 
 I have always found the poets my best traveling companions. 
 They see many things that are invisible to common eyes. Like 
 Orlando in the forest of Arden, " they hang odes on hawthorns and 
 elegies on thistles." They invest the landscape with a human feel- 
 ing, and cast upon it 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration and the poet's dream." 
 
 Even scenes unlovely in themselves become clothed in beauty when 
 illuminated by the imagination, as faces in themselves not beautiful 
 become so by the expression of thought and feeling. 
 
 The most important topic has been reserved to the last a 
 knowledge of history itself. Perhaps there is reason to fear
 
 152 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 that the normal schools and the institutes are leading some 
 teachers to think that the first requisite is not knowledge, 
 hut methods. No greater mistake could possibly be made. 
 Methods can not be understood until subject-matter has been 
 mastered, and, even if they could be, they would prove empty 
 and useless. Although it was maintained by both Jacotot 
 and Pestalozzi, the most monstrous error in the history of 
 pedagogy is the dogma that a man can teach what he does 
 not know. Even more than in some other subjects ample 
 knowledge is necessary to the best results in this field. 
 Without it the insight, the interest, and the enthusiasm so 
 necessary to success are impossible. 
 
 It may be thought that the standard of qualification has 
 been placed high, at least for teachers in elementary and 
 secondary schools. But it is none too high for an ideal. 
 The time has gone by when persons having no knowledge 
 of auxiliary subjects, or even of the main subject save what 
 they have gleaned from the text-book in the hands of their 
 own pupils, or a similar one, should be tolerated in schools 
 as teachers of history. Moreover, the earnest teacher of 
 good abilities can qualify himself in all the subjects that 
 have been named, even if his own school preparation did 
 not include them. He can not, indeed, provide himself with 
 a new mind, but he can accomplish much the same thing 
 by stimulating and developing those powers that are more 
 directly enlisted in studying and in teaching the subject. 
 
 It is a pregnant saying of Dr. Thomas Arnold's: "A 
 Professor of History, if I understand his duties rightly, has 
 
 rtwo principal objects : he must try to acquaint his hearers 
 with the nature and value of the treasure for which they 
 are searching ; and, secondly, he must try to show them 
 the best and speediest method of discovering and abstract- 
 ing it."
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 
 
 References. Bunbury : History of Ancient Geography; Free- 
 man : The Historical Geography of Europe, Text and Maps, Methods 
 of Studying History, Geography and Travel, General Sketch of 
 History; Dr. W. Smith: Dictionaries of Greek and Roman Geog- 
 raphy, and of the Bible ; Bryce : The Holy Roman Empire, Appen- 
 dix D ; Green : A Short History of the English People, The Making 
 of England ; Ransome : Elementary History of England ; Taylor : 
 Names and Places ; Putzger : Historischer Schul- Atlas ; Keith John- 
 ston : Physical, Historical, Political, and Descriptive Geography ; 
 Gardiner : A School Atlas of English History. 
 
 DR. FREEMAN observes that geography in its bearing on 
 history has two meanings or aspects, which tend to run into 
 one another and yet are purely distinct. One aspect is 
 knowledge which may be acquired by the study of books 
 and maps ; the other, knowledge that is acquired by means 
 of travel, by actually seeing things with our own eyes. His- 
 torical geography corresponds to the first of these forms of 
 knowledge, and has to do with the political divisions of the 
 earth at different times. 
 
 " It comes," he says, " very largely to be a matter of no- 
 menclature ; what is the meaning of such and such a geo- 
 graphical name at such and such a time." Three questions 
 may arise : 1. " Did it mean the same extent of the surface of 
 the earth which it means now ? " 2. " Did it reach farther 
 than it does now, or not so far?" 3. "Or did it, as some- 
 times happens, mean some other part of the earth from what 
 it means now some part which may not have an inch of 
 12
 
 154: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 ground in common with the land to which the name is now 
 commonly given ? " Questions also arise as to the original 
 meanings of names. Accordingly, he defines historical ge- 
 ography as the knowledge of the names which different 
 parts of the earth's surface have borne at different times, in- 
 cluding their origin and signification. How important 
 accurate knowledge of this kind is, as well as how diffi- 
 cult to obtain, this chapter and the following one will illus- 
 trate. 
 
 First, we may consider the three continents of the Old 
 World and their names. Necessarily, the names could not 
 be used in a continental signification until the distinctness 
 of the continents themselves was recognized ; and this, for 
 reasons that are here immaterial, was but slowly effected. 
 
 While Homer was acquainted with parts of all these con- 
 tinents, he had no idea of their distinctness and unity ; and 
 even Herodotus, who uses the divisions and the names, be- 
 cause they were sanctioned by custom, thought them un- 
 reasonable and without good foundation. Sometimes the 
 Nile was regarded as the boundary between Asia and Africa. 
 Nor was there in antiquity any universally recognized 
 boundary between Asia and Europe. The majority fol- 
 lowed Hecataeus in making it the Tanafe. or the Don, but 
 some followed Herodotus, who made it the Phasis, now 
 known as the Faz or Rioni. Even in our own times this 
 boundary is not fixed beyond dispute, some geographers 
 making it the Don and some the Volga. But the different 
 senses attributed to the names arising from special uses and 
 from limited information are far more confusing than those 
 originating in disputes about boundaries. Every one of the 
 three names appears to have been used first in a merely lo- 
 cal sense, and afterward to have been expanded with the 
 progress of geographical knowledge. 
 
 Asia is used in history in several distinct senses. It is 
 probable that the first Asia was the plain of Lydia, or possi- 
 bly even the meadow of the river Cayster, and that it was 
 successively applied to the whole peninsula of which Lydia
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 155 
 
 formed a part, to the parts of the continent abutting on the 
 Mediterranean, and finally to the continent. The name Asia 
 Minor first appears in the fifth century A. D., and its appear- 
 ance marks the need of a special name for the peninsula, in 
 order to separate it from the continent, or from Upper Asia, 
 as the region beyond the Taurus was called. Asia is some- 
 times named the kingdom of Troy, sometimes the kingdom 
 of Pergamus, and sometimes Proconsular or Roman Asia. 
 How confusing these Asias are is shown by familiar pas- 
 sages in the book of Acts. St. Paul, being already in Asia, 
 and in Asia Minor, is forbidden "to preach the word in 
 Asia," and at Ephesus is advised by " certain of the chief of 
 Asia, which were his friends," etc. (chaps, xvi, 6 ; xix, 31). 
 The Asia of these passages is the one last mentioned in the 
 above enumeration. 
 
 The Greeks called the second of the great continents, ex- 
 clusive of Egypt, Libya, and the Romans borrowed the 
 name from them. The Carthaginians called their own re- 
 gion, and perhaps the continent so far as they knew it, Afric 
 or Af ricus, and the name passed from them to their conquer- 
 ors. The Romans at first applied it to the Carthaginian 
 territory, and later to Proconsular or Roman Africa, which 
 was of different extents at different times. Still later 
 Africa took the place of Libya, including Egypt as well, 
 while Libya disappeared from the map. 
 
 Perhaps the name of the third continent is of more un- 
 certain origin than either of the others. One theory is that 
 Europe means " Broad Land," and that the Asiatic Greeks 
 gave the name to the extended coast of Thrace to distinguish 
 it from the islands of the ^Egean Sea and the Peloponnesus. 
 However this may be, the name was used in a continental 
 sense from the time that the geographical unity of Europe 
 was recognized, and is therefore free from uncertainties like 
 those attending Asia and Africa. 
 
 Before going farther it will be well to distinguish be- 
 tween geographical and political names. Dr. Freeman de- 
 fines the first as " a name meaning a certain part of the
 
 156 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 earth's surface, marked out by boundaries which can not 
 well be changed" ; the second as "simply meaning the ex- 
 tent of country which is occupied at any time by a particu- 
 lar nation, and whose boundaries may be easily changed." 
 Britain is an example of a geographical name ; England, 
 Wales, and Scotland are examples of political names. Spain 
 falls into the first class ; Castile, Aragon, and Portugal into 
 the second. The same may be said of Gaul and France. 
 Sometimes the same name is both geographical and polit- 
 ical, and in precisely the same sense ; but such cases are less 
 frequent than we might antecedently expect. 
 
 Few names are more curious and instructive than Greece 
 and Greek. The people whom we know as Greeks called 
 themselves Hellenes, and their country Hellas. At first 
 the Hellenes were but a single tribe occupying a small dis- 
 trict in Thessaly. The southern part of the easternmost 
 of the three Mediterranean peninsulas was, however, occu- 
 pied by a group of affiliated tribes or peoples. It was always 
 understood that Hellas was the country of the Hellenes ; 
 and as the original tribes and states came more and more 
 to recognize and to value their relationships, and as they be- 
 came better known to the outside world, the names Hellenes 
 and Hellas were progressively expanded. The geographical 
 unity of the country, as well as the commercial and political 
 relations of the people, worked strongly in the direction 
 of unity. At one time Hellas extended only to the Co- 
 rinthian Gulf on the south and to the Ambracian Gulf on 
 the north ; later, Peloponnesus and Macedonia were included 
 within its boundaries. Nor is this all ; the Hellenes were a 
 commercial and a colonizing people, and, in the largest 
 sense of the term, all their colonies and outposts were in 
 Hellas, whether on the Hellespont, the Euxine, or African 
 coast, whether in Spain, Gaul, Italy, or the Islands of 
 the Sea. Still, the two names were not employed in a gen- 
 eral sense until after the time of Homer ; he calls the 
 motley host that sailed to Troy by a number of different 
 names, but never Hellenes. Even after the names became
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 157 
 
 common there were numerous controversies as to what 
 tribes were and what were not Hellenes. These controver- 
 sies, into which political factors entered very deeply, make 
 the definition of the Grecian boundaries at all times difficult. 
 Finally the Romans became acquainted with a small tribe 
 called Grseci, living on the coast of Epirus, who were per- 
 haps not Hellenes at all, and they gave the name of this 
 tribe to the whole country and people of the peninsula, thus 
 settling the usage. While Greece was never used in as 
 broad a sense as Hellas, lower Italy, which became thor- 
 oughly Graecized, was known as Greater Greece. The pres- 
 ent kingdom of Greece, still called Hellas, founded in 1833, 
 embraces but a small part of ancient Greece. 
 
 We first meet the name Italy in the lower part of the 
 second Mediterranean peninsula. The Romans, the master- 
 ful people who expanded the name, although of the Italian 
 stock, did not live in the original Italy at all. In the time 
 of Julius Caesar Italy extended north only to the Rubicon, 
 and it was Augustus who first made it include the valley of 
 the Po and the southern slopes of the Alps. At a later time 
 the name was limited to the northern part of the peninsula, 
 and Milan became the capital. On the breaking up of the 
 Frankish Empire a kingdom of Italy was formed in the 
 north, Charles V being the last monarch to wear its iron 
 crown, and a second but short-lived kingdom of the same 
 name was created by Bonaparte in 1805. For a long time 
 the name was without political significance, being, as was 
 said, "a mere geographical designation." Such, in fact, 
 it continued to be until the formation of the present king- 
 dom of Italy, which, however, does not include the whole 
 peninsula or all the Italians. To say nothing of San Marino, 
 considerable parts of Italy still belong to Austria. The 
 necessity of keeping the meaning of names in mind in 
 reading history is well illustrated by the account of Caesar's 
 passing the Rubicon with his army in defiance of the Senate. 
 This river, which flows into the Adriatic south of the Po 
 valley, was part of the boundary between the province of
 
 158 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Gaul, which Caesar governed, and the Italy of his day, which 
 the Senate itself governed. 
 
 The original Romans were the people of Rome, the town 
 by the river Tiber ; but step by step the name as well as 
 the rights of the Romans were conferred upon all the tribes 
 and nationalities comprehended in the most imposing polit- 
 ical structure that the world has seen the Roman Empire. 
 After the division of the empire, Roman was never used in 
 the West as a general name either of the land or of the peo- 
 ple, although it lived on as a part of the name of the empire 
 itself. Nor is the name used in Italy to-day save as applying 
 to the city and to the district called the Romagna ; but in 
 the East its use with a general significance took deep root. 
 The inhabitants of the Eastern Empire knew themselves as 
 Romans to the very end, and the land gradually came to 
 be called Roumania. The potent name made a deep im- 
 pression upon the Asiatic barbarians who overthrew that 
 empire ; when the Seljook Turks overran Asia Minor their 
 leaders assumed the title Sultans of Roum. Roumania and 
 Roumelia, inhabited mainly by people who speak a language 
 descended from the Latin, and who are themselves supposed 
 to be descended from the colonists whom Trajan established 
 in Dacia, are memorials of the strong impression that the 
 Roman power and name made upon the East. Strangely 
 enough, the name of a people whose great qualities were 
 political and military is now most widely used in a strictly 
 religious signification. 
 
 In the widest sense Gaul was the land of the Gauls, or 
 Celts, as Hellas was the land of the Hellenes. In early Ro- 
 man times, however, the name was used in a much narrower 
 sense. The country so named was divided into Cisalpine 
 and Transalpine Gaul or Gaul on this side and Gaul on 
 that side of the Alps, speaking from the standpoint of 
 Rome. The first was incorporated into Italy by Augustus. 
 The Gaul that Caesar describes as divided into three parts, 
 much of which he conquered, extended from the Pyre- 
 nees, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean to the Channel
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY : THE OLD WORLD. 159 
 
 and the North Sea, exclusive of Provence, which had been 
 subdued in earlier times. This country is the Gaul of the 
 Imperial Period. 
 
 When we obtain our first glimpse of Central Europe it is 
 occupied by a group of affiliated nations or tribes calling 
 themselves Deutsch that is, the people or the nation, and 
 whose descendants, living in the same country, still call 
 themselves by the same name. The derivative "Dutch," 
 however, is strictly limited to the people of the Netherlands. 
 English-speaking men call the Deutsch Germans and Teu- 
 tons, and their country Germany, borrowing the names 
 from the Romans. Where the Romans obtained them is 
 a matter of controversy, but Teuton was the name of a 
 Germanic tribe with which the Romans were brought into 
 contact, and which they used in a generic sense. Broadly 
 speaking, Germany, or Deutschland, is the native country 
 of the Germans, or the Deutsch ; but its ethnological, geo- 
 graphical, and political limits have materially varied at dif- 
 ferent times, and, in fact the three significations of the word 
 have never fully coincided, at least in modern times. The 
 principal political phases of Germany may be thus particu- 
 larized : 
 
 1. The Germany of Caesar and Tacitus, consisting of a 
 large number of independent tribes and groups of tribes 
 without cohesion or unity. In this period the Germans 
 are crowding outward, and they soon overflow in all direc- 
 tions. 
 
 2. Carolingian Germany, the empire of the Carlings. 
 The Franks, who were one of the largest divisions of the 
 Germans, crossed the Rhine in the fifth century, under Clo- 
 vis, and established themselves in Gaul. Their power cul- 
 minated when Charlemagne, their king, having gained the 
 mastery of nearly all Gaul and part of Spain, of Germany 
 and Northern Italy, was crowned Emperor at Rome. Fran- 
 cia, which in this period was the proper country of the 
 Franks, embraced the major parts of Gaul and Germany. 
 
 3. The German kingdom. Soon after the death of
 
 160 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Charlemagne, which occurred in 814, his empire broke up. 
 East Francia, the country between the Rhine and the Elbe, 
 and West Francia now fell apart and were never reunited. 
 In East Francia there grew up the German kingdom, the 
 real greatness of which dates from Otto the Great, crowned 
 in 936. This kingdom, called also the German Empire, 
 passed through many changes and stood in important rela- 
 tions to all the powers of Western Europe. The German kings 
 wore, or were entitled to wear, four crowns the royal crowns 
 of Germany, Burgundy, and Italy, and the imperial crown of 
 Rome. Charles V was the last monarch who was actually 
 crowned Roman Emperor. The kingdom was a confederacy, 
 the head of which was originally elected by the German 
 princes collectively, but afterward by a certain fixed number 
 of them, called electors. Still, the crown tended to become 
 hereditary in some great reigning family that could bring to 
 the office strength in exchange for dignity and a great title. 
 It must be remembered, however, that Burgundy and Italy 
 were not parts of Germany, but were rather foreign domin- 
 ions of the German kings until they fell away from his 
 grasp. The Empire, and the German kingdom, came to an 
 end in 1806 in consequence of the Napoleonic wars. Francis 
 II then renounced the imperial crown and assumed the new 
 title of Emperor of Austria. 
 
 Here it may be observed that European history, and es- 
 pecially in mediaeval times, can not be understood without a 
 clear and firm grasp of the Holy Roman Empire, the name 
 by which the imperial dominions of the kings or emperors 
 were known. Often, however, it was called merely The 
 Empire. 
 
 4. The German Confederation. This was a loose federal 
 union formed of all the proper German states in 1815. The 
 kings of England, the Netherlands, and Denmark were 
 members of the body for their German dominions, as the 
 King of England for Hanover. The Emperor of Austria 
 was the hereditary president of the diet, representation in 
 which was regulated by fixed agreement. Austria and
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 
 
 Prussia were the leading members of the confederacy, and 
 their rivalry finally destroyed it. 
 
 5. The German Empire. In 1866 the German Confedera- 
 tion came to an end, and the North German Confederation 
 was formed under the leadership of Prussia. Austria and 
 the other South German states were not included. In 1870, 
 when the Franco-Prussian war was in progress, all these 
 excluded states but Austria joined the Northern Union, and 
 the next year the present German Empire was organized, 
 the crown being invested in the reigning family of Prussia. 
 Some of the old states were now merged in Prussia; the 
 old German lands of Alsace and Lorraine, that had been 
 wrested from France in the course of the war, were rean- 
 nexed to Germany, and Austria, with a German population 
 of more than ten million, was shut out of political Ger- 
 many altogether. 
 
 Perhaps no name in European history is more confusing 
 than Austria. Austria-Hungary is composed, as the name 
 itself suggests, of two parts, each of which is an agglomera- 
 tion of older states and parts of states. Hungary consists of 
 the old Hungarian kingdom together with other lands, and 
 does not require further description. Austria dates from the 
 time of the early German kings, who founded, as a bulwark 
 against the Hungarians, a mark, march, or border state, 
 called Oesterreich, Ostmark, Eastmark, or Austria. By and 
 by the mark became a duchy, then an archduchy, and to- 
 ward the end of the thirteenth century it passed into the 
 possession of the house of Hapsburg. In one way and 
 another the Austrian princes won power ; the imperial 
 crown came to them ; they gained new territories in Ger- 
 many, in Italy, in Poland, in Hungarian and Turkish lands 
 not all of which, however, ever became parts of Austria 
 proper. They were known by a great number of titles : in 
 their original dominions as archdukes ; in Bohemia and 
 Hungary as kings ; in their other states as counts, dukes, 
 margraves, etc. ; while in Germany at large and through 
 Europe they were styled Emperors. The head of this com-
 
 162 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 posite state assumed the title Emperor of Austria when he 
 renounced the imperial crown in 1806. He is now known 
 as emperor in Austria and in Europe generally, but as king 
 in Hungary a point on which the Hungarians are very 
 sensitive. Austria proper consists of fourteen different 
 parts, eleven of which belonged to Germany previous to 
 1866. 
 
 The original Prussia, a province on the Baltic Sea that 
 the Teutonic Knights had won from the heathen, was not 
 German at all. In the sixteenth century it passed to the 
 Elector of Brandenburg, one of the seven electors of the 
 German kingdom, and in 1701 the Elector assumed the title 
 King of Prussia. His kingdom lay partly within and partly 
 without Germany. As a German prince he was called an 
 elector, hut as a European prince he was known by his 
 higher title. Step by step Prussia has grown in all direc- 
 tions, until it is now far larger than any other German 
 state. At present Prussia is all included in Germany, al- 
 though a considerable part of the population, as the Poles 
 and the Pomeranians, are not Germans. 
 
 Reference has been made to the division of Francia in 
 the ninth century. The old name was reserved in both 
 divisions ; in the west it became France, in the east Fran- 
 con ia. Western Francia, or Latin Francia, which corre- 
 sponded in a general way to ancient Gaul, following the 
 breaking up of Charlemagne's empire, was divided into a 
 great number of small political bodies, which, like all such 
 bodies at that time, were endowed with the strongest repel- 
 lent qualities. These bodies were not only without natural 
 boundaries for the most part, but they were all divisions of a 
 great region or country that was strongly marked by geo- 
 graphical unity and coherence. The Alps and the Medi- 
 terranean, the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, and the Channel wall 
 this region about, save in one quarter. On the northeast, or 
 the side of the Rhine, it lies open, thus affording a high- 
 way of war that armies have often trodden. In course of 
 time the political and military elements existing in the tenth
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 163 
 
 century were brought together and thoroughly integrated, 
 producing modern France. It is common to assign this 
 great and beneficial work to the skill and policy of Hugh 
 Capet and his successors, re-enforced by the great qualities 
 of their people ; but the material factors in the problem 
 are no less potent than the human ones. Moreover, beyond 
 the limits that Nature set for her, France, although one of 
 the great military powers of history, has never succeeded in 
 permanently extending her boundaries. Nor has she at any 
 time been threatened with serious loss within these limits. 
 Only on her one open side have her boundaries been un- 
 stable. 
 
 Spain is a country of a strongly marked character, both 
 geographical and historical. Minutely to set forth the po- 
 litical changes that have taken place within it would require 
 a volume. Only two or three facts can here be mentioned. 
 
 In the eighth century the Saracens conquered the larger 
 part of Spain ; the mountainous north, however, preserved its 
 independence under a line of princes claiming to represent 
 the old Gothic kings, and in time it became the Kingdom of 
 Leon. This kingdom was the original center of resistance 
 to the Mohammedans. Progressively, as the country was 
 won back bit by bit from its conquerors, there grew up a 
 circle of counties and kingdoms the relation of which to 
 one another and to Leon are curiously blended and con- 
 fused. The most prominent of these were Navarre, which 
 extended over the Pyrenees, Aragon, Portugal, and Castile 
 the last so called because at first it was a line of castles. 
 Modern Spain was the product of the integration of nearly 
 all these states. To quote Dr. Freeman : " The permanent 
 union of the dominions of Castile and Aragon, the tempo- 
 rary union of the dominions of Castile, Aragon, and Por- 
 tugal, formed that great Spanish monarchy which in the 
 sixteenth century was the wonder and terror of Europe, 
 which lost important possessions in the sixteenth and sev- 
 enteenth centuries, and which was finally partitioned in 
 the beginning of the eighteenth." Castile and Aragon,
 
 164 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 which had previously absorbed much Christian territory in 
 the peninsula, gave the finishing 1 blow to the Moorish power 
 the very year that Columbus discovered America. The 
 marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella did not immediately 
 lead to the unification of the two crowns ; it is common to 
 refer the union to 1506, but it did not become complete and 
 final until the reign of Charles V. The union of Portugal 
 with the other kingdoms proved to be but temporary. The 
 potency of physical factors is happily illustrated by the fact 
 that so much of the old Navarre as lies north of the Pyre- 
 nees is now a part of France, while the remainder is a part of 
 Spain. 
 
 It has been seen that the ethnological, geographical, and 
 political meanings of the same name often differ widely. It 
 is perhaps hardly necessary to remark that no student can 
 disentangle and retain in his memory these distinctions un- 
 less he is willing to read closely, to scan maps carefully, and 
 to do a great deal of hard thinking besides. It is also neces- 
 sary that the student shall emancipate himself from the 
 bondage of the modern map ; he must live in the geography 
 of the times that he studies. 
 
 Many other examples of the shrinkage, the expansion, the 
 disappearance, and the transference of geographical names 
 can be found in the history of Europe. The fact is, every 
 important name is a separate study. How Saxony, Sweden, 
 and Turkey have shrunk up ! How Eussia has grown ! 
 Through what transformations Switzerland has passed! 
 Spain, which was originally a geographical name merely, is 
 now a political name as well. Burgundy and Poland, once 
 so prominent, have wholly disappeared from the map. In- 
 deed, Mr. Bryce describes ten different Burgundies, and 
 then adds that there was very nearly being an eleventh 
 one. 
 
 Dr. Freeman remarks with emphasis, that although Caesar 
 in 55 B. O., and William the Conqueror in 1066 A. D., both 
 landed in the same island, the first landed in Britain, the 
 second in England. The distinction is important, because
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 165 
 
 the two names suggest very different conditions, and par- 
 ticularly very different peoples. 
 
 The people of the Mediterranean who first visited those 
 regions appear to have spoken of the whole group of islands 
 rather than of any particular island as Britain. Still, be- 
 fore Caesar's day the name had been applied also to the 
 largest island of the group, while its inhabitants, who were 
 Celts, were called Britons. The Eoman conquest and occu- 
 pancy in no way disturbed these names. Soon after the 
 Romans retired beyond the Channel, in 410, bands of Jutes, 
 Saxons, and Angles began to invade Britain ; and step by 
 step these invaders, constantly re-enforced from beyond the 
 sea, succeeded in displacing the native inhabitants in a 
 large part of the island. The Britons already had some 
 knowledge of the Saxons, and that is probably the reason 
 why they called the invading host indiscriminately by that 
 name. At all events, they did call them all Saxons, and to 
 this day their descendants in Wales, Ireland, and the Scotch 
 Highlands call the English by some form of that word. 
 But the new people that was gradually formed in Britain 
 called themselves Angles or English, and the country An- 
 glia or England, perhaps because that tribe was more numer- 
 ous and came to possess more of the land than the others. 
 Still, England never took the place of Britain as a name, for 
 reasons which it is important to state. 
 
 The Romans found a people known as the Caledonians 
 in Northern Britain. They were of the Celtic stock. By 
 and by the Picts appear on the scene, they being the same 
 tribe with a new name, or an affiliated tribe who displace or 
 absorb the Caledonians. Glancing at the contemporary map 
 of Ireland, we see that its northern part is called Scotia and 
 its inhabitants Scotti. Thus the original Scotland was North 
 Ireland, and the original Scotchmen were Irishmen. Before 
 the German invasion of Britain began some Scots had 
 crossed the sea and planted themselves on the coast north of 
 the Clyde. These Scots, continually re-enforced by their 
 countrymen in the lesser island, made common cause with
 
 106 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 the Picts in warring upon the Britons after the Romans 
 abandoned the island, and also in resisting the Saxons or 
 English as they pressed northward. Moreover, they eventu- 
 ally gave their name to the Picts, as well as to many of the 
 English themselves and to the whole northern part of an- 
 cient Britain. The first Nova Scotia was Scotland. 
 
 Step by step the English pushed their conquests north- 
 ward as far as the Highlands, and they actually occupied 
 permanently a great part of the Scottish Lowlands. But 
 the English kings failed to maintain a high northern bound- 
 ary ; on the contrary, there was formed a Kingdom of Scot- 
 land, the people of which were partly the old Caledonians, 
 or the Pictish stock, partly the Scots, and partly the Lowland 
 English that finally made common cause with the others. 
 Thus the" northern as well as the southern kingdom is 
 known by a foreign name. Caledonia disappeared from the 
 map of the one island as Scotia did from the map of the 
 other. On the perfecting of the union of the kingdoms of 
 England and Wales and of Scotland in 1707, it was ordained 
 that together they should be called Great Britain. And this 
 fact the Scotchman, who is particular to have it understood 
 that his country was never conquered, is strenuous to have 
 remembered. The native name of the Highlander is Gael. 
 
 The diverse elements uniting to form the Scottish nation 
 had much to do with the long and bitter feuds between the 
 Highlands and the Lowlands. Sir Walter Scott has made 
 the most of these contentions, as in the speech that Roderick 
 Dhu makes to Fitz James as the two stand upon one of the 
 mountain spurs overlooking the valley of the Forth. .This 
 speech emphasizes the fact that the Highlander and the 
 Lowlander were of alien race, and also illustrates the High- 
 land or Gaelic use of the term Saxon. 
 
 Saxon, from yonder mountain high, 
 I mark'd thee send delighted eye, 
 Far to the south and east, where lay, 
 Extended in succession gay,
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 167 
 
 Deep waving fields and pastures green, 
 With gentle slopes and groves between : 
 These fertile plains, that soften'd vale, 
 Were once the birthright of the Gael ; 
 The stranger came with iron hand, 
 And from our fathers reft the land. 
 Where dwell we now ! See, rudely swell 
 Crag over crag, and fell o'er fell. 
 
 The contrast presented by men occupying mountainous re- 
 gions and by men occupying plains or valleys has often been 
 remarked. It is particularly observable in the early history 
 of civilization. The man of the mountains retains his primi- 
 tive habits of character long after his neighbor on the plain 
 below has entered upon the ways of regular civil life ; he 
 continues to live by the chase, on the produce of his few goats 
 or sheep, and perhaps a meager tillage, to raid and murder, 
 and to assert his independence in all ways, when his neigh- 
 bor has become an agriculturist, a mechanic, or a trader en- 
 gaged in amassing and emjoying wealth, and takes up his 
 old trade of war only when compelled to do so in self-de- 
 fense. This story may be read in the relations of the Scotch 
 Highlanders and Lowlanders down to recent times. The 
 mind of the mountaineer continues stern and unbending, 
 his spirit fierce and intractable, brooking no domination, 
 when the Lowlander becomes plastic, versatile, devoted to 
 gain or comfort, and loving quiet and peace even to the 
 point of submitting to severe oppression. Thus mountain- 
 ous regions not only furnish those who dwell in them fast- 
 nesses easy of defense, but they breathe into their inhabitants 
 an intense spirit of individuality and freedom that some- 
 times renders them invincible. A few thousand Monte- 
 negrins withstood for centuries the Ottoman Empire ; and 
 the Swiss, although comparatively few in numbers, and 
 divided by blood, language, and local interests, successfully 
 maintained their independence against some of the greatest 
 powers of Europe. Still the men of the plain have not al- 
 ways tamely submitted to the yoke of the oppressor. Mr.
 
 108 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Kingsley has signalized in an engaging story the stubborn 
 resistance that the men of the Fens under Hereward the 
 Wake made to William the Conqueror ; while Mr. Motley 
 has celebrated in learned tomes of history the heroic and 
 successful resistance that the Dutch made to Spain. 
 
 Environment tells us why some countries are so subject 
 to foreign invasion. For thousands of years invaders from 
 beyond the central mountain axis of Asia have at times 
 pressed into the great peninsula of Hindostan, seeking its 
 milder climate and its richer fruits. The modern tourist 
 who passes in a day from France or Germany into Italy is 
 at no loss to discover why in ancient times the Celt, the 
 Teuton, and the Hun longed for its beautiful mountains and 
 valleys, and why hi later times it has been so fiercely con- 
 tested by the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the German, and 
 even the Saracen. Then, some countries by their very posi- 
 tion and configuration are battlefields of nations or high- 
 ways of war. Such in ancient times was Palestine, often 
 trodden under foot by the colossal powers of Egypt, Assyria, 
 and Syria. Northern Italy has been a favorite battle ground 
 for countries lying beyond the Alps, while Flanders, Dr. 
 Holmes once said, is the bowling alley in which the kings of 
 Europe have rolled cannon balls at each other's armies. 
 The records of such movements and operations are often 
 read in historical geography. 
 
 The English called the Britons Welsh that is, strangers ; 
 and there were two or three Welsh kingdoms in the west- 
 ern parts of the island that maintained their independence 
 through several centuries, and that, when finally subdued, 
 left behind them enduring memorials. Cornwall is the old 
 kingdom of Corn- Wales, or kingdom of the Welsh of the 
 Horn (Corn being derived from the Latin comua); while 
 the Principality of Wales is the Welsh kingdom that Ed- 
 ward I subdued, and that gave a title to the eldest son of the 
 King of England. Still, the people of the Principality do 
 not call themselves Welsh, but Cimri. 
 
 So far little has been said about the origin and meaning
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 169 
 
 of geographical names. Dr. Freeman includes these ele- 
 ments in his definition of historical geography, and Rev. 
 Isaac Taylor writes a book to show us that local names, 
 whether of provinces, cities, villages, rivers, or mountains, 
 are never purely arbitrary sounds destitute of meaning, but 
 are rather records of the past, inviting and rewarding a care- 
 ful historical interpretation. Sometimes the original mean- 
 ings have faded out ; sometimes they are so doubtful that 
 we can not deduce from them certain conclusions ; but in a 
 majority of cases they are not only discoverable but throw 
 much light on historical studies. Geographical names are 
 sometimes chapters of history in themselves. The numerous 
 Alexandrias, Antiochs, and Seleucias scattered over the Mace- 
 donian Empire point at once to their founders or to the men 
 for whom they were named. The same may be said of the 
 various Csesareas, of which Jersey is but a corruption. The 
 cities of Adrianople and Orleans remind us of the Emperors 
 Adrian and Aurelian. Tiberias stands for the emperor of 
 that name, and Constance for Constantius. Philippi was the 
 city of Philip, and our own Philadelphia goes back by the 
 city of the same name in Asia Minor to Philadelphus, King 
 of Pergamus. The three names of the great city of the 
 Bosporus Byzantium, Constantinople, and Stamboul fitly 
 mark the three periods of its eventful history. St. Peters- 
 burg is the City of Peter the Great. But such examples as 
 these lie on the surface. 
 
 Historical geography shows very conclusively that, at 
 different times, several different peoples have flowed over 
 the major part of Europe, and it also marks in a more or 
 less definite way their metes and bounds, just as an existing 
 moraine marks the former extent of an ancient glacier. 
 First of all, so far as we know, came the race of which the 
 Basques and Finns are remnants ; and then followed suc- 
 cessive waves of Celts, Germans, Lithuanians, and Slavo- 
 nians, that have left incontestable proof of their presence in 
 geographical names wherever they went. Celtic names 
 abound in the region west of the Rhine, in Italy, and in the 
 13
 
 170 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 British islands, and are found beyond these limits. Ger- 
 man names are scattered over the western half of Europe. 
 In fact, some of these countries are sown with names in 
 different languages three or four deep, and it is often easy 
 to discover the order in which they are scattered. In Italy, 
 Greek, Latin, Celtic, and German names are found, not to 
 mention still other languages ; in France, Celtic, Latin, and 
 German names. In the eighth century the Arabs crossed 
 the Strait of Gibraltar and founded a kingdom in Spain ; 
 they also invaded Gaul, the Mediterranean islands, and 
 Southern Italy ; and wherever they went they left behind 
 them demonstrative proof of their presence, even if their 
 name should fade from the annals of Europe. In Spain 
 and Portugal, where they remained longest, the memorials 
 of their presence are thousands in number, including many 
 of the best-known names, as Guadalquivir, Gibraltar, Medi- 
 na, and Trafalgar. At a still earlier time the Phoenicians 
 had given a name to Cadiz. 
 
 In Great Britain historical geography shows us the plain- 
 est traces of the three races that have ruled the island the 
 Celts, the Romans, and the English and also of the inva- 
 sions of the Scandinavians and the Normans. 
 
 Names given to features of country are naturally more 
 permanent than names of towns and political divisions. 
 " Mountains and rivers," it has been said, " still murmur the 
 voices of nations long since denationalized or extirpated." 
 To quote Mr. Taylor : " The river names, more particularly 
 the names of important rivers, are everywhere the memo- 
 rials of the very earliest races. These river names survive 
 when all other names have changed ; they seem to possess an 
 almost indestructible vitality. Towns may be destroyed, the 
 sites of human habitations may be removed, but the ancient 
 river names are handed down from race to race ; even the 
 names of the eternal hills are less permanent than those of 
 rivers. Over the greater part of Europe in Germany, 
 France, Italy, Spain we find villages which bear Teutonic 
 or Romance names, standing on the banks of streams which
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 
 
 still retain their ancient Celtic appellations. Throughout 
 the whole of England there is hardly a single river name 
 which is not Celtic." The same author prints a map that 
 shows the most thoroughly Saxon and Scandinavian parts 
 of Great Britain to be traversed by rivers whose names are 
 now almost the sole evidence of a once universal Celtic oc- 
 cupation. Often the Celtic name was simply a word that 
 meant water, stream, or river, and so was a common noun, as 
 a/ow, meaning river, and dur and esk, meaning water. The 
 Saxons also named streams in the same way. Frequently 
 the present name is composed of two or more root words. 
 Thus the Teutons, coming to a stream already called Dur or 
 Door, added " beck," making Durbeck, which means water- 
 stream. Esk-water and Derwent-water were formed in the 
 same way. Wansbeckwater is composed of four parts, and 
 means river water-river water. 
 
 Chester is the Latin castra, meaning camp, and the 
 name bears witness to the fact that the city stands on the 
 site of an old Roman fortification. The same may be said 
 of names holding the same word in combination, as Dor- 
 chester, Rochester, Porchester, Manchester, Doncaster, and 
 many more. Cologne, or Koln, as the German says, is a 
 corrupted form of the Latin colonia, and shows us that the 
 Romans had a colony on the site of that city ; while Coblenz 
 comes from the Latin confluentes, and points to the fact that 
 the Romans also occupied the confluence of the Rhine and 
 the Moselle. The syllable " coin " in English Lincoln has 
 the same origin as Cologne. 
 
 It is interesting to observe that Cologne is by no means 
 a solitary example of a double name occurring in that re- 
 gion of Europe. We have Elsass and Alsace, Lothringen and 
 Lorraine, Mosel and Moselle, Mainz and Mayence, Trier and 
 Treves, Luttich and Liege, Mechlin and Malines, Lowen and 
 Louvain, Aachen and Aix-la-Chapelle, and many more. 
 The first name in the several pairs is the older German 
 name, the second one the later French name. The expla- 
 nation of these double names is partly the fact that the
 
 172 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 French have a fashion of adapting names to their own lan- 
 guage, and that other peoples, as the English, owing to the 
 general currency of French, commonly adopt these newer 
 forms ; but it is also partly the fact that this region has been 
 a debatable land between Germany and France, at different 
 times in the possession of either people, and so furnishes a 
 valuable lesson in historical geography. 
 
 In England a multitude of names are found that suggest 
 the idea of an inclosure, and so of protection. The familiar 
 terminations "ton," "ham," "worth," "stoke," "fold," 
 "garth," "park," "burgh," "bury," "borough," "borrow," 
 all have this meaning. These terminations were added to 
 some other word, as the name of a tribe or family, and in this 
 way were formed many of our most familiar geographical 
 names. The original bond of the Saxon community was 
 blood relationship. "As they fought side by side on the 
 field," says Mr. Green, " so they dwelt side by side on the soil. 
 Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing, and each 
 ' wick ' and ' ham ' and ' stead ' and ' ton ' took its name from 
 the kinsmen who dwelt in it. In this way the house or ham 
 of the Billings was Billingham, and the town or township of 
 the Harlings was Harlington." The fact that most of the 
 old centers of population, as London, Winchester, Manches- 
 ter, Lancaster, and others, bear Celtic or Latin-Celtic names, 
 while other centers bear Teutonic names, suggests that it 
 was in the first that the Celts longest maintained themselves 
 against their enemies ; " while the Teutonic town names 
 usually indicate by their suffixes that they originated in iso- 
 lated family settlements in the uncleared forest, or arose 
 from the necessities of traffic in the neighborhood of some 
 frequented ford." 
 
 The Scandinavians, who played such an important part 
 in English history, would naturally land on the northeast- 
 ern coast, since it was most convenient to their own coun- 
 try ; and the multitude of Scandinavian names found in 
 that part of the island, separate from all documents, proves 
 that such was the fact.
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 173 
 
 The names of many English counties are full of instruc- 
 tion. Essex, Sussex, Wessex, and Middlesex were first the 
 names respectively of the kingdoms of the East, South, West, 
 and Middle Saxons, hefore the Teutonic kingdoms were 
 united. Surrey was the south realm. Norfolk and Suffolk 
 were the northern and southern divisions of the East Angli- 
 can folk. Northumberland is the land north of the Hum- 
 ber. Cumberland, Cornwall, Devon, and Kent are the 
 names of Celtic tribes. 
 
 Such are a few of the many lessons that we read in the 
 geographical names of the Old World. We shall now study 
 some of the similar lessons written on the map of the New 
 World.
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 
 
 References. 1. Discovery and early Exploration. Bancroft's, 
 Hildreth's, and Bryant and Gay's Histories; Winsor: Narrative and 
 Critical History of America (II., III., IV.), Christopher Columbus 
 (IX.-XIX., Appendix, The Geographical Results) ; Fiske : The Dis- 
 covery of America (V., VI., VII., XII.) ; Scaife : America, Its Geo- 
 graphical History, 1492-1892 ; Parkman : The Pioneers of France 
 in the New World. 
 
 2. Interior and Western Exploration. Winsor, as above ; Park- 
 man : Series entitled France and England in North America ; J. D. 
 Whitney : The United States (Appendix, A, B). 
 
 3. Maps. MacCoun: The Historical Geography of the United 
 States, Historical Charts of the United States ; Hart : The Epoch 
 Maps ; also the maps in Winsor. 
 
 4. Miscellaneous. Lodge : A Short History of the English Colo- 
 nies ; Poore : The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, 
 etc. ; Taylor : Names and Places ; Coxe : The Forum, IV., 67 (Amer- 
 ican Geographical Names) ; Redway : Manual of Geography ; C. 
 Blackie : Etymological Geography. 
 
 IN some respects the historical geography of the New 
 World is even more interesting than that of the Old. 
 It abounds in examples of the enlargement, the shrinking 
 up, the transference, and the disappearance of names. It 
 presents to us aboriginal names in competition with names 
 given by discoverers and explorers, and names of the second 
 class in competition with one another. We meet a multi- 
 tude of names brought over from Europe. What is more, 
 the whole process goes on in the open light of history as it
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 175 
 
 were, under our own eyes a fact that often makes the les- 
 son more definite and precise. 
 
 The first lesson that we read in the historical geography 
 of the New World is the history of a great man's blunder. 
 When Columbus sailed from Palos on his first voyage of 
 discovery, he expected to land in Cathay, or China, which 
 had been made known to the people of Europe by Marco 
 Polo and other travelers. Strong as was his belief that he 
 should make such a landfall, he found nothing in the 
 islands which he discovered corresponding to the glowing 
 accounts of Cathay that he had received. Hence he con- 
 cluded that he had come upon some of the islands that Mar- 
 co had described as lying off the eastern coast of Asia, and 
 so that he was within the magic circle of India. For ex- 
 ample, he identified Hayti as Cipango, or Japan. He there- 
 fore reported on his return to Spain that he had found the 
 Indias, and, of course, the Indians. In his three subsequent 
 voyages he interpreted everything that he -discovered in the 
 light of his original prepossession. He believed that Cuba 
 and the South American coast were parts of the mainland 
 of Asia ; and although he was twice on the shore of the 
 new continent, and followed it for some distance in both in- 
 stances, he never entertained the idea that he had found a 
 new world. He said, not long before his death, that if any 
 man did not give him credit for having discovered the re- 
 maining parts of Asia, it must spring from personal hostil- 
 ity. His report was implicitly accepted by the Spanish 
 Government, which proceeded in due time to organize the 
 famous Council for the Indies. The example that the Span- 
 iards thus set was generally followed. Columbus's geo- 
 graphical errors were in due time corrected, but the correc- 
 tion did not prevent the names Indies and Indians from at- 
 taching themselves firmly to the New World. The islands 
 among which he made his first discoveries are still known 
 as Indies, the prefix West having been given them to 
 distinguish them from the Indies proper, or, as they are now 
 called, the East Indies. All things considered, it is perhaps
 
 It 6 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 strange that the whole New World was not similarly 
 named ; at least, The Indies is the Spanish official designa- 
 tion of America to this day. But while the name that Co- 
 lumhus applied to the new countries is now used only in a 
 restricted sense, the name that he applied to the people is 
 used in a general sense. The native races of America are 
 known as the Indians, or the American Indians, to distin- 
 guish them from the Asiatic or original Indians. As a re- 
 sult, wherever the word " Indian " is used as a local name, 
 either by itself or in combination, we have a memorial of 
 the erroneous theory that lay in the mind of Columbus 
 when he sailed from Palos, and of the practical mistakes 
 that he committed afterward, and in which he persisted to 
 his death.* 
 
 A thousand times has the failure to call by his name the 
 world to which Columbus piloted the way been declared a 
 grievous wrong. Had such a suggestion been made to him, 
 he would have repelled it with passionate warmth. He had 
 brooded on Asia, he sailed for Asia, his great plans turned 
 on Asia, and it was Asia that he had found. To listen to 
 anything else would have been treason to the passion of his 
 life. He had sought what he did not find ; he had found 
 what he did not seek. We know that his failure was a far 
 grander triumph than his success could have been, but this 
 thought lay below the horizon of his day. But we must not 
 think Columbus blinder than others. Asia had completely 
 enthralled the men of that age, and they could see no other 
 vision when they looked into the West. History is full of 
 
 * Dr. George E. Ellis says : " It is to be noted, however, that the French, 
 who so soon after followed the Spaniards by voyages to the southern and 
 northern lands on the mainland of our domain, did not adopt or use the 
 word ' Indians ' as a name for the aborigines. I do not recall a single case 
 of its use by any of the French explorers. They uniformly spoke and 
 wrote of the natives as ' les sauvages ' the savages. Occasionally a reference 
 may be found in which a French writer will use the expression, ' the In- 
 dians, as the English call the savages.'" The Red Man and the White 
 Man, p. 8.
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 
 
 examples, including both the Cabots and explorers as late 
 as John Smith, Henry Hudson, and La Salle. John Cabot 
 thought that he had landed in the territory of the Grand 
 Khan when he made his landfall in the region of the St. 
 Lawrence. Thoroughly to cast Asia out of the .map of the 
 Western Hemisphere was the work of two hundred years. 
 
 Americus Vespucius was long supposed to have robbed 
 Columbus of the honor that was his due. This is now 
 known to be a baseless charge. Without attempting to 
 guess the Vespucian riddle, which is, perhaps, the most per- 
 plexing in the history of Western exploration, the main 
 facts in relation to the baptism of the New World may be 
 stated. 
 
 In April or May, 1503, Vespucius wrote a letter to Loren- 
 zo de Medici, giving an account of his voyage in 1501-'2, the 
 so-called third of the Vespucian voyages, in which he had 
 followed the South American coast far to the south of Cape 
 San Koque. He thought it proper to call this coast a new 
 world. The translator of a Latin version of this letter that 
 appeared at the beginning of the next year made these 
 words the title of his little pamphlet, Mundus Novus. Nu- 
 merous editions of this tract were published in different 
 languages, and among others the Latin edition referred to 
 at Strasburg, in 1505. In September, 1504, Vespucius wrote 
 a letter to Soderini, a magistrate of Florence and an old 
 schoolfellow, in which he gave a rough outline of his four 
 voyages. This letter was published in Florence, July, 1506. 
 
 At this time there was a small group of scholars, some- 
 times called an academy or college, clustered around a print- 
 ing press in Saint Die, in the Vosges Mountains. While 
 these scholars were employed upon a new edition of Ptol- 
 emy's Geography, there was brought to them a French copy 
 of Vespucius's letter to Soderini, which was handed over to 
 Martin Waldseemiiller and Matthias Ringman, who were 
 more especially charged with the work, to be used as mate- 
 rial. Ringman was the man who had brought out the Stras- 
 burg edition of the letter to Lorenzo, and was therefore
 
 178 flow T0 STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 already familiar with the idea of a new world. Too impa- 
 tient to await the tardy appearance of the Ptolemy, the two 
 scholars executed a work named Cosmographiae Introductio. 
 This work, consisting of fifty-two leaves, contained a simple 
 treatise on cosmography and the full text of the letter to 
 Soderini. The last chapter of the original part of the work, 
 following descriptions of Asia, Europe, and Africa as the 
 three grand divisions of the earth, as taught by Ptolemy, 
 contained this pregnant sentence : 
 
 "But now these parts have been more extensively ex- 
 plored, and another fourth part has been discovered by 
 Americus Vespucius. as will appear in what follows : where- 
 fore I do not see what is rightly to hinder us from calling it 
 Amerige or America, i. e., the land of Americus, after its 
 discoverer Americus, a man of sagacious mind, since both 
 Europe and Asia have got their names from women." 
 
 The Cosmographiae Introductio was published in 1507, 
 and attained a considerable circulation. Its principal au- 
 thor, Waldseemiiller, baptized America. We must not sup- 
 pose that the Saint Die scholar dreamed of what he was do- 
 ing. He intended merely to call a part of the country that 
 we know as Brazil, America. The name was soon expanded. 
 On John Ruysch's map of 1508, so much of South America 
 as appears is called Terra Sanctae Crucis, sive Mundus Novus, 
 while the discoveries that had already been made in the 
 north are represented as appendages of Asia. On the map 
 assigned to Leonardo da Vinci (about 1514) America takes 
 the place of this double designation, and on Mercator's Pro- 
 jection (1541) Labrador, Nova Scotia, Florida, Mexico, and 
 Mundus Novus are connected by continuous though very 
 inaccurate coast lines, making a continent wholly distinct 
 and separate from Asia, while, as if to solemnize the mar- 
 riage, the first three letters of the name AMERICA, now 
 given to the whole continent, are placed above the site of 
 Lake Superior, and the last four west of the River Plate. 
 
 Still Columbus's name has been many times impressed 
 on the map of the New World ; witness the United States of
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 179 
 
 Colombia, the District of Columbia, the capitals of South 
 Carolina and Ohio, the great river of Oregon, and the minor 
 Columbuses and Columbias scattered over our land. Then 
 the poetic name sometimes given to America, but com- 
 monly to the United States, should not be forgotten. Its 
 earliest use in literature, in the more limited sense, is said 
 to be in Dr. Dwight's song : 
 
 Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, 
 
 The queen of the world and the child of the skies. 
 
 The land that Vespucius called Novus Mundus and Wald- 
 seem tiller America, was first called Sancta Cruz, and after- 
 ward Terra Sanctae Crucis. America was soon used for a 
 general purpose, while the earlier names gave way to Bra- 
 zil, a name given to the country because it produced Brazil 
 wood, a highly prized dye stuff, so called on account of its 
 color braza, a live coal or glowing fire. The same name, 
 variously spelled, had before been applied to a mythical 
 island lying in the Atlantic. Mr. Scaife says the name had 
 "a will-o'-the wisp character," since it designated various 
 bodies of land on different maps, as an anarctic continent 
 extending to the south pole, as well as the island of Brazil, 
 which the map-makers moved about to suit themselves. 
 The mythical geography of the Atlantic Ocean contributed 
 another notable name to American history. Antillia, or 
 Isle of Seven Cities, one of the most persistent of the imagi- 
 nary islands, was supposed to lie in mid-ocean on the road 
 to Cathay. Toscanelli, who figured it on his celebrated map, 
 told Columbus that it would be a convenient halfway house 
 on his great voyage to the Indies. Early in the sixteenth 
 century the name was given to the groups of islands that 
 still bear it the Greater and the Lesser Antilles. 
 
 India and Indian are not the only American names that 
 commemorate blunders. The body of water called Eio Ja- 
 neiro is a bay, and not a river ; the Rio de la Plata is not a 
 river of silver. The name of the greatest river on the globe 
 was given to it in the belief that its banks were inhabited by
 
 180 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 a tribe of female warriors, and so it keeps alive the Amazons 
 who figure in ancient story. On the St. Lawrence, not far 
 above Montreal, the village of Lachine stands at the foot of 
 the rapids of the same name. Mr. Parkman quotes an old 
 French authority, who says that the name was given to the 
 place in 1669 by some of La Salle's men, who refused longer 
 to follow him, in derision of the adventurer's dream of a 
 westward passage to China. Another account is that La 
 Salle himself gave the name, in token of his early faith that 
 he could reach China by the way of the St. Lawrence. 
 Mention may also be made of the coast that was early called 
 Tierra del Labrador, cultivable land, to distinguish the re- 
 gion, it is said, from Greenland. 
 
 Two nations that shared in the division of America wrote 
 their religious creeds on the maps of the regions that they 
 visited and for a time controlled. For example, we find in 
 Canada, the Lake region, and the Mississippi Valley many 
 rivers named for saints : the St. Croix, the St. Johns, the St. 
 Lawrence, the St. Francis, the St. Charles, St. Maurice, St. 
 Claire, St. Joseph, St. Louis, and many others. In Florida. 
 the St. Marys and the St. Johns are found. Between Nova 
 Scotia and Florida, with a single exception, I recall no river 
 that bears the name of a saint. The French who named 
 the rivers of the North and West, and the Spaniards who 
 named those of the South, were Catholics, while the Eng- 
 lish who occupied the middle region were Protestants. The 
 exception proves the rule it is the St. Marys of Maryland, 
 a Catholic colony. The geographical distribution of towns 
 and cities bearing the prefix u St.," " San," or " Santa," is also 
 well worth observing. In fact, from the day that Columbus 
 called Guanahani San Salvador, the Spaniards, Portuguese, 
 and French gave full proof of their piety by drawing heavily 
 upon the saints' calendar and the list of holy days to mark 
 their discoveries. 
 
 A small island off the western coast of Newfoundland 
 is called Baccalaos. This word is extensively used in south, 
 ern Europe as a name for codfish. It has the same mean-
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 181 
 
 ing as stock-fish, so called because this fish was commonly 
 stuck on a stock or stick to be cured. Baccalaos, variously 
 spelled, is found on many of the maps of the early discover- 
 ers on the eastern coast of North America. Sometimes it is 
 the name of an island, sometimes of an extensive region on 
 the mainland, sometimes it comprehends Newfoundland, 
 Labrador, and Nova Scotia. Who first used the name can 
 not be ascertained, but the causes that led to its use are 
 clear enough. At that time, when all Christians were Catho- 
 lics and the Catholic festivals were universally observed, 
 fish were a very important article of food and fishing a very 
 important industry ; and it was 'but natural that the name 
 41 codfish land " should be given to the region where, as the 
 Cabots said, these fish almost crowded one another out of the 
 water. 
 
 A full list of names once placed on maps of America 
 that did not remain there would be a long one. Peru was 
 called New Castile. Sir Francis Drake, on his voyage 
 around the world in 1577 -'80, visited the western shore of 
 the United States, took possession of it in the name of Queen 
 Elizabeth, and named it Nova Albion. The same name was 
 given to New Jersey, when it was patented to Edward Plow- 
 den in 1634. Around few of our lost names does more ro- 
 mance cluster than around Norumbega. This name, vari- 
 ously spelled, is found on many early maps, sometimes des- 
 ignating an island off the coast south of the Gulf of St. Law- 
 rence, and sometimes a part of the mainland. We read 
 also of a river and city bearing the same name ; the river is 
 supposed to have been the Penobscot, the city was never 
 found. In the day when the discovery of gold was an al- 
 most universal passion, when fancy was quick and men 
 were credulous, it was not strange that crazy adventurers, 
 misinterpreting what the Indians told them, should invent 
 an El Dorado ; while of all possible regions the vast wilds 
 of the Orinoco or the Amazon were the most favorable for 
 its location. On no other subject did the Spaniards so oft- 
 en misunderstand the Indians as in relation to the precious
 
 182 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 metals. Efforts to find the gold and silver of Manoa, culmi- 
 nating in those made by Sir Walter Raleigh at the beginning 
 of the seventeenth century, yield to few adventures in respect 
 to romance and peril, and to none in respect to the disap- 
 pointments with which they were crowned. The fictions 
 of the El Dorado and of the Amazons Originated at the same 
 time. Basing her claim upon Verrazzano's voyage of 1534, 
 France at one time claimed the eastern sea front of the 
 United States, and her attempt to colonize and hold the 
 southern portion of it led to some of the most tragical 
 events in colonial history. Two important marks of 
 that temporary occupation still remain, the names Port 
 Royal and Carolina, the second of which was given 
 for Charles IX of France. In accordance with the 
 same claim, Henry IV gave the region bounded on the 
 south by the fortieth parallel, and on the north by the 
 forty-sixth parallel, to De Monts, the charter bearing the 
 date 1603. The king imposed upon the grant the name 
 Acadia. The establishment of the English colonies and 
 other causes soon limited the name to the peninsula that 
 the English afterward named Nova Scotia. Acadia has 
 disappeared from the map, but will long live in history, 
 and in tale and story. 
 
 California is perhaps the most romantic of all our Ameri- 
 can names. In 1862 Dr. E. E. Hale found the name in a 
 Spanish romance that appeared in 1510, entitled The Deeds 
 of Esplandian. In this romance this bit of description is 
 met with : 
 
 Know, then, that on the right hand of the Indies there is an island 
 called California, very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise, 
 and it was peopled by black women, without any men among them, 
 for they lived in the fashion of Amazons. They were of strong and 
 hearty bodies, of ardent courage and great force. Their island was 
 the strongest in all the world, with its steep cliffs and rocky shores. 
 Their arms were all of gold, and so was the harness of the wild 
 beasts which they tamed and rode. For in the whole island there 
 was no metal but gold. They lived in caves wrought out of the
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 183 
 
 rock with much labor. They had many ships with which they 
 sailed out to other countries to obtain booty.* 
 
 The connection between this romance and the western side 
 of our continent has not been very clearly made out. Dr. 
 Hale thought the name struck the fancy of Cortez as an 
 omen of wealth, and that he made the application in 1530 ; 
 as a Western person now gives the name of Eden to his new 
 home, so Cortez called his new discovery California. This 
 is probable enough as to the process, but doubtful as to the 
 man and the time. The name is a striking one, derived per- 
 haps from the Eastern title caliph, and it does not require 
 much ingenuity to see how such adventurers as the Span- 
 iards should have borrowed it from the romance, f Certain 
 it is that the name became greatly expanded ; there came to 
 be an Upper and a Lower California, the first of which is 
 now the State of that name, while the second is still a prov- 
 ince of Mexico. For many years following the discovery 
 of gold California was often called El Dorado : this was 
 because that golden name had come to be a synonym for a 
 place where it was believed wealth could be rapidly accumu- 
 lated. 
 
 Of the familiar process of name expansion the New 
 World offers some good examples. America and Brazil 
 have already been mentioned. When the Spaniards in- 
 vaded the country of Montezuma they found that his capi- 
 tal and the district surrounding it were called Mexico, a 
 name derived from the Aztec war god. This name the 
 Spaniards gave to the whole country, and afterwai-d to a 
 large share of Spanish North America. The first use of 
 Canada, as well as its origin, is disputed ; some writers de- 
 rive it from a Latin root, some say it is a native word ; some 
 hold that it was first a generic name, and some that it was a 
 local name ; the probability is that the name is Indian, 
 meaning a village or collection of huts, and that the early 
 
 * The Atlantic Monthly, vol. xiii, p. 267. 
 
 t See Winsor : Narrative and Critical History, vol. ii, p. 443. .
 
 184 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 French explorers, meeting it for the first time on the lower 
 St. Lawrence, mistook it for the name of a region or dis- 
 trict. No one claims that the Indians, or even the French, 
 ever used it in its present greatly enlarged signification. 
 
 In 1513, Ponce de Leon, while in search of the fountain of 
 youth; as the story runs, discovered the southern peninsula 
 in which the Atlantic coast terminates, and named it Florida, 
 because he first saw the shore on Pascua Florida, or flowery 
 Sunday, as the Spaniards call Easter. This name the Span- 
 iards extended until " it comprehended," says Mr. Parkman, 
 "the whole country extending from the Atlantic on the 
 east to the longitude of New Mexico on the west, and from 
 the Gulf of Mexico and Kiver of Palms indefinitely north- 
 ward toward the frozen sea." The same writer tells us fur- 
 ther that a map of the time of Henry n of France names 
 all North America Terra Florida. France and England 
 laid claim to large parts of this territory. France finally 
 withdrew her claim in the South, leaving the other two 
 powers to settle their dispute. England founded the colo- 
 nies of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia in spite of the 
 opposition of Spain. The Spanish claim, and so Florida 
 itself, was more and more hemmed in ; but no final bound- 
 ary had been agreed upon down to the time that Florida 
 was ceded to England, in 1763. Long before this time the 
 founding of Louisiana by the French had cut Florida short 
 on the west, at the Mobile River. The King of England, 
 the very year of the cession, made the St. Marys River and 
 the thirty-first parallel the northern boundary of the prov- 
 ince. Passing by the later disputes over its boundaries, we 
 may say that Florida came to the United States in 1819 
 with the limits just named, and that it was afterward some- 
 what reduced in order to widen Alabama's front on the Gulf 
 of Mexico. 
 
 The first Louisiana was the Mississippi Valley, together 
 with the country east and west draining to the Gulf of 
 Mexico from the Mobile to the Rio Grande. The sec- 
 ond Louisiana was the western half of the valley and the
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 185 
 
 island of New Orleans. This was the Louisiana purchase of 
 1803. In 1804 Congress organized that part of the purchase 
 lying south of parallel 33 into the Territory of Orleans, and 
 the next year the part lying north of the same line into the 
 Territory of Louisiana. This state of things continued 
 until 1812, when the Territory of Orleans, with some minor 
 changes of boundaries, became the State of Louisiana, and 
 the Territory of Louisiana took the name of Missouri. 
 
 In choosing names of discoverers and explorers for geo- 
 graphical purposes, the Muse of History acted a capricious 
 part. Her treatment of Columbus and Vespucius has al- 
 ready been described. Neither of the two Cabots nor John 
 Smith was in any way recognized. Raleigh lives in the 
 capital of North Carolina. Hudson is commemorated by 
 the river, the strait, and the bay that bear his name. Cham- 
 plain gave his name to the lake that he discovered in 1609, 
 La Salle and Joliet are names of Illinois cities, Marquette 
 the name of a Michigan city, while Hennepin is the name 
 of a projected canal ; but neither Verrazano nor Cartier 
 has been similarly honored. In the far North, where com- 
 petition for territory was less eager, it is somewhat dif- 
 ferent ; here we meet the names of Frobisher, Davis, Baffin, 
 and Smith. The great Spanish discoverers and conquerors 
 fared still worse than the Englishmen and Frenchmen ; the 
 names of Ponce de Leon, De Soto, Cortes, Coronado are 
 unknown to the maps unless in humble capacities. In later 
 times it has been much as it was in the beginning : Mac- 
 kenzie, Lewis, Clark, Pike, Long, Fremont, are familiar 
 names of mountains or rivers ; but we search in vain for 
 any token of the brothers La Verendrye, who discovered the 
 Rocky Mountains ; of Gray, who first sailed into the mouth 
 of the Columbia ; or of Bonneville, who first explored the 
 Great Basin. 
 
 A glance at a map of the New World would teach any 
 
 student, independently of other evidence, that it had been in 
 
 possession of a native race or races before the arrival of the 
 
 European colonists. There is no mistaking an aboriginal 
 
 14
 
 186 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 name for a European one. The Indian names that remain 
 throw light upon the distribution and relationships of the 
 native tribes, upon their habits of mind, and the scope of 
 their geographical ideas. They illustrate the tendency to 
 name an object with reference to some striking quality or 
 feature. Minnehaha is laughing water ; Sandusky, cold 
 spring ; Michilimackinac, great-turtle place. The Indians 
 of the north, at least, were deficient in general names, as of 
 regions and districts ; even our States that bear Indian 
 names have borrowed them from local features, as the name 
 of a river or of an Indian tribe. As in Europe, the most 
 persistent names are those of rivers. A large majority of 
 the important rivers of the United States bear Indian names, 
 and particularly those of the West, some of which have 
 survived a close competition with one or more European 
 names. The Spaniards first called the Mississippi the river 
 of the Holy Spirit ; Marquette called it the Immaculate 
 Conception, and La Salle the Colbert ; the Iroquois called 
 it the Ohio ; but the proper Algonquin name, Mississippi, 
 meaning " much water " or " many waters," was the fittest, 
 if survival is a test of fitness. The French called the Ohio 
 both the St. Louis and the La Belle Riviere, but here again 
 the native name triumphed. Cartier adopted the Indian 
 name Hochelaga for the great river of the north, but St. 
 Lawrence, the name that he had given to the gulf, unfortu- 
 nately superseded it. The same river is called the Iroquois 
 and the Cataraqui in many old historical documents. 
 
 It is a significant fact that, relatively, a much larger num- 
 ber of native names has been preserved in the West than in 
 the East. Only two of the fifteen Atlantic States bear such 
 names, while only five of the twenty-nine other States bear 
 European names. Something the same is true also of rivers 
 and other natural features of the country. White men sud- 
 denly introduced to the Atlantic slope tended to use Euro- 
 pean names ; while in the West, where they became ac- 
 quainted with the country gradually, they tended to use a 
 larger number of the native names.
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 187 
 
 The nations colonizing America wou]d naturally want 
 names for their new possessions, and just as naturally they 
 would tend to name them after the old countries. Spain 
 was content with The Indies as a general name ; but she 
 called her vast dominions in North America, exclusive of 
 Florida, New Spain, a name that remained on the map until 
 those dominions became independent. On Franquelin's map, 
 such of Louis XIV's American dominions as drained to the 
 Atlantic, the St. Lawrence, and the Great Lakes are called 
 New France ; such of them as drained to the Gulf of Mexico, 
 Louisiana. At a later day New France included both of 
 these two great divisions, while the divisions themselves 
 were called Louisiana and Canada.* The Swedes called 
 their colony on the Delaware New Sweden, and the Dutch 
 their more vigorous plantings New Netherlands. New Eng- 
 land was never used in a general sense. In one respect 
 England's possessions in North America were peculiar ; 
 they never had any proper general name. The nearest ap- 
 proach to it was Virginia. 
 
 The Cabots did not name the coasts visited by them in 
 1497-'98, that England afterward claimed by right of their 
 discoveries. The charter granted to Sir Walter Ealeigh in 
 1584 neither named nor described any region that he was 
 authorized to colonize. Raleigh proposed to call the country 
 to which he sent his ships Virginia, in honor of the Virgin 
 Queen, and Elizabeth promptly approved the suggestion. 
 The charter of 1606, that created the London and Plym- 
 outh Companies, authorized the planting of two colonies 
 in that part of America commonly called Virginia, and 
 other parts and territories lying between 34 and 45 north 
 latitude. The charter of 1609 to the London Company 
 
 * " According to Ortilius, New France comprises the whole of both North 
 and South America ; so also in the Speculum Orbis Terrarum of Cornelius, 
 1593. The application of this name dated back to a period immediately 
 after the voyage of Verrazzano, and the Dutch geographers are especially 
 free in their use of it, out of spite of the Spaniards." Parkman : Pioneers 
 of France in the New World, p. 184-
 
 188 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 bounded Virginia on the south by a latitudinal line drawn 
 through a point two hundred miles south of Old Point Com- 
 fort, and north by a west and northwest line drawn through 
 a point the same distance from the same starting place, 
 "throughout from sea to sea." The charter of 1611-'12 
 made the Bermudas a part of Virginia. 
 
 These vast limits were invaded on every side. The Mary- 
 land and Pennsylvania charters, 1632 and 1681, with the 
 subsequent settlements, limited the colony on the north by 
 the Potomac River and Mason and Dixon's line ; the Caro- 
 lina charter of 1665, limited it on the south by the parallel 
 86 30'. The treaties made in 1763, at the close of the French 
 and Indian War, bounded the English colonies on the west, 
 Virginia included, by the Mississippi River. At the close 
 of the Revolution Virginia claimed on the parallel 36 30' to 
 the Mississippi, and northwest of the Ohio to the Great Lakes 
 and the same river. In 1784 she surrendered to the National 
 Government her claim to the Old Northwest, and in 1792 
 she consented to the admission of Kentucky to the Union as 
 an independent State. The Civil War still further limited 
 the State of Virginia by the creation of West Virginia. 
 
 In 1608 Captain John Smith explored more fully than 
 had yet been done the coast of northern Virginia beyond 
 Cape Cod, mapped it, and named it New England. The 
 charter of 1620 confirmed to the Plymouth Company all that 
 part of America lying between the fortieth and the forty- 
 eighth parallels of north latitude, " throughout all the main- 
 lands from sea to sea," King James at the same time declar- 
 ing it to be his will and pleasure that the same should 
 henceforth be called by the name of New England in 
 America. This great domain was cut short in the north by 
 the French claims and settlements, and on the west and 
 southwest by the operations of the Dutch on the Hudson 
 and the creation of the group of middle colonies. 
 
 At first Englishmen called the new English communities 
 beyond the Atlantic The Colonies, or The Plantations, and 
 afterward, when circumstances required more precision,
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 
 
 The Thirteen Colonies, or The American Colonies. When 
 these communities became independent, and assumed a sepa- 
 rate station among the nations of the earth, they took the 
 name The United States of America. It has often been 
 proposed that this designation, which is rather a description 
 than a name, should be dropped, and a real name, as " Co- 
 lumbia," u Appalachia," or " Alleghania," should be adopted 
 in its stead. 
 
 There is not a State in the Union a good map of which 
 will not teach some valuable historical lessons. The shower 
 of classical names on the map of Central New York does not 
 point to a Roman or Greek occupation of that State, but it 
 certainly was not an accident. The large number of places 
 in Virginia marked " C. H.," with the name of the county 
 preceding the letters, as Hanover Court House, Fairfax 
 Court House, Cumberland Court House, etc., point plainly 
 enough to the infrequency of towns that was so character- 
 istic of that State in early times.* The names of Gallia 
 County and Gallipolis, Ohio, testify to the French emigra- 
 tion that the Scioto Company, under the lead of Joel Barlow, 
 brought to the banks of the Ohio. Cincinnati was named 
 for the famous Revolutionary society of the Cincinnati, and 
 points us back to the Roman dictator. The map of Michigan 
 bears impartial testimony to the presence of the races and 
 nationalities that have dominated the two peninsulas, the 
 Indian, the French, and the Anglo-American. In the south- 
 central and southwestern portions of the State many coun- 
 ties are known by the names of President Jackson and lead- 
 ing Democratic statesmen of his time Calhoun, Van Buren, 
 
 * " One great element of modern life was wholly wanting. There were 
 practically no towns and no centers of population. The people were widely 
 scattered over the whole face of the country. . . . These [county] towns, 
 planted in many cases in the midst of the forest, usually consisted of the 
 courthouse, the prison, and its accompaniments of stocks, pillory, whip- 
 ping post, and ducking stool, with one miserable inn, where the judges 
 lodged when they came to hold court." Lodge : A Short History of tltt 
 English Colonies in America, pp. 50, 52.
 
 190 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Cass, Livingston, Berrien, Branch, Eaton, and Barry. Not a 
 single Whig statesman has been similarly honored. The 
 explanation is that the State came into the Union under 
 Democratic auspices, in 1837, and was itself strongly Demo- 
 cratic in politics at the time when this portion of the State 
 was settled. 
 
 Why some names survive and others perish, is a curious 
 question. Professor E. G. Bourne draws attention to the 
 fact that Waldseemuller really proposed two names for the 
 Novus Mundus of Vespucius Amerige, composed of the 
 Greek ge and a shortened genitive of Americus, and a femi- 
 nine form of Americus; and he thinks the second one was 
 adopted rather than the first because it is simpler and more 
 euphonious.* No doubt the superior fitness or convenience 
 of one name rather than another was often a decisive factor. 
 Political causes also had much to do with the matter. The 
 triumph of England over France effaced New France and 
 Acadia from the map, while the independence of Mexico 
 abolished New Spain. 
 
 Still closer attention may be drawn to the relations ex- 
 isting between names and nationalities. The traces of the 
 French in South Carolina, on Lake Champlain, in the West, 
 and on the northern New England shore are too obvious to 
 be mistaken. It is not necessary to read history to learn that 
 the Dutch, the first of Europeans, occupied the Hudson and 
 Mohawk Valleys, New York Bay, and parts of New Jersey. 
 At the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning 
 of the succeeding one, thousands of Scotch-Irish flocked to 
 America ; and their names may be found scattered along 
 our great Eastern mountain system from Londonderry in 
 New Hampshire to the far South. Holland, and several 
 other names of Netherland provinces found on the western 
 shore of the lower Michigan peninsula, enable us to locate 
 a large Dutch emigration. Historical geography teaches us 
 that a large part of the United States once belonged to 
 
 * The Nation, No. 1423.
 
 HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE NEW WORLD. 191 
 
 Spain ; for example, little learning is required to distin- 
 guish between the river names of Texas or California and 
 those of the Atlantic slope. 
 
 One of the most important lessons read in our historical 
 geography is the great number of Old World names found 
 on our maps. These names teach us how much easier it is 
 to borrow an old name than to make a new one. They es- 
 tablish lines of race descent and of historical connection. 
 They speak of the emigrant's fondness for the places and 
 scenes and men that he has left behind him. Very often 
 we find a name that has been many times repeated ; perhaps 
 it was first used in Massachusetts, then transported to West- 
 ern New York or to Ohio, next to Wisconsin or Iowa, and 
 finally to the Pacific slope. The emigration that has made 
 the last transfer looks back to its previous home, as the Eng- 
 lish emigrants to Massachusetts or Virginia looked back to 
 the mother country. All the nationalities that have con- 
 tributed to our mixed population have also contributed to 
 our store of geographical names.
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 
 
 References. Reclus : The Earth and its Inhabitants (The United 
 States), also other works previously mentioned ; Guyot : Earth and 
 Man ; Whitney : The United States. Facts and Figures Illustrat- 
 ing the Physical Geography of the Country and its Material Re- 
 sources; Shaler: Previous references; Ganett: A Dictionary of 
 Altitudes in the United States ; Doyle : The History of the United 
 States, Chap. L, The English Colonies in America, L, The Puritan 
 Colonies, II., Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas ; Count of Paris : 
 History of the Civil War in America (Vol. III., Chap. I., Rivers and 
 Railways) ; Draper : History of the American Civil War, Thoughts 
 on the Future Civil Polity of America (I., On the Influence of Cli- 
 mate); Thwaites, Hart, and Wilson: Epoch Series of American 
 History: MacCoun : Historical Geography of the United States, 
 Historical Charts of the United States. 
 
 THE teacher of history should form in his mind an out- 
 line map of the theater with which he deals, an outline at 
 once strong and bold, and also sufficiently detailed to hold 
 the larger historical facts. This map will be larger or 
 smaller according to the breadth of the field that he is cov- 
 ering. If he is treating the civil war in England, a map 
 of Great Britain suffices ; but if he is following the career 
 of Napoleon, his survey must practically embrace all Eu- 
 rope. The teacher of the history of the United States will 
 find it necessary to work out such a map of North America. 
 Moreover, no small part of .his task will be to develop simi- 
 lar maps in the minds of his pupils, and to show them how 
 to organize their historical material with reference to them.
 
 NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 193 
 
 As an aid to teachers who are seeking to do this work, as 
 well as a preparation for several chapters that are to follow, 
 a mental sketch map of our continent is submitted. 
 
 In form North America hears a general likeness to a tri- 
 angle. Its sides are formed by the shore lines of the three 
 oceans that inclose it. In size it is the third of the conti- 
 nents, containing a little less than 8,000,000 square miles 
 (7,952,386 square miles, including the West Indies). 
 
 The eastern north-and-south trending ranges of the Cor- 
 dilleran Mountain system form the primary geographical 
 axis of the continent, and divide it into two very different 
 but not very unequal parts. 
 
 The western division, consisting of a vast complex of 
 mountain ranges and peaks, valleys, basins, slopes, and pla- 
 teaus, is sometimes called the Pacific Highlands, sometimes 
 the Cordilleran System, and again the Cordilleran Region. 
 This region is very complicated in geographical structure, 
 even that part of it which falls within the United States be- 
 ing divided into six several parts : 1, The Rocky Mountains ; 
 2, The Great Basin and the Basin ranges ; 3, The Northern 
 or Columbian Plateau ; 4, The Southern or Colorado Pla- 
 teau ; 5, The Sierra and Cascade ranges ; 6, The Pacific 
 Coast ranges. While we are not called upon to describe 
 these one by one, some of the more general features of the 
 region should be worked out. 
 
 The first fact to invite our attention is the high elevation 
 which the Pacific Highlands reach. In the United States 
 alone there are numerous mountain peaks that attain to 
 heights of more than fourteen thousand feet above the level 
 of the sea. These high altitudes, however, are much less 
 significant than the high average elevation of the whole 
 mass. If the continent were depressed about six thousand 
 feet or, what amounts to the same thing, if the sea were 
 raised by that amount while its whole eastern side would 
 disappear beneath the waves, on the western side, in Cen- 
 tral America, in Mexico, in the United States, and in the 
 British Possessions, not merely isolated mountain peaks, but
 
 194 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 extensive plateaus and valleys would still be above the sur- 
 face. 
 
 Railroads that cross mountains seek out the natural pass- 
 es or depressions. The Northern Pacific Railroad pierces 
 the divide of the Rocky Mountains, high up in William's 
 Pass, by a tunnel four-fifths of a mile long, at an elevation 
 of 5,548 feet. The Union Pacific Railroad, in South Pass, 
 attains an elevation of more than eight thousand feet. The 
 Central Pacific crosses the Sierra Nevada seven thousand 
 feet above the sea level. Ogden, where the Union Pacific 
 and the Central Pacific effect their junction, is forty-three 
 hundred feet, or about the level of Salt Lake. 
 
 Another feature is the shore line ; north of Puget Sound 
 this is irregular, but not deeply indented; south of the sound 
 it is so remarkably regular that one rarely finds an extend- 
 ed coast that conforms more closely to a series of straight 
 lines drawn from headland to headland. There are but two 
 or three good harbors within the limits of the United States, 
 the best ones being formed by the bays of San Francisco 
 and San Diego. The rapid growth of San Francisco is 
 mainly owing to its having the finest harbor on the coast. 
 The mouth of the Columbia River is difficult of access, save 
 to steam vessels handled by skillful pilots. 
 
 Mention of the Columbia suggests another characteristic 
 feature ; but few rivers come down to the sea. There are 
 but two worthy of note in the United States the Columbia 
 and the Colorado and these are in no sense continental 
 streams. No river on that side opens a water-way to the 
 central part of the continent. 
 
 But the absence of continental rivers is not the only fact 
 that makes the continent difficult of approach on that side. 
 Starting from any point on the coast that one may choose, 
 he must cross parallel chains of lofty mountains before he 
 reaches the interior. Again, the slopes are abrupt some of 
 them very abrupt. The descent from the summit of the 
 Central Pacific Railroad on the sierra to the great valley of 
 California is greater than that from the South Pass to
 
 NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 195 
 
 Omaha, and is made in a much shorter distance. The loco- 
 motives that draw the heavily laden trains up the slopes of 
 the sierra labor as though they were things of life. 
 
 Putting all that has been said together, we see that the 
 western side of North America is geographically closed and 
 unsocial. It does not stretch out open hands to the Pacific 
 Ocean and the world beyond. Nor should we fail to observe 
 that, until we reach a high latitude, there are no islands off 
 the coast or near the coast that could allure the discoverer, 
 or give the colonist a basis of operations against the con- 
 tinent itself. The greatest of all the oceans rolls between 
 that shore and the ancient but stunted civilizations of the 
 opposing one. Fortunately, the continent did not invite the 
 Mongolian race. 
 
 Turning our backs upon the Pacific and facing the other 
 way, we soon discover that the eastern side of the continent 
 differs from, the western in every feature that has been men- 
 tioned. It is much simpler in structure. Not only are there 
 no mountain ranges or peaks to compare with those of the 
 Pacific Highlands, but the average elevation is low. We 
 face two sides of the triangle, which are broken, and often 
 deeply broken, by numerous indentations. Here we find 
 some of the grandest rivers in the world. And, finally, the 
 characteristic slopes are among the longest and gentlest with 
 which the geographer has to deal. But all these points 
 must be worked out in detail. 
 
 Parallel with the Atlantic shore, and not a great distance 
 from it, run the Appalachian Mountains from Point Gaspe 
 to Alabama. This system forms the secondary axis of the 
 continent. It consists of numerous chains or ridges, some 
 of them practically continuous, although separated by 
 transverse depressions, some of them parallel and separated 
 by intervening valleys. The highest summit in the North 
 is Mount Washington, 6,293 feet above the level of the sea; 
 in the South, Mitchell's High Peak, 6,688 feet. In structure, 
 this system of mountains is much the most complicated part 
 of eastern North America.
 
 196 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 To the east of the Appalachian Mountains lies the Atlan- 
 tic Slope or Plain, having an average width of not more than 
 two hundred miles, and descending gradually from the 
 mountain foothills to the shore. This slope is indented, 
 and sometimes cut almost wholly across by numerous bays, 
 sounds, and arms of the sea. It is also traversed by a multi- 
 tude of rivers that head in the mountains, a few of them 
 flowing east or south, but most of them following the gen- 
 eral line of the slope to the southeast. These ocean inden- 
 tations and rivers furnish numerous harbors many of 
 them excellent harbors and some of them also water trans- 
 portation almost to the very watersheds that supply them. 
 
 The Atlantic slope is singularly open and accessible from 
 the side of the sea ; but the mountains behind it, while of 
 low elevation as compared with those of the Pacific slope, 
 still form a mountain rampart that long opposed an effectual 
 obstacle to westward movements of population, and even to 
 discovery and exploration. 
 
 Between the Cordilleran and Appalachian systems of 
 mountains lies the Central Plain or middle region of the 
 continent. This plain extends from the Arctic Ocean to the 
 Gulf of Mexico, five thousand miles, and from east to west, 
 in the widest part, one half that distance. The numerous 
 inequalities that it presents, although some of them are 
 called mountains, are so slight in comparison with the size 
 of the region that we may well consider it as the third 
 primary unit of the continent, the Pacific Highlands and the 
 Atlantic Highlands being the other two. 
 
 The Central Plain is divided into three parts. The St. 
 Lawrence Valley and the Lake Basin, which together form 
 one of the three subdivisions, cuts the Appalachian system 
 and the Atlantic plain short on the north, and then, extend- 
 ing first southwest and then north and northwest, splits the 
 Central Plain one half in two. North of the watersheds of 
 the St. Lawrence River and of the Great Lakes, and of the 
 wavy slight elevation that extends westward to the Rocky 
 Mountains, is the Arctic Plain, sloping gradually down to
 
 NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 197 
 
 the Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay, and the Labrador coast. 
 South of the southern watersheds of the St. Lawrence, be- 
 ginning at a point in central New York, and of the eleva- 
 tion before referred to beyond the head of Lake Superior, 
 and of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi Valley slopes south- 
 ward to the Gulf of Mexico, by far the most important of 
 the subdivisions of the Central Plain. Perhaps the best way 
 to think of these three divisions is as continental drainage 
 basins. 
 
 The comparative sizes of the various physical divisions 
 of the United States are of much interest. The following 
 are the areas as given by Professor Whitney, to whom I am 
 much indebted for facts used in the preparation of this 
 chapter, Alaska not included : 
 
 square miles. 
 The Pacific slope and Great Basin . . 848,000 
 
 The Atlantic slope 277,000 
 
 The Lake Basin 175,000 
 
 The Mississippi Valley .... 1,240,000 
 Other Gulf of Mexico drainage . . 486,000 
 
 Total 3,018,000 
 
 The eastern side of North America lies open to the sea. 
 Three great water-ways pierce its center. 
 
 First may be mentioned Hudson Bay and the Nelson- 
 Winnipeg River system, which extends to the Rocky Moun- 
 tains and Height of Land. The great bay, discovered by 
 the man whose name it bears and whose life it cost, in the 
 days when men were searching for a northwest sea route to 
 the Indies, was once a bone of English and French conten- 
 tion ; but since it is closed to navigation the major part of 
 the year it has never acquired much historical importance. 
 Still it offers the shortest passage from the far Northwest to 
 the wharves of Liverpool, and the practicability of sending 
 the grain products of that extensive region by that passage 
 to the European markets is now under discussion. 
 
 Secondly, the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. This
 
 198 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 water-way played an important part in the early days of 
 discovery and exploration ; and it was the object of a much 
 fiercer contention between the great powers before mentioned 
 than the more northern one, almost from the beginning of 
 the French and English plantations down to 1763. In the 
 two struggles between the United States and England the 
 possession of the St. Lawrence has been vigorously attacked 
 by the first and stoutly defended by the second. The basin 
 that it drains is so large and so productive, and is so closely 
 connected with the surrounding areas, while the St. Law- 
 rence is itself such a noble river, that, as has been said, we 
 might expect to find it forming the grand avenue of com- 
 munication with the interior, and furnishing at or near its 
 mouth the metropolis of the continent, were it not that the 
 northeasterly trend of the river carries it into a region 
 beyond that of successful cultivation and populous settle- 
 ments, where navigation is suspended during a considerable 
 portion of the year. As it is, New York is found at the 
 opening of another inland commercial avenue. 
 
 Far in the south the Gulf of Mexico makes the largest 
 indentation found on the eastern side of the continent. This 
 not only gives to the United States a long sea boundary of a 
 thousand miles and more, but, what is of still greater impor- 
 tance, through the numerous rivers that flow into it, and par- 
 ticularly the Mississippi, makes the southern half of the Cen- 
 tral Plain as accessible by water as any similar area in the 
 world. The great extent of "the drainage of the territory 
 of the United States into the Gulf of Mexico naturally opens 
 the way to a recognition of the most important fact in the 
 topography of the country, namely, the existence of such an 
 orographic structure as compels the waters to concentrate 
 themselves into one great system of tributaries, coming in 
 from the east and the west, and uniting in a main north- 
 and-south channel." 
 
 We may now notice the elevations above the sea of a 
 few points lying in the Lake Basin and the Mississippi 
 Valley :
 
 NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 199 
 
 feet. 
 
 Lake Superior 602 
 
 Lake Erie 573 
 
 Lake Ontario . . . . . . . .247 
 
 Pittsburg 700 
 
 Lakeltasca 1,656 
 
 St. Paul 700 
 
 St. Louis 400 
 
 Cairo 300 
 
 From St. Paid to the Yellowstone River the elevation is 
 but two feet to the mile, and the Union Pacific Railroad 
 ascends the Platte by a gradient of five feet to the mile. 
 
 The Great Lakes call for more specific mention. A 
 writer has remarked that the term " Basin of the Lakes " is 
 a misnomer, for, like most fresh-water lakes, these bodies of 
 water occupy an elevated plateau the summit, in fact, of the 
 vast expanse of land which spreads out between the Alle- 
 ghanies and the Rocky Mountains. No large streams flow 
 into them, and they drain limited areas. On the contrary, 
 the Ohio, the Wabash, and other large tributaries of the 
 Mississippi have their sources within a few miles of the lake 
 borders, yet drain into the southern gulf ; while the great 
 rivers of British America, commencing near the lakes, have 
 their outlets in the northern seas. The magnificent St. 
 Lawrence alone, finding its supply in these sources, pursues 
 its eastward way to the Atlantic. The lakes cover a water 
 area of ninety-five thousand square miles, and drain one of 
 one hundred and fifty thousand. They make up the largest 
 system of deep-water inland navigation on the globe, and 
 contain more than one half of all its fresh-water surface. 
 How elevated is the region that they occupy, and how 
 low the surrounding watersheds, is shown by the channels 
 through which at different times they have discharged 
 their floods. Once there was an outlet from Lake Michigan 
 through the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf of 
 Mexico ; also one from Lake Erie to the Gulf by the Wa- 
 bash. Later there was an open drainage channel from Lake
 
 200 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Ontario through the Mohawk and the Hudson to New York 
 Bay, and still later an outlet from Lake Huron via Lake 
 Ni pissing, French Kiver, and the Ottawa to the St. Law- 
 rence. Once the Hudson, Lake Champlain, and the Riche- 
 lieu formed a continuous body of water. Geologically, it 
 is only in very recent times that the present outlet through 
 the Detroit River, the Niagara, and the St. Lawrence be- 
 came the sole channel of discharge of the northern waters. 
 
 Nature could hardly have furnished easier lines of com- 
 munication from any one of the three great drainage sec- 
 tions of the Central Plain to those adjoining, provided she 
 were to preserve their individuality at all. 
 
 From New York Bay northward to the St. Lawrence ex- 
 tends a strongly marked depression of surface that cuts the 
 Appalachian system asunder and separates New England 
 from the Middle States. In the southern half of this depres- 
 sion lies the Hudson River, with New York city at its ex- 
 tremity ; in. the northern half, the Richelieu-Champlain sys- 
 tem, with Montreal at its extremity ; the two separated and 
 connected by a narrow " divide," over which canal and rail- 
 road make their way with ease. The Hudson-Richelieu 
 Valley is the most noticeable feature in both the topography 
 and the history of the region. In the French wars, in the 
 Revolution, in the War of 1812, it was the theater of impor- 
 tant military operations, especially the northern half of it ; 
 and it is certain to become such a theater again if, unhappily, 
 the two powers that divide its possession should again become 
 involved in war. The Iroquois Indians perfectly understood 
 the importance of Lake Champlain. They called it "the 
 Gate of the Country." 
 
 Again, the Hudson River offers easy means of com- 
 munication from deep water to the lower lakes. The 
 effect of the tides is felt as far up as Albany ; and here flows 
 into the Hudson its principal tributary, the Mohawk, which 
 leads up to the low elevations that separate the basins of 
 Lakes Ontario and Erie from the Atlantic Plain and the 
 Mississippi Valley.
 
 NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 201 
 
 South of the Hudson are several river valleys that deeply 
 indent the mountain mass : the Delaware, the Susquehanna, 
 the Potomac, the James, and the Savannah. The Carolina 
 rivers penetrate less deeply, while their mouths are muffled 
 hy sand bars and islands formed of materials washed 
 down from ahove. South of the mountains a belt of land 
 runs east and west along the Gulf Coast, uniting the Atlan- 
 tic Plain with the Mississippi Valley. 
 
 Early Western emigration moved westward along four 
 main lines of travel : 1, the Hudson-Mohawk depression, 
 leading to the lakes ; 2, the Potomac, leading to the upper 
 Ohio; 3, the Valley of Virginia, and the mountain gaps 
 at its head, leading into Tennessee and Kentucky; 4, the 
 zone of low land lying along the Gulf. It was by the way 
 of the Potomac and the Valley of Virginia that emigrants 
 first reached the Great West ; but the first canal and rail- 
 road connecting the West and tide water were constructed 
 through the Mohawk Valley. 
 
 The natural barriers separating the Lake Basin and the 
 Mississippi Valley are much less formidable than those that 
 we have been considering. In Ohio the canal summits are 
 but four hundred feet above Lake Erie ; in Indiana the water 
 partings are still lower ; while in early days boatmen, in 
 times of high water, sometimes poled rafts and flat-bottomed 
 boats from Lake Michigan to the Des Plaines and Illinois 
 Rivers. In Wisconsin and Minnesota the portages are fre- 
 quent and easy, and boats may still be pushed from the Min- 
 nesota into the Red River of the North. 
 
 Perhaps the easy transits between the four great drainage 
 areas can be presented still more strongly. So complete is 
 the break made by the Hudson-Mohawk system in the moun- 
 tain wall that a sinking of land to an amount of only about 
 one hundred and fifty feet would isolate from the rest of the 
 continent all of New England and that part of Canada lying 
 to the southeast of the St. Lawrence as far as the extrem- 
 ity of Gaspe. A further sinking of two hundred and eighty 
 feet would open a water-way from the Atlantic to the Great 
 15
 
 202 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Lakes, and leave the mass of the Adirondacks as an island 
 lying adjacent to New England on the east and the Appa- 
 lachian land mass on the south. A depression of five hun- 
 dred feet would cause the Gulf of Mexico to set back to Cin- 
 cinnati and Burlington, and almost to Chicago and Jefferson 
 City. A depression of one thousand feet would unite the 
 Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico ; and one of two thou- 
 sand feet would overwhelm all the watersheds east of the 
 Rocky Mountains except the upper parts of the Appalachians, 
 and probably the Laurentian Hills. 
 
 The eastern side of North America is its open and ap- 
 proachable side. The Atlantic, as compared with the Pa- 
 cific, is a narrow ocean. Moreover, off the shore are numer- 
 ous islands that not only held out their own attractions to 
 navigators and planters two and a half centuries ago, but 
 also afforded them convenient resting places on their way to 
 the mainland : Newfoundland, the Bermudas, the Bahamas, 
 and the Antilles. 
 
 It would be hard to exaggerate the historical consequence 
 of the facts that have been set forth. They furnish the ex- 
 planation, in so far as natural facts ever explain such things, 
 of many interesting matters of history. They help to ex- 
 plain the all-important fact that North America became a 
 historical dependency of Europe, and not of Asia. They 
 throw a flood of light upon the first division of the continent 
 among Spain, England, and France, on the course and or 
 der of discovery and exploration, and on the struggles of 
 those powers for territorial dominion. They account for 
 the extraordinary territorial expansion of the United States 
 and their political unity. They enable us to understand the 
 astonishing rapidity of Western settlements, and the equally 
 astonishing celerity with which the artificial channels of 
 travel and trade were constructed which now bind the sec- 
 tions of the country together with bonds stronger than those 
 of nature. They are the sure pledge of our future territorial 
 and political integrity. As another has said : " Areas iso- 
 lated by their natural features were, before modern methods
 
 NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 
 
 203 
 
 of transportation had practically destroyed all natural bar- 
 riers, adapted to be the cradle of permanent and strong races. 
 Europe has been in all times peculiarly divided up into such 
 areas ; hence the multiplicity of its political divisions and the 
 fixity of the characteristics of the separate peoples which 
 have inhabited them. North America, on the other hand, 
 is unfitted to be the cradle place of different peoples ; its 
 continent is in the main a geographical unit." 
 
 Such a sketch map as the foregoing will serve the teacher 
 as a geographical framework for the distribution of the larger 
 facts of our history. He will need, however, to add addi- 
 tional features relating to climate and natural productions. 
 He can make the map more minute when he has passed 
 beyond general outlines and entered upon details. For 
 example, he can place the Ohio Valley in situ when deal- 
 ing with the French and Indian War; the Rio Grande, 
 when teaching the war with Mexico ; the Cumberland and 
 Tennessee, in connection with the campaigns of Sherman 
 and Grant. 
 
 Every competent teacher of American history must carry 
 in his mind a sketch map of the continent, and he must 
 steadily aim to develop one in the minds of his pupils ; but 
 it will not come amiss again to remind him that conspec- 
 tuses, or bird's-eye views, of large subjects belong rather to 
 the later than to the earlier stages of study. 
 
 NOTB. Distribution of Population by Drainage Basins : Percentage of 
 Population. 
 
 DIVISIONS. 
 
 1890. 
 
 1880. 
 
 1870. 
 
 Atlantic Ocean 
 
 96-2 
 
 97-1 
 
 97-8 
 
 New England coast 
 
 7-2 
 
 '7-6 
 
 8-5 
 
 Aliddle Atlantic coast 
 
 18'3 
 
 19-2 
 
 20-8 
 
 South Atlantic coast 
 
 6-8 
 
 7'4 
 
 7-3 
 
 Great Lakes 
 
 11-2 
 
 10-7 
 
 11-0 
 
 Gulf of Mexico . 
 
 52'7 
 
 52-2 
 
 50-2 
 
 Great Basin 
 
 4 
 
 4 
 
 3 
 
 Pacific Ocean 
 
 8-4 
 
 2'5 
 
 1-9 
 
 
 
 
 
 I. Census Bulletin, No. 47.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE COLONIZATION OP NORTH AMERICA. 
 
 References. Bancroft, Hildreth, Bryant and Gay, and Winsor : 
 Previous references; Parkman: Pioneers of France in the New 
 World, The Jesuits in North America, La Salle and the Discovery of 
 the Great West, The Old Regime in Canada, Count Frontenac and 
 France under Louis XIV, A Half Century of Conflict, Montcalm 
 and Wolfe ; Doyle, Thwaites, and Lodge : Previous references ; 
 Roberts: New York; Robinson: Vermont; Cooley: Michigan (the 
 last three works in the Commonwealth Series) ; Campbell : Outlines 
 of the Political History of Michigan. 
 
 On the papal bulls and right of discovery Fiske : The Discovery 
 of the New World (Vol. I., p. 454, Vol. II., Appendix B); Winsor: 
 The Narrative and Critical History of America (passim) ; Bourne : 
 Papers of the American Historical Association (IV., 169; The his- 
 tory and determination of the line of demarcation established by 
 Pope Alexander VI between the Spanish and Portuguese fields of 
 discovery and colonization) ; Scaife: Annual Report of the American 
 Historical Association for the Year 1891, p. 103. (The development 
 of international law as to newly discovered territory) ; Brown : The 
 Genesis of the United States (Preface, Introductory Sketch, 1485- 
 1607) ; Phillimore : Commentaries upon International Law, Part III., 
 Chap. XII. ; Lieber : Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. II., pp. 26-28 ; 
 Poore: Charters and Constitutions, Vol. I., p. 304; Hinsdale: Ohio 
 Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, December, 1888 (The Right 
 of Discovery). 
 
 IN the fifteenth century the Pope of Rome, as supreme 
 arbiter of the world, assumed to be the custodian and dis- 
 penser of all heathen lands. Acting in this capacity, Nico- 
 las V, in 1454, gave to the crown of Portugal, in perpetuity,
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 205 
 
 whatever such lands she might discover from Cape Bojador, 
 on the African coast, eastward to and including the Indies. 
 Upon the return of Columbus, in 1493, Alexander VI, on 
 the application of Ferdinand and Isabella for a similar dota- 
 tion in the West, issued two bulls, dated May 3 and 4, 1493, 
 that, taken in connection with those previously issued in the 
 interest of Portugal, had this effect : They gave to Spain all 
 heathen lands that she had already discovered or might 
 thereafter discover, lying west of a line drawn one hundred 
 leagues beyond the Azores, or the Cape Verd Islands, and 
 confirmed to Portugal all such lands lying east of that line 
 This division did not please King John of Portugal, and so 
 the two powers, in 1494, entered into a treaty commonly 
 called the Treaty of Tordesillas, from the place where it was 
 negotiated, but sometimes the Treaty for the Partition of the 
 Ocean, from its subject-matter that drew the line of demar- 
 cation three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Azores, 
 but that did not otherwise disturb the papal arrangements. 
 This treaty the two powers, supported by the Pope, who duly 
 ratified it, strove earnestly to carry out. But the other 
 Western maritime powers, disregarding the treaty and also 
 the papal bulls, entered into the competition of discovery, 
 and ultimately Spain and Portugal were compelled to aban- 
 don their exclusive claims and to admit France, England, 
 and Holland to the possession of shares in the Western 
 World. The Pope's bulls were finally abandoned, and the 
 right of discovery became the sole ground of title. When 
 fully developed this right embraced the following features : 
 1. The Christian nation that discovers a heathen land 
 owns it to the exclusion of all other Christian nations. 2. 
 This nation must complete its title within a reasonable time 
 by occupying and using this land. 3. The native inhab- 
 itants are the occupants of the land only. We are now to 
 see how this rule was applied in making the first division of 
 North America. While the papal bulls were set aside yet 
 their influence was great on the course of history.
 
 206 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 J. The Spaniards in the Gulf of Mexico. 
 
 Spain took prompt possession of the islands at the en- 
 trance of the Gulf of Mexico, and at once made them a base 
 of operations for further discovery and colonization. In 
 1498 Columbus discovered the South American coast near 
 the mouth of the Orinoco River, and in twenty years from 
 that time Spanish discoverers had traced out, in a general 
 way, the whole coast from that point to the Carolinas. In 
 1513 Ponce de Leon discovered and named the Peninsula of 
 Jf lorida. In 1519 Cortez began the conquest of Mexico, and 
 in 1536 Pizarro that of Peru. In 1539 De Soto began his 
 long march through the country north of the Gulf of 
 Mexico, searching for a throne like that of Montezuma, and 
 for riches like the riches of Mexico. In 1540 Coronado be- 
 gan his quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola. De Soto started 
 from Tampa Bay, Coronado from the Gulf of Mexico ; both 
 explorers, who penetrated the Missouri River region before 
 returning, were unsuccessful. Besides seating herself firmly 
 in Mexico and in Peru, Spain established lines of communi- 
 cation across the continent and the Pacific Ocean, reaching 
 to the Indies. 
 
 In the sixteenth century Spain had the best opportunity 
 ever presented to any nation to take possession of and to 
 hold the Mississippi Valley. She held the keys to the Gulf, 
 from which she strove to exclude all other powers. By dis- 
 covering the mouths of the rivers flowing into the Gulf, and 
 particularly of the Mississippi, she laid a foundation for a 
 title to the vast region lying between the Appalachian and 
 the Cordilleran mountain systems. The portal of the Mis- 
 sissippi stood always open to admit her ships, and there was 
 no European power that could prevent, or for the time 
 wished to prevent, her completing her title by occupation. 
 The Lake and St. Lawrence region was more accessible from 
 the south than the Mississippi Valley was from the north, be- 
 cause the Mississippi has less obstruction from ice. And yet 
 Spain did not improve her great opportunity ; in fact, down
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 207 
 
 to 1682 she had done nothing toward taking possession of 
 the country lying between the Atlantic and the Rio Grande 
 but to found St. Augustine, in 1565, and Santa Fe, in 1582. 
 While we congratulate ourselves on the failure of Spain to 
 plant her civilization in the Great West, we should inquire 
 into its causes. 
 
 These causes are few and simple. The master forces that 
 moved the Spaniards in their American undertakings were 
 lust for gold and silver and for political and military power. 
 The notion that the precious metals are the only real wealth, 
 which was then universally received, had such a hold of 
 their minds that' they despised ordinary industry and trade 
 in comparison ; and when De Soto and Coronado had failed 
 to find what they so eagerly sought in the regions that they 
 visited, those regions lost all immediate interest for their 
 countrymen. Probably the men who presided over Spain's 
 interests in the New World thought the time would come 
 when the Mississippi would be valuable ; but for the time 
 being that river had no value in comparison with the metal- 
 producing countries of the Aztecs and the Peruvians. Thus 
 the mines of those countries held the richest valley in the 
 world in pledge, first for France, but ultimately for the 
 United States. However, another motive power must be 
 mentioned. In the long struggle between Christianity and 
 Mohammedanism great zeal for proselyting the infidel and 
 the heathen had been developed among the peoples of 
 Southern Europe. But while zeal for the conversion of the 
 Indians was a considerable factor in Spanish exploration 
 and colonization, still of itself it was not strong enough 
 to carry them into the Mississippi Valley. The Spaniards 
 cut a far more picturesque figure than the English in the 
 pages of early American history ; what they did, one has 
 said, " was poetry in action, the knight-errantry of the Old 
 World carried into the depths of the American wilderness " ; 
 but they lacked the substantial qualities that fitted them to 
 receive so great a heritage as the Mississippi Valley. In 
 truth, Spain took little interest in Florida save as its pos-
 
 208 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 session was necessary to the mastery of the islands of the 
 Gulf and to the control of the sea routes leading from the 
 Spanish ports to Vera Cruz and Cartagena. St. Augustine 
 was a bulwark of both the West Indian and the East Indian 
 seas. This explains the vigor with which Spain drove the 
 Huguenots out of the peninsula, and the firmness with which 
 she resisted the advance of the English toward the Gulf of 
 Mexico. 
 
 II. The French in the Lake and St. Lawrence Basin. 
 
 At first France claimed the whole front, of the continent 
 north of Florida, basing her claim upon Verrazzano's voyage 
 of 1524, but in the end she abandoned the southern and cen- 
 tral parts of it to her competitors. Her first permanent col- 
 ony was Port Royal, now Annapolis, planted in 1605. But 
 Champlain persuaded the King of France that the St. Law- 
 rence, to which Cartier's voyages of 1534, 1535, and 1540 had 
 given him a title, was the proper center of his American 
 empire. So Champlain was commissioned to effect the 
 necessary change of base, and in doing so he won the title, 
 "Father of New France." How wisely he had judged, a 
 general view of the ideas and motives of the French in con- 
 nection with the opportunities that the St. Lawrence opened 
 to them will show. These ideas were the glory of France, 
 the fur trade, and the salvation of the savages. Sometimes 
 these ideas were all embodied in the same man ; but properly 
 the discoverer, explorer, or soldier stood for political and 
 military dominion, the hunter and trader for the Indian 
 trade, and the priest for Indian missions. 
 
 Champlain founded Quebec in 1608. The next year he 
 ascended the Richelieu, and discovered the lake to which he 
 gave his name. His plan was to bring within the circle of 
 French colonization and influence the whole region extend- 
 ing southward from the St. Lawrence toward the mouth of 
 the Hudson. But, unfortunately for his purposes, he en- 
 countered a war party of the Mohawk Indians near the 
 head of the lake ; and although he defeated them in battle,
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 
 
 he was so impressed by the prowess that they had shown, by 
 what he heard of the confederacy to which they belonged, 
 and by the hostility of this confederacy toward the Indians 
 of the north, who were his allies, that on his return to Que- 
 bec he changed his policy. Had he succeeded in his first 
 purpose, France would have seated herself on the streams 
 that flow to the lower lakes and the St. Lawrence, to New 
 York, Delaware, and Chesapeake Bays, and to the Ohio River. 
 Both General Scott and General Grant, it is said, have called 
 this region the key to the continent east of the Mississippi. 
 Had France seized it, we know not with what difficulty it 
 would have been wrenched from her hand, if at all. The 
 Indian skirmish, so far as we can tell, alone prevented this 
 issue. Still more, this skirmish was the beginning of the 
 long hostility of the Iroquois toward the French, which is 
 such an important factor in our history. It is also worthy 
 of remark that this formidable confederation owed its 
 power to the great advantages of its position, as well as to 
 its statesmanship and valor. Not only were its lands pro- 
 ductive, but the Confederates could, within their own terri- 
 tories in central New York, launch their canoes on waters 
 that would bear them to any point of the compass. Hence 
 it was in great part that they were able to carry the terror 
 of their arms to the Carolinas, the Tennessee, and the Mis- 
 sissippi, to the upper lakes, and the lower St. Lawrence. 
 
 Champlain's second plan was to explore and to bring 
 within the circle of French influence the country north of 
 the St. Lawrence. Here furs were more abundant than in 
 the south, and the savages, who proved friendly to the 
 French and were hostile to the Iroquois, stood in equal need 
 of salvation. 
 
 Montreal, situated on the St. Lawrence near the mouths 
 of the Richelieu and the Ottawa, dates from the year 1611. 
 In 1615 Champlain ascended the Ottawa, crossed the por- 
 tage to Lake Nipissing, and made his way by French River 
 and Georgian Bay to Lake Huron. On his return to Que- 
 bec the next year he discovered Lake Ontario. The Ottawa
 
 210 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 was the thoroughfare by which the Indians were accustomed 
 to pass between the St. Lawrence and the upper lakes. It 
 was comparatively free from the incursions of the Iroquois ; 
 it lay through a friendly country, and it was much shorter 
 than the road by the St. Lawrence and the lower lakes. 
 Naturally, therefore, it long continued the great route by 
 which the French passed and repassed between their posts 
 on the St. Lawrence and the Northwest. A well-known 
 geologist who has recently visited parts of this route says 
 it is " exciting to see with our own eyes direct evidence that 
 the engineers of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, when fol- 
 lowing the trail of Champlain. . . were not only paying 
 tribute to the skill of the Indians in selecting the lowest 
 passes from one valley to another, but were also unsuspect- 
 edly utilizing one of the most remarkable of Nature's high- 
 ways." 
 
 In 1629 Brule visited Lake Superior. In 1634 Nicolet 
 passed through the Straits of Mackinaw and discovered Lake 
 Michigan and Green Bay. In 1659-'60 Groseilliers and 
 Radisson reached the country beyond the head of Lake 
 Superior. The French first heard of Lake Erie about 1640 ; 
 but it was not until 1669 that Joliet, on returning from Lake 
 Superior, descended the water connection between Lake 
 Huron and Lake Erie, and thus demonstrated the connec- 
 tion between the upper and the lower lakes. In 1671, Saint- 
 Lusson, at the Sault Ste. Marie, acting in the name of Louis 
 XIV of France, took formal possession of the lakes, rivers, 
 and islands of the Northwest, extending to the sea in every 
 direction. About the same time La Salle discovered the 
 Ohio. In 1673 Marquette and Joliet, starting from Green 
 Bay, ascended Fox River, crossed the portage, descended the 
 Wisconsin to the Mississippi, down which they floated until 
 they had passed the mouth of the Arkansas, and satisfied 
 themselves that the river did not flow to the Gulf of Cali- 
 fornia or to Chesapeake Bay, but to the Gulf of Mexico ; 
 then they returned to the North by the Illinois River and 
 Lake Michigan. In the winter of 1679-'80 La Salle ascended
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 211 
 
 the St. Joseph, crossed to the Kankakee, and paddled his 
 way down the Illinois to Peoria Lake. Two years later the 
 same intrepid explorer descended the Illinois and the Missis- 
 sippi to the Gulf of Mexico. On April 9, 1682, he took pos- 
 session of the Mississippi Valley, in the name of his royal 
 master, Louis XIV. About the same time Hennepin made 
 further discoveries in the region of the upper Mississippi. 
 In 1742-'43 the brothers La Verendrye, starting from the 
 French settlements in the Winnipeg country, conducted an 
 expedition westward, in the course of which they discovered 
 the Rocky Mountains.* 
 
 While this bare outline sacrifices all the interest and 
 charm of French discovery and exploration, it answers the 
 present purpose. Never did a great opportunity of the kind 
 fall into hands better fitted to make the most of it. No 
 sooner had the French made their feeble beginnings on the 
 St. Lawrence, than they pierced the center of the chain of 
 the Great Lakes, pushed their discoveries to their farthest 
 limits, crossed the easy portages connecting the interlocked 
 systems of waters, and made their way to the Rocky Moun- 
 tains and to the Gulf of Mexico. This they did in the short 
 space of seventy-four years, with a powerful savage foe con- 
 stantly hanging upon their flank and rear. Had such a 
 mountain system as the Appalachian stood along the south- 
 ern margin of the Lake Basin, no man can conjecture in what 
 different lines early American history might have run. 
 
 Wherever they went the French took such pains as they 
 thought necessary to secure and hold the country. For ex- 
 ample, missions were established among the Hurons in 1615, 
 at Sault Ste. Marie in 1668, at Mackinaw in 1671, and also at 
 St. Esprit, near the head of Lake Superior, and at Green 
 Bay. These missions answered as well the purposes of trad- 
 ing posts and military stations, thus illustrating the close 
 connection of the three ideas lying at the foundation of New 
 France. 
 
 * The southern continuation of these mountains had long been known 
 to the Spaniards.
 
 212 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 III. The English on the Atlantic Plain. 
 
 The English rested their claim to the Atlantic Plain on 
 the Cabot voyages of 1497 and 1498. The evidence tends to 
 show that Spain never claimed the country north of the 
 forty-fourth parallel, and that England for nearly a century 
 showed no disposition to intrude south of that line. But in 
 1580, on the return of Sir Francis Drake from his voyage 
 around the world, Queen Elizabeth's government informed 
 the King of Spain that it could not acknowledge the Spanish 
 right to all that country, either by donation by the Pope or 
 from their having touched here and there upon those coasts. 
 From this time England was a strong advocate of posses- 
 sion or use as a factor in the right of discovery. She 
 now entered into competition with Spain south of the 44 
 line. Sir Walter Raleigh's attempts to plant colonies failed, 
 but Jamestown and Plymouth proved successful. In 1526, 
 and again in 1570, Spain had attempted to occupy Chesa- 
 peake Bay, but fortunately failed. In 1611 a Spanish armed 
 force hovered off Jamestown, but, learning that the settle- 
 ment would probably perish of disease and famine if let 
 alone, it sailed away without molesting the feeble colony. 
 Progressively, England occupied the coast from Maine to 
 Florida, Georgia, the last of the thirteen colonies, owing its 
 existence in part to the felt need of a bulwark between the 
 Spaniards and the Carolinas. Spain steadily resisted the 
 southward extension of the English colonies, and no definite 
 line of demarcation between them and Florida had been 
 fixed down to 1763. 
 
 While the English laid a firm hand upon the Atlantic 
 Plain, they were very slow in finding their way toward the 
 mountains that separated them from the interior of the 
 continent. The Virginians did not discover the Shenandoah 
 Valley until 1716, and they did not plant a settlement on the 
 waters flowing to the Mississippi until the middle of the 
 eighteenth century. Englishmen bore no part or lot in the 
 discovery and exploration of the Great West. Why did
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 213 
 
 they so long linger almost within cannon shot of the shore 
 line ? Why did they not sooner enter into the Western com- 
 petition with the French ? 
 
 In the first place, what the Indians called " the Endless 
 Mountains " for a long time effectually stopped their west- 
 ward progress. In dealing with this subject, Professor 
 Shaler remarks that, although the Appalachian peaks are 
 not of great height, their ranges are singularly continuous, 
 and that the passes did not afford for the pioneer any natu- 
 ral means of passage ; he must climb over the mountain 
 ridges. Then, from Maine to Alabama the forests were 
 dense and unbroken, while the ground north of central 
 Pennsylvania was strewn thick with bowlders. The Appa- 
 lachians' barrier of forest and mountain, he says, was almost 
 as impassable as the Alps. In the North, the Hudson and 
 Mohawk Valleys offered a comparatively easy path to the 
 lower lakes, although the Mohawk is not a navigable stream, 
 but potent causes long prevented its utilization. In the 
 second place, the mountains served to confirm Englishmen 
 in the opinion, which was early formed, that North America 
 was a long but narrow island lying between two oceans. But 
 the third cause was more powerful than both the others ; it 
 was the fundamental ideas or motives of the English colo- 
 nists. England sent her cavaliers to Virginia, her Puritans 
 to Massachusetts Bay, and these colonies became distribut- 
 ing centers for the whole Atlantic Plain. While different 
 in minor particulars, the Northern and Southern colonies 
 alike possessed the great qualities of the English character. 
 They showed some picturesque features; they made what 
 they could out of the Indian trade, and took a feeble interest 
 in Indian evangelization ; but they were interested in indus- 
 trial, commercial, and political life ; they created farms and 
 plantations, founded villages and towns, built ships in which 
 they carried on deep-sea fisheries or sent their products to 
 Europe or the West Indies, and, above all, established free 
 commonwealths on the English model. Englishmen had 
 been much less affected than the Spaniards and Frenchmen
 
 214: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 by the Mohammedan conflict ; they were already beginning 
 to break up into a diversity of churches and sects, and so it 
 was perfectly natural that the characteristic religious feature 
 of the English colonies was not zeal for the souls of the In- 
 dians, but zeal for religious freedom and the rights of con- 
 science for themselves, as in New England and Maryland. 
 While the life of the New England villagers, the New York 
 and Pennsylvania farmers, and the Virginia planters was 
 tame and prosaic as compared with the life of New France or 
 of New Spain, it was stronger, more modern, more permanent, 
 having the promise of the future of the continent. Mr. 
 Lowell tells us that, " looked at on the outside, New Eng- 
 land history is dry and unpicturesque. There is no rustle 
 of silks, no waving of plumes, no clink of golden spurs. 
 Our sympathies are not awakened by the changeful des- 
 tinies, the rise and fall of great families, whose doom is in 
 their blood. Instead of all this, we have the homespun 
 fates of Cephas and Prudence repeated in an infinite series 
 of peaceable sameness, and finding space enough for record 
 in the family Bible ; we have the noise of axe and hammer 
 and saw, an apotheosis of dogged work, where, reversing 
 the fairy tale, nothing is left to luck, and, if there be 
 any poetry, it is something that can not be helped 
 the waste of the water over the dam." And it was New 
 England that bore the brunt of the long struggle with 
 New France. 
 
 IV. The French and the English Colonies in Contrast. 
 
 It is very pertinent to observe that the three regions 
 now described harmonized well with the character of the 
 three nationalities to which they severally fell, and tended 
 to foster their ruling ideas. The Spaniard found what he 
 sought in the South, the Frenchman in the North, while 
 the Englishman possessed the environment that best suited 
 him on the Atlantic Plain. History would have run in 
 quite different lines if the three regions had been differ- 
 ently distributed. In respect to the French and the Eng-
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 215 
 
 lish colonies the parallel should be traced a little dis- 
 tance. 
 
 How advantageous the French position was for carrying 
 on exploration, the fur trade, and Indian missions we have 
 seen already. The opportunities of the French developed 
 resource, capacity for dealing with the savages, hardihood 
 and romance, but they did not develop either a numerous 
 people or a strong state. New France was founded by com- 
 mercial companies, but it soon passed into the hands of the 
 Crown. Planted by power and nourished by patronage, it 
 never became self-sufficing, but always continued a tax 
 upon the mother country. Both the virtues and the vices 
 of absolutism flourished : courage, devotion, and chivalry ; 
 ignorance, corruption, and dependence. The population in- 
 creased very slowly, and was thinly scattered through vast 
 wildernesses, where much of its strength was lost. Even 
 the St. Lawrence settlements were few, small, and widely 
 separated. Such were the attractions of the woods and the 
 waters for the Canadians that large numbers of them adopt- 
 ed a forest life much like that of the Indians becoming 
 hunters, or coureurs de bois thus adding to the picturesque- 
 ness of Canada, but also constantly draining away its life- 
 blood. These tendencies were further stimulated by facts 
 yet to be mentioned. 
 
 In respect to regular and productive industry, the French 
 colonists were at a disadvantage as compared with their Eng- 
 lish competitors. In marking the contrast Professor Shaler 
 states the following points : 
 
 1. The rapids of the St. Lawrence, the cataract of Niagara, 
 and the storms of the Great Lakes which have few natural 
 harbors, and, moreover, the cold that closes up these bodies of 
 water five months of every year, were a decided drawback 
 to the advantages that the great Northern water-way would 
 otherwise have offered. 
 
 2. The long and severe winters, which limited the time 
 that could be given to tillage, and made the keeping of do- 
 mestic animals difficult, were a great hindrance.
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 3. The soil of Canada consisted of drift, and could be 
 fitted for tillage only by a great amount of labor. To clear 
 away the stones, to say nothing of cutting away the forests, 
 was a costly process. Then the St. Lawrence lands were far 
 inferior in quality to those farther south. 
 
 4. The French beginnings lay north of the corn -pro- 
 ducing region, so that the people were without that 
 cheap and nutritious food. At the South this grain and 
 its universal concomitant long furnished the food sta- 
 ples. "Maize fields, with pumpkin vines in the inter- 
 stices of the plants, became for many years the pre- 
 vailing, indeed almost the only, crop throughout the 
 northern part of America. It is hardly too much to 
 say that, but for these American plants and the Ameri- 
 can method of tilling them, it would have been decidedly 
 more difficult to have fixed the early colonies on this 
 shore." 
 
 5. Tobacco, which did so much to enrich some of the 
 English colonies, could not be produced at the North as an 
 article of commerce. Nor was there any other agricultural 
 staple that could take its place. 
 
 These hard conditions constantly tended to retard the 
 increase of population, and also to disperse such as there was 
 on the shores where fish could be caught, or in the wilder- 
 ness where beaver could be trapped. The result was that 
 Canada grew up as weak in industrial, commercial, and 
 civic qualities as she was strong in military qualities and in 
 adventure. A great community could not be founded on 
 the fur trade. 
 
 On the Atlantic Plain some of the obstacles that the 
 French encountered were also present. In the North the 
 climate was severe, the drift extended as far south as central 
 Pennsylvania, while the forests were heavy. Still, on the 
 whole, all the forces that were at work tended in directions 
 just the opposite of those that have been traced out : geo- 
 graphical environment, the possibilities of agriculture and 
 trade, the opportunities for commerce, fear of the Indians
 
 THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 21 7 
 
 and the French, and the character of the people. Popula- 
 tion, instead of spreading into the interior, was confined to 
 the shore, where it became relatively numerous and thick, 
 rich and prosperous. There were no English posts like the 
 missions of Sault Ste. Marie and St. Esprit, no class like the 
 coureurs de bois. Hunters and Indian fighters of the type 
 of Boone and Kenton, Wetzel and Brady, did not appear 
 until the Endless Mountains had been passed. After re- 
 marking that the proselyting spirit was far weaker in Eng- 
 land than on the Continent, while the commercial spirit 
 was far stronger, Professor Shaler says the English colonies 
 in the New World " consisted of people who came to stay, to 
 breed upon the ground, and to found New Englands on the 
 foreign shore. Though in part led by religious convictions, 
 seeking a haven for peculiar creeds, they were on the whole 
 commercially minded true colonists in their intent, as were 
 the Greeks in their time, or their ruder imitators, the North- 
 men, in a later age." The causes that have been mentioned 
 confined the English colonists between the mountains and 
 the sea until, by reason of their growth, strength, and 
 civic education, they had prepared themselves to contest 
 the possession of the Great West, first with France and 
 afterward with England and Spain. Professor Shaler has 
 well said : 
 
 There was a certain advantage arising from the hemming in of 
 the British colonies in North America by the Appalachian bound- 
 ary. In place of the detached settlements which characterized the 
 Spanish, and more particularly the French plantations, the British 
 colonial establishments were, by their geographical conditions, 
 compelled to develop in a more connected way. It was possible 
 in 1700 to ride from Portland, Me., to southern Virginia, sleep- 
 ing each night in some considerable village. If our ancestors on 
 the continent had secured a ready access to the interior, it is 
 likely that a hundred years [more] would have gone by before the 
 colonists became sufficiently dense in population to permit the 
 interactive life which prepared the way for the American Revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 16
 
 218 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 There could be no better test of the meaning of New 
 France and of the meaning of the English colonies than is 
 furnished by the statistics of their population. In 1754 all 
 New France contained 80,000 white inhabitants, the thirteen 
 English colonies 1,160,000. The disparity in wealth must 
 have been even greater. 
 
 Physiography of the United States. A series of monographs 
 prepared by specialists under the auspices of the National Geo- 
 graphic Society. These monographs are most useful to the student 
 of history as well as to the student of physical geography. Especial 
 attention may be directed to the monograph entitled The Northern 
 Appalachians, by Mr. Bailey Willis.
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH 
 AMERICA. 
 
 References. Bancroft, Hildreth, Bryant and Gay, Winsor, Park- 
 man, Campbell, Roberts, Robinson, and Cooley : Previous references ; 
 Fernow : The Ohio Valley in Colonial Days ; Fiske : American Po- 
 litical Ideas, pp. 54-56, 125 ; Chalmers : A Collection of Treaties be- 
 tween Great Britain and other Powers. 
 
 On the subjects treated in Chaps. XIV.-XVIII., inclusive, the 
 author refers to his own work, entitled The Old Northwest, with a 
 View of the Thirteen Colonies as constituted by the Royal Charters 
 (I. North America in Outline; II. The First Division of North 
 America ; III. The French discover the Northwest ; IV. The French 
 colonize the Northwest; V. England wrests the Northwest from 
 France; VI.- VII. The Thirteen Colonies as constituted by the 
 Royal Charters; IX. The Northwest in the Revolution; X. The 
 United States wrest the Northwest from England). 
 
 THIS struggle was a necessary outgrowth of causes that 
 lie upon the surface. First, the character and interests of 
 the two nations were so diverse that only an occasion was 
 necessary to bring them into armed collision ; Second, the 
 maritime discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
 greatly multiplied their points of friction; Third, the op- 
 posite tendencies and characters of the French and the Eng- 
 lish colonies in America, and, fourthly, their geographical 
 relations, made lasting peace between them impossible. 
 Some leading features of the long struggle will be passed in 
 review. 
 
 Argall's exploits at Mount Desert and Port Royal in 1612,
 
 220 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 and Kirk's capture of Quebec in 1629, require nothing more 
 than mention. Before the next trial of arms the governors 
 of Canada had formed the policy that they pursued to the 
 end, and that must be briefly described. 
 
 Champlain hoped that the St. Lawrence might prove a 
 road to China, and La Salle for a time saw the same vision. 
 But on the discovery of the Mississippi, and of its general re- 
 lations to the Lake Basin, to the Atlantic Plain, and the 
 Gulf of Mexico, La Salle conceived a new plan. This was 
 to make the Mississippi the center of New France, with one 
 flank resting on the Gulf of Mexico and the other on the 
 Gulf of St. Lawrence. These extreme points should be 
 bound together by a chain of settlements and posts stretch- 
 ing through the intervening wilderness. If France could 
 hold the two keys to the interior of the continent and could 
 securely bind them together, she could shut the Spaniards 
 up in Mexico and confine the English to their narrow shore. 
 To carry out this plan it was necessary to bring the Indians 
 of the West within the circle of French influence, and, since 
 the Iroquois could not be placated, to break their power. 
 Such was the scheme that finally brought England and 
 France into conflict in the Ohio Valley and on Lake On- 
 tario. 
 
 England claimed the whole breadth of the continent 
 from Maine to Georgia, but she took no steps to complete 
 her title. She had, in fact, no colonial policy, and long 
 trusted her interests to the logic of events. As early as 1685 
 Governor Dongan, of New York, divined the French policy 
 and strove to frustrate it. He proposed that the English 
 should penetrate the Northwest by the Mohawk Valley and 
 Lake Erie, and thus inclose the French in the St. Lawrence 
 Basin. In 1686 and 1687 parties of English and Dutch 
 traders, escorted by Iroquois warriors, attempted to ascend 
 to the upper lakes ; but the French, although it was a 
 time of peace, seized them or turned them back homeward. 
 Soon afterward the French closed the passage from the lower 
 to the upper lakes. Moreover, the Iroquois did not kindly
 
 STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 221 
 
 brook the intrusion even of their friends within their terri- 
 tories. Thus, the French and the Iroquois stopped the Eng- 
 lish at the North quite as effectually as the mountains stopped 
 them at the South. Still, it must be said that about this time 
 originated the claim that the Five Nations were subjects of 
 England, and so under her protection a claim out of which 
 great results afterward grew. The commission of Andros, 
 who succeeded Dongan as Governor of New York, embraced 
 the whole country reaching to the Pacific Ocean. 
 
 Warlike operations in the time of Argall and Kirk were 
 necessarily confined to the water. King William's War, 
 (1689-'97) reveals some new features. The French and In- 
 dians, moving along the water courses and through the de- 
 files of the wilderness, for the first time fell upon and 
 destroyed outlying English settlements.* The New Eng- 
 land colonies and New York attempted to dispatch a feeble 
 force against Montreal, but it did not go beyond the head of 
 Lake Champlain. A French expedition projected against 
 Albany and New York also came to nothing. Thus early 
 did the rival colonies find the great cleft of the mountain 
 
 * Mr. R. E. Robinson, author of Vermont, in the Commonwealth Series, 
 has graphically described the northern highway of war. " Different routes 
 were taken by the predatory bands in their descents upon the frontiers of 
 New England. One was by the St. Francis River and Lake Memphrema- 
 gog, thence to the Passumpsic, and down that river to the Connecticut, that 
 gave an easy route to the settlements. Another was up the Winooski and 
 down White River to the Connecticut. Another left Lake Champlain at 
 the mouth of Great Otter Creek ; then up its slow lower reaches to where 
 it becomes a swift mountain stream, when the trail led to West River, or 
 Wantasticook, emptying into the Connecticut. And still another way to 
 West River and the Connecticut was from the head of the lake up the 
 Pawlet River. Of these routes, that by the Winooski was so frequently 
 taken that the English named the stream the French River ; while that of 
 which Otter Creek was a part, being the easiest and the nearest to Crown 
 Point, was perhaps the oftenest used, and was commonly known as the ' In- 
 dian road.' All these warpaths, familiar to every Waubanakee warrior 
 with every stream and landmark bearing names which his fathers had 
 given them, led through Vermont, then only known to English-speaking 
 men as ' The Wilderness.' "(Pages 10, 11.)
 
 222 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 system extending from New York Bay to the St. Lawrence, 
 which has been a highway of war ever since whenever the 
 people of the two regions have been engaged in hostilities. 
 In 1696 Fort Frontenac was built, where Kingston now 
 stands or rather it was rebuilt, for it had once been de- 
 stroyed. The purpose of the Governor of Canada in build- 
 ing this post was to secure the alliance of the friendly Indi- 
 ans, to overawe the Iroquois, to carry on the fur trade, and 
 to command the outlet to Lake Ontario. It played an im- 
 portant part in wilderness history. At the conclusion of 
 peace, Count Frontenac, the French governor, had seriously 
 weakened the power of the Five Nations, had confirmed and 
 extended his alliances with the Indians of the West, had re- 
 pelled the English theory of Iroquois sovereignly, and had 
 put matters in fine train for the further development of the 
 French policy. Dongan's plan had completely failed. 
 
 In the short interval of peace, Count Frontenac took an- 
 other important step. In 1686 he caused De Luht to con- 
 struct Fort St. Joseph at the head of Ste. Claire River, and in 
 1701 he sent Cadillac to plant the colony and build the 
 stockade of Detroit. These posts securely closed the North- 
 west to the English. 
 
 In Queen Anne's War (1702-'13) the English made an- 
 other ineffectual attempt to strike Canada by the way of 
 Lake Champlain. At the treaty of Utrecht France ceded 
 to England Newfoundland, and Acadia with its ancient 
 boundaries ; and, what was still more important in our view, 
 she formally admitted that the Five Nations or Cantons 
 were subjects of Great Britain. 
 
 Years before war again broke out both sides were taking 
 steps that made war still more certain. In 1720, Vaudreuil, 
 Governor of Canada, built at the mouth of the Niagara River 
 a fort of the same name, near the spot that had once been 
 occupied by La Salle. Of all points on the lakes this was 
 now the most important one for the French to hold. In 
 1732, Governor Burnett, of New York, in order to throw up 
 a bulwark between the Iroquois and Canada, constructed a
 
 STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 223 
 
 fortified trading post at the mouth of the Oswego River. 
 This was the first time that the English had made even a 
 beginning on the chain of Great Lakes ; the French had 
 made their beginnings more than one hundred years before. 
 Oswego was intended as an answer to Forts Frontenac and 
 Niagara, and it foretold the day when an English flotilla and 
 army would descend the St. Lawrence to the conquest of 
 Canada. In the meantime the rival colonies were feeling 
 their way toward Lake Champlain. The English established 
 settlements and posts on the upper Connecticut, in western 
 Massachusetts, in southern Vermont, and in the wilderness 
 where lie the sources of Lakes George and Champlain. In 
 1665 the French had occupied Isle La Motte, and in 1730-'31 
 they seized the narrows of Lake Champlain and constructed 
 the formidable Fort Frederic, at Crown Point. This act 
 planted them in " the gate of the country," as the Iroquois 
 called the lake, along both sides of which French settle- 
 ments began slowly to spread. The French had now fully 
 taken up La Salle's original idea. In the far West also 
 France was fortifying her right with might. As early as 
 1735 French colonists crossed the Kankakee portage to the 
 Wabash Valley, where they planted a long, thin line of 
 settlements, of which Vincennes was the chief. Afterward 
 these colonists reached Canada by the St. Marys, the Maumee, 
 and Lake Erie. Still other settlements and fortified posts 
 were established on the Illinois and the Mississippi Rivers, 
 on the Tennessee and the Alabama. Only one great river 
 valley the possession of which was essential to her policy 
 had France failed to secure down to 1744. 
 
 King George's War (1744-'48) was marked by the old 
 features : naval battles, French and Indian forays, and fu- 
 tile schemes to invade Canada by Lake Champlain. The 
 treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored all conquests that had 
 been made in the course of the war on either side, and as its 
 negotiators could not agree upon boundary lines, and par- 
 ticularly upon the ancient boundaries of Acadia, they re- 
 ferred such questions to a joint commission, which, however,
 
 224: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 could not agree, and so accomplished nothing. The truth 
 is, the relations of the two powers in America had become 
 so strained that only the sword could render a decisive ver- 
 dict. The peace was therefore of short duration. 
 
 The time had finally come for the English colonists to 
 show a real interest in the country beyond the mountains. 
 For some time the hunter and trader had been following 
 the deer through the mountain passes to the streams flowing 
 to the Mississippi, and now the explorer and the pioneer 
 began to follow the hunter and trader. In 1748 Dr. 
 Walker, with a company of Virginians, made his way into 
 the West, discovering and naming the Cumberland Moun- 
 tains and Cumberland and Louisa Rivers. In the same 
 year the first transmontane settlement was made, at Draper's 
 Meadow, on New River, a branch of the Kanawha. In 1748 
 also the Ohio Company was formed ; it obtained a grant of 
 five hundred thousand acres of land on the Kanawha and 
 Monongahela Rivers, and ordered large shipments of goods 
 from London, preparatory to embarking in land speculation 
 and in the Indian trade. About the same time the Will's 
 Creek route from the Potomac to the Ohio was discovered. 
 In 1750-'51 Christopher Gist, an agent of the Ohio Com- 
 pany, explored both sides of the Ohio for a considerable dis- 
 tance below the forks. The Indians occupying the country 
 between the Ohio and Lake Erie were found generally 
 friendly to the English, and the Pennsylvanians and Vir- 
 ginians carried on a large trade with them. 
 
 While the French and Indian War was only the Ameri- 
 can side of the Seven Years' War, it began before hostilities 
 broke out in Europe and originated in a purely American 
 issue. This was the line of demarcation between Canada 
 and her dependencies and the English colonies. France 
 proposed a geographical boundary. She claimed that all 
 countries drained by streams falling into the St. Lawrence, 
 the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi should belong to Canada. 
 This would have planted her securely on the ridges and 
 mountain crests separating the Lake and St. Lawrence Basin
 
 STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 225 
 
 and the Mississippi Valley from the Atlantic slope, giving 
 France all the interior of the continent, and leaving nothing 
 to England but her old strip of seacoast. The accomplish- 
 ment of this claim would be the full realization of the policy 
 that she had so long pursued. France rested her claim on 
 the work of her discoveries and explorers, missionaries, and 
 bushrangers. Moreover, it must be admitted that this was a 
 reasonable title compared with the claim that England now 
 advanced. That power now practically abandoned the Cabot 
 title to the whole breadth of the continent, and brought for- 
 ward a new one. In 1684 the Iroquois had placed them- 
 selves under the protection of the Duke of York and of 
 Charles II ; in 1713 the French had solemnly admitted that 
 the Five Tribes were subjects of Great Britain ; in 1726 the 
 tribes conveyed to England their lands in trust for the 
 grantors, with little sense, no doubt, of what they were 
 doing. Nor was this all : the Iroquois claimed all territories 
 that their war parties had overrun, and the English now set 
 up the claim that they stood in the same relation to these 
 territories that they did to the original Iroquois lands in 
 New York. This was claiming not only the country be- 
 tween the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, but also that be- 
 tween Lakes Erie and Huron and the Ottawa River, for this 
 region was also an Iroquois conquest dating from the de- 
 struction of the Huron missions. Indeed, the Tribes had 
 formally ceded it all to the English, including Detroit ; still 
 further, in 1744 they made to Virginia a deed that covered a 
 large part of the whole West. 
 
 As we have seen, the French had strung a long line of 
 posts through the Western wilderness, extending from the 
 St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, resting their claim 
 upon discovery and occupancy. The English now made 
 ready to cross the mountains in force, pleading their Iro- 
 quois title. Given all the factors that have been enumerated, 
 as national and colonial characters and tendencies and geo- 
 graphical relations, the great contest of arms that now came 
 on was inevitable.
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 French America had two heads one among the snows of Canada, 
 and one among the canebrakes of Louisiana ; one communicating 
 with the world through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the other 
 through the Gulf of Mexico. These vital points were feebly con- 
 nected by a chain of military posts, slender and often interrupted, 
 circling through the wilderness nearly three thousand miles. Mid- 
 way between Canada and Louisiana lay the valley of the Ohio. 
 If the English should seize it, they would sever the chain of posts 
 and cut French America asunder. If the French held it, and en- 
 trenched themselves well along its eastern limits, they would shut 
 their rivals between the Alleghanies and the sea, control all the tribes 
 of the West, and turn them, in case of war, against the English 
 borders a frightful and insupportable scourge.* 
 
 Mr. Parkman here reveals the one step necessary to her 
 policy that France had neglected to take ; she had not seized 
 and fortified the forks of the Ohio. This position was ab- 
 solutely essential to the control of that river, and ultimately 
 even to the control of the Mississippi itself. Why, then, 
 had not France placed herself in that gateway as promptly 
 as she had occupied the portals of the Niagara and the 
 Detroit ? The answer to this question is, that the position 
 was an exposed one the attempt to hold it dangerous. Its 
 possession would necessitate a line of communications ex- 
 tending from Canada by the foot of Lake Erie and the 
 Alleghany River to the forks a long line that could be 
 easily struck and broken, unless made very strong indeed, 
 by any one of the colonies, New York, Pennsylvania, or Vir- 
 ginia, to say nothing of the Iroquois. Then it lay well with- 
 in the region that England claimed. So France deferred 
 seizing the country lying between Lake Erie and the Ohio 
 River as long as possible, in the meantime establishing 
 connections between the two heads of New France farther 
 to the West. It is a significant fact that Frenchmen had 
 explored and mapped the far Northwest, Michigan, and 
 Illinois, long before they had any definite knowledge of the 
 
 * Parkman : Montcalm and Wolf, vol. i, pp. 39, 40.
 
 STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 227 
 
 present State of Ohio. But the logic of events had now 
 brought things to such a pass that she could no longer hesi- 
 tate to act. 
 
 It may be again remarked that it is not easy to exagger- 
 ate the part that the Iroquois played in early American 
 history. Mr. Parkman has shown very plainly that if 
 France could have brought these haughty tribes under her 
 full influence, American history would have reached its 
 destined goal, but by different routes from those actually 
 followed. An Indian empire ruled by French priests would 
 have occupied the Mississippi Valley ; war would have been 
 repressed and agriculture encouraged ; the West would have 
 been cut up into fiefs and feudalism established ; the Eng- 
 lish colonies would have been longer confined to the At- 
 lantic Plain ; when the final conflict drew on, absolutism 
 would have opposed to them a much stronger resistance, and 
 American independence would have been deferred, how 
 long no one can tell, not to speak of the later modifying 
 influence of French ideas upon American civilization. As 
 it was, the Five Nations constantly weakened Canada, and 
 retarded the growth of French absolutism until English 
 liberty became equal to the final struggle.* 
 
 The Walker expedition, the Draper settlement on New 
 River, the Ohio Company, Gist's explorations, and the pacific 
 temper of the Ohio Indians have already been mentioned. 
 The Pennsylvanians also were beginning to find their way 
 over the mountains. So in 1749 Governor Galissoniere 
 sent Bienville from Canada by Lake Chautauqua and the 
 Alleghany into the Ohio Valley, directing him to take pos- 
 session of it in the name of France, to placate the Indians, 
 and to thwart the English. In 1753 Duquesne sent a force 
 to seize and hold French Creek and the upper Alleghany. 
 Early in 1754 a small force of Virginians occupied and be- 
 gan to fortify the forks of the Ohio : but before they had 
 finished their work a much stronger French force descended 
 
 * The Jesuits in North America, pp. 446-449.
 
 228 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 the Alleghany, seized the Virginians, and proceeded to con- 
 struct Fort Duquesne. This act placed France at once in 
 the doorway of the West and precipitated the final conflict. 
 The next year Braddock advanced against Duquesne with a 
 view of cutting New France asunder, but his army was de- 
 feated and himself killed on the Monongahela. 
 
 The war had not far advanced before the English Cabinet 
 was dominated by a statesman who had a clear American 
 policy, and the vigor necessary to carry it into execution. 
 William Pitt proposed nothing less than the conquest of 
 Canada, and the war now assumed that form. To Canada 
 there were three lines of approach. The first was the Gulf 
 and River St. Lawrence, guarded by the fortifications of 
 Louisburg and Quebec. The second was Lakes George and 
 Champlain and the River Richelieu a route that the 
 French, not content with their previous precautions, quickly 
 safe-guarded by constructing the fortress of Ticonderoga. 
 The third route led from Oswego, by Lake Ontario and the 
 upper St. Lawrence, to the heart of Canada. The shifting 
 scenes of the long war need not here be even sketched. 
 Considering alone the great disparity of the French and 
 English colonies in numbers and in wealth, we should be 
 surprised that the contest continued nine years ; but it is 
 important to remember that the French colonies were far 
 more effective in war than the English, that they waged a 
 defensive struggle, and that they were supported by France, 
 as their competitors were by England. It is still more impor- 
 tant to observe that by every one of the three routes Nature 
 offered the greatest obstacles to the progress of the English 
 arms. 
 
 " ' Geography,' says Von Moltke, ' is three fourths of 
 military science ' ; and never was the truth of his words 
 more fully exemplified. Canada was fortified with vast out- 
 works of defense in the savage forests, marshes, and moun- 
 tains that encompassed her, where the thoroughfares were 
 streams choked with fallen trees and obstructed by cataracts. 
 Never was the problem of moving troops encumbered with
 
 STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. 229 
 
 baggage and artillery a more difficult one. The question, 
 was less how to fight the enemy than how to get at him. If 
 a few practicable roads had crossed this broad track of wil- 
 derness, the war would have been shortened and its charac- 
 ter changed." * 
 
 All these obstacles were finally overcome ; and in 1760 
 Montreal, the last Canadian stronghold, fell before the ad- 
 vance of the three English armies that, coming by the three 
 different routes, effected a junction in its neighborhood on 
 the same day. France now retired from the continent. She 
 ceded in 1763 part of her North American possessions to 
 England and part to Spain, the Mississippi River and the 
 Iberville becoming the boundary between them. 
 
 This rapid view of a contest, the vast consequences of 
 which are more fully seen as time goes by, reveals the ele- 
 ments of power that were arrayed on either side. As Pro- 
 fessor Shaler puts the case : 
 
 Throughout their efforts in North America, the French showed 
 a capacity for understanding the large questions of political geog- 
 raphy, a genius for exploration, and a talent for making use of its 
 results, or guiding their way to dominion, that is in singular con- 
 trast with the blundering processes of their English rivals. They 
 seem to have understood the possibilities of the Mississippi Valley 
 a century and a half before the English began to understand them. 
 They planted a system of posts and laid out lines for commerce 
 through this region ; they strove to organize the natives into civil- 
 ized communities; they did all that the conditions permitted to 
 achieve success. Their failure must be attributed to the want of 
 colonists, to the essential irreclaimableness of the American savage, 
 and to the want of a basis for extended commerce in this country. 
 There were no precious metals to tempt men into this wilderness, 
 and none of the fancy for life or for lands among the home people 
 that wandering instinct which has been the basis of all the im- 
 perial power of the English race. Thus a most cleverly devised 
 scheme of continental occupation, which was admirably well adapted 
 
 * Parkman : Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. ii, pp. 380, 381.
 
 230 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 to the physical conditions of the country, never came near to suc- 
 cess. It fell beneath the clumsy power of another race that had 
 the capacity for fixing itself firmly in new lands, and that grew 
 without distinct plan until it came to possess it altogether. 
 
 At the critical periods in the long struggle much was 
 said by both parties about " their rights " ; but our balanc- 
 ing arguments pro and con is little to the purpose, for the 
 issue was one that grew out of geography and love of do- 
 minion, and hence one that only force could determine. 
 
 Mr. Bancroft says the issue of 1754 was which of the 
 two languages should be the mother tongue of the future 
 millions of the West whether the Romanic or the Teutonic 
 race should form the seed of its people. The issue was a 
 broader one than the destiny of the West was none other 
 than the destiny of the major part of North America. 
 Should the institutions of England, or of France and Spain, 
 spread over the larger share of its surface ? The immediate 
 issue of the war derives most of its significance from a sec- 
 ond inevitable conflict to which it soon led. Mr. Fiske has 
 called Wolfe's triumph on the Plains of Abraham, which 
 really determined the struggle, the greatest turning point in 
 modern history ; and Mr. Green assigns the reason when he 
 calls this triumph the beginning of the history of the United 
 States. 
 
 NOTE. The conflicting claims are well shown by Parkman: Fifty 
 Years of Conflict, vol. i, p. 204, vol. ii, pp. 63, 273 ; Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 
 i, pp. 37, 61, 79, 122-128, 168, 236-238, 259, vol. ii, p. 86.
 
 CHAPTEE XVIII. 
 
 A CONSPECTUS OP THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 
 
 References. See histories of the United States previously re- 
 ferred to. Carrington : Boston and New York, The Battles of the 
 Revolution, The Strategic Relations of New Jersey (these books 
 are military studies of the war) ; Gilmore : The Rear Guard of the 
 American Revolution ; Roosevelt : Winning the West (particularly 
 Chaps. 11., III., IX) ; Perkins : Annals of the West ; Campbell and 
 Cooley : Previous references ; Fiske : The American Revolution. 
 
 LAFAYETTE called the Revolution " the grandest of con- 
 tests, won by the skirmishes of sentinels and outposts." 
 Skirmishes the battles certainly were as compared with the 
 great battles of Europe or of our Civil War ; moreover, they 
 were so scattered, were fought by so many different men, 
 and looked directly to such different ends, that it is not easy 
 to bring them together into one general view. The only 
 way to overcome the difficulty is : (1) To frame a clear out- 
 line map of the whole theater of action, of its several divi- 
 sions and their relations ; (2) To perceive clearly not only 
 the grand ends of the war conquest on the one part and 
 defense on the other but also the particular ends of the sev- 
 eral divisions of the action ; (3) To concentrate the attention 
 on the important points, leaving detail and side incidents to 
 fall out of the mind. These observations are, of course, 
 equally pertinent to all similar cases. To illustrate them, the 
 following conspectus of the Revolution is submitted : 
 
 I. In no other part of the country were American ideas 
 so fully developed as in New England. In the march to- 
 ward independence, New England led the country, Massa-
 
 232 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 chusetts led New England, and Boston led Massachusetts. 
 To enforce the obnoxious laws, to overawe the province, and 
 to check, if possible, the spread of dangerous ideas, the Brit- 
 ish ministry had sent four regiments of troops to Boston in 
 1768. These troops were received by the people in no 
 friendly spirit ; and after the Boston Massacre of March, 
 1770, this spirit became more and more pronounced. 
 
 II. Events now moved rapidly in all the colonies. Every 
 year saw some fresh act of British aggression and witnessed 
 the higher rise of the spirit of resistance. When the royal 
 governor dissolved the Massachusetts Legislature, it imme- 
 diately reappeared as a provincial congress. There were 
 committees of correspondence and committees of safety. In 
 various colonies the militia were reorganized, put under 
 patriotic captains, and drilled for active duty. Munitions 
 of war powder and ball and cannon were gathered at 
 various convenient places. Everything on the American 
 side betokened war, if only the British officers should pro- 
 voke it. 
 
 III. General Gage's attempt to destroy the munitions 
 that had been gathered at Concord brought on the battle of 
 Lexington, April 19, 1775, fired the country, and led to a 
 general uprising of the people. Hundreds of armed men 
 pressed hard after the British column as it retreated from 
 Concord to Boston, and thousands more followed after the 
 hundreds. Immediately the British troops were shut in be- 
 tween a patriotic host and the sea. In June, Bunker Hill 
 was fought. In July, Washington took command of the 
 American forces, and at once began to organize into an 
 army the motley multitude that had gathered from far and 
 near. Month after month he pressed the siege closer and 
 closer ; and in March, 1776, General Howe, who had suc- 
 ceeded General Gage, finding that his position could no 
 longer be defended, put his troops on board the fleet and 
 sailed away to Halifax. 
 
 IV. But the war was not over. The ministry dispatched 
 the choicest troops of the British army and the finest ships
 
 A CONSPECTUS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 233 
 
 of the British navy to America. More than this, it sent over 
 thousands of mercenaries hired or bought of the princes of 
 Germany. It also summoned to its aid the savage warriors 
 of the American forests. But Boston was not again molest- 
 ed, nor Massachusetts again invaded to the end of the war. 
 Armed resistance to the ministry had extended to all the 
 colonies ; and the enemy, on his return, sought a place of 
 attack that he thought more suitable for his purpose. 
 While the royal forces are gathering at Halifax, we will 
 take a glance at the country and people whom they are sent 
 to subjugate. 
 
 V. The thirteen colonies, stretching along the Atlantic 
 shore from the Piscataqua to the St. Marys, presented an 
 ocean front more than fifteen hundred miles in length. 
 This front was cut at short intervals by deep rivers that 
 made excellent harbors for commerce, but also offered to an 
 enemy ready means of access to the country. Jamestown, 
 New York, and Plymouth were each more than one hun- 
 dred and fifty years old ; still the settlements were only a 
 thin fringe to the continent, and by far the larger part of 
 the Atlantic Plain was an unbroken forest. Mr. Bancroft 
 estimates the total population at nearly 2,600,000, black and 
 white. Virginia was the most populous colony, Georgia the 
 least. The three principal cities were Philadelphia and New 
 York, each with about 20,000 to 22,000 people, and Boston, 
 with only 17,000. Lancaster, Pa., with 1,000 houses and 
 6,000 people, was the largest internal town. There were 
 few men in the colonies owning property to the amount of 
 $200,000. 
 
 VI. If the king's ministers had ever flattered themselves 
 that armed resistance to their policy would be local, they 
 were quickly undeceived. The conflict which they had 
 provoked was not the Boston, or even the Massachusetts, 
 rebellion, but the American Revolution. At first there was 
 no thought of independence. Such a purpose was directly 
 disavowed. The sole object was to resist encroachments on 
 ancient rights and to defend ancient privileges. But as the 
 
 17
 
 234: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 purposes of the king's government became more and more 
 distinctly revealed, a desire for separation from the mother 
 country took the place of the demand for a redress of griev- 
 ances. And so, on July 4, 1776, when there was not a British 
 soldier within all their borders, this desire was expressed in 
 the Declaration of Independence. 
 
 VII. The States were divided into three zones : New 
 England, the Middle States, and the South. The New Eng- 
 land States contained about 700,000 white inhabitants, the 
 Middle States about the same number, the Southern States 
 800,000. Most of the four or five hundred thousand negroes 
 were in the South. New England could be assailed from 
 Boston and New York ; the Middle States from New York 
 and Philadelphia ; the South, from Chesapeake Bay, Cape 
 Fear River, and Charleston. The British plan of campaign 
 for the year 1776 embraced the whole country. Cape Fear 
 River was chosen as the base of operations against the South ; 
 New York against the middle zone and the East. At the 
 same time the ministry more than half expected that the 
 States would be smitten with terror at sight of the powerful 
 armaments sent against them, and so submit without further 
 resistance. 
 
 VIII. Sir Henry Clinton and Sir Peter Parker were sent 
 to the South. After collecting their forces in Cape Fear 
 River, they bore away to Charleston. But the attack on 
 Fort Sullivan failed as signally as the proclamation to the 
 people that Clinton issued. Colonel Moultrie gallantly re- 
 pulsed Parker's ships, and they sailed away to the North. 
 It was more than two full years before the British renewed 
 operations in the southern zone. 
 
 IX. New York was the principal point of attack. About 
 a week after the adoption of the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence a powerful fleet with 30,000 troops on board arrived 
 in the bay, and took possession of Staten Island. Lord Howe 
 commanded the fleet, and his brother, General Howe, the 
 army. Situated at the mouth of the Hudson, the city was 
 the gateway to the interior of the State and to Canada. It
 
 A CONSPECTUS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 235 
 
 was within easy striking distance of the Connecticut and 
 Rhode Island towns. New Jersey lay open to invasion from 
 the city and bay, and Philadelphia was but ninety miles off 
 to the southwest. The richest parts of the country were 
 within a few days' march. It was the best center for naval 
 operations on the coast. It was the metropolis of a State 
 that was full of Tories, and a large number of its own popu- 
 lation were loyal to the king. All in all, New York was as 
 desirable a point for making war against the people of the 
 Atlantic Plain then as it is for carrying on their commerce 
 now. 
 
 X. After the British evacuation of Boston Washington 
 had hurried to New York, bringing with him as many of 
 his troops as possible. He had done his utmost to put the 
 city in a state of defense. Some 20,000 men of all kinds, 
 mostly undisciplined militia, had been gathered. Fortifica- 
 tions had been built at various favorable points below and 
 above the city ; but the defenses were insufficient, the stores 
 and armaments scanty, the troops too few in numbers and 
 too deficient in discipline. Toward the end of August the 
 fighting began. The Americans lost the battle of Long 
 Island. Washington now withdrew his forces to New York, 
 and General Howe soon followed him. Little by little the 
 whole island, including Forts Lee and Washington, fell into 
 Howe's hands. Before the end of November the British 
 commander had fully succeeded in the first object of his 
 campaign. New York was his, and so defenseless seemed 
 the country, whichever way he turned, that he might well 
 have been embarrassed to tell where he should deliver his 
 next blow. New York was the first city to fall into the 
 hands of the enemy, and it remained longest in their pos- 
 session. 
 
 XI. Washington threw what remained of his army across 
 the Hudson into New Jersey. Here the British followed 
 him, their purpose being to scatter the small remnant of his 
 forces, to overrun the country between the coast and the 
 Delaware, and to capture Philadelphia. December, 1776,
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 was the darkest month of the Revolution ; but Washington 
 managed to keep the field in the enemy's front, falling back 
 as he advanced. At last he crossed the Delaware, and se- 
 cured on the western bank of the stream all the boats with- 
 in reach. Lord Cornwallis, who was in command of the 
 pursuing forces, expected to " catch him and end the war " 
 as soon as the ice would bear his army. But Washington 
 recrossed the river and surprised the enemy, first at Trenton 
 and then at Princeton, inflicting severe losses at both places. 
 Next he marched to Morristown, in the mountains of north- 
 ern New Jersey, where Cornwallis did not dare attack him. 
 
 XII. Washington now held the range of low mountains 
 extending southwest from Peekskill on the Hudson across 
 the upper end of New Jersey, a line that he continued to 
 hold most of the time until the end of the war. The British 
 drew back toward Sandy Hook. The victories at Trenton 
 and Princeton greatly encouraged the Americans, and con- 
 vinced the king's generals that the war was not over. 
 They had failed to capture Philadelphia, and were really 
 shut up, on that side, to New York and the adjacent towns. 
 In December the British captured Newport, R. I., which 
 they held for the next three years. ' 
 
 XIII. Henceforth New York was the base of nearly all 
 the British operations in America, no matter in which of the 
 three zones they were conducted. These operations looked 
 to three ends : 1, to cut off New England by controlling 
 the Sound and the Hudson ; 2, to overrun and hold the 
 Middle States ; 3, to subjugate the South. To thwart them 
 in their large undertakings, while remaining apparently in- 
 different to their isolated and unimportant expeditions, now 
 became Washington's steady policy. To this end he occu- 
 pied strong positions in New Jersey, as at the hub of a 
 wheel, so near to New York that the British generals could 
 not venture out of the city in force without endangering 
 their base, while Washington kept his army compact for 
 effective fighting when he was disposed. New York and 
 Pennsylvania were the two theaters of war in 1777.
 
 A CONSPECTUS OF TUB AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 237 
 
 XIV. In the spring of 1775 Ethan Allen and Benedict 
 Arnold captured the British fortresses on Lake Champlain, 
 Ticonderoga and Cro wn Point. Later the sam e year, Generals 
 Schuyler and Montgomery, with a small force, descended 
 the lake, and in November captured Montreal. A little 
 later Montgomery effected a junction with General Arnold, 
 who with another small force had made his way through 
 the wilderness of Maine to Canada. The main object of this 
 double invasion was, if possible, to enlist the people of 
 Canada in the war and to effect a political union with them ; 
 but the Canadians, being of French descent, and having had 
 no such training in self-government as the Americans, were 
 indifferent to the contest. Montgomery and Arnold made a 
 spirited attack on Quebec, but were repulsed, and Mont- 
 gomery was killed. In the summer of 1776 the Americans 
 abandoned Canada and retreated to the forts on Lake 
 Champlain. 
 
 Under the circumstances, the invasion of Canada and the 
 determined effort to effect its conquest may seem to have 
 been doubtful policy. On the other hand, Congress was 
 extremely anxious to induce the Canadians to make common 
 cause with the States against England, and even more anx- 
 ious to ward off Indian attacks from that quarter, and to 
 keep the country from becoming the base of such move- 
 ments as those of Burgoyne, made two years later. John 
 Adams wrote at the time : 
 
 The regulars [of the British army], if they get full possession of 
 that province and the navigation of the St. Lawrence River above 
 Deschambault at least above the mouth of the Sorel will have 
 nothing to interrupt their communication with Niagara, Detroit, 
 Michilimackinac ; they will have the navigation of the five Great 
 Lakes quite as far as the Mississippi River ; they will have a free 
 communication with all the numerous tribes of Indians extended 
 along the frontiers of all the colonies, and by their trinkets and 
 bribes will induce them to take up the hatchet and spread blood 
 and fire among the inhabitants; by which means all the frontier in- 
 habitants will be driven in upon the middle settlements at a time
 
 233 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 when the inhabitants of the seaports and coasts will be driven back 
 by the British navy. Is this picture too high-colored ? Perhaps it 
 is ; but surely we must maintain our power in Canada.* 
 
 XV. In the summer of 1777 General Burgoyne ascended 
 Lake Champlaiu with 8,000 men. He expected to effect a 
 junction near Albany with one British army from New 
 York, and with another that should march from Lake 
 Ontario by the way of Oswego and the Mohawk Valley, and 
 then to descend the Hudson. His aim was to subdue the 
 State of New York, to hold the whole line from the St. La,w- 
 rence to New York Bay, and to separate New England from 
 the Union. He captured the lake forts, and drove the small 
 American force before him as he advanced. Passing over 
 the " divide " to the southward slope, he began to encounter 
 such difficulties as many another general has encountered 
 who finds himself in an enemy's country, far from his base 
 of supplies. Provisions became scarce, his men fell by dis- 
 ease and in battle, the enemy in increasing numbers hung 
 upon his rear, and became bolder in his front. A detach- 
 ment that he sent to Bennington was annihilated. Checked 
 at Bemus Heights and Stillwater in his efforts to break 
 through the American army, defeated in his attempt to fall 
 back toward Canada, and failing to meet the forces that he 
 expected from the South and West, Burgoyne, at Saratoga, 
 in October, surrendered to General Gates what remained of 
 the army that he had led from Canada a few months before. 
 Meantime General Clinton was ascending the Hudson, but 
 learning of the surrender he retraced his steps to New York, 
 while the force dispatched from Lake Ontario under St. 
 Leger was defeated at Oriskany and compelled to turn back 
 whence it came. After Burgoyne's defeat no further at- 
 tempt was made to split the Union by driving a wedge 
 through it from North to South. In the meantime impor- 
 tant events were taking place in the middle zone. 
 
 XVI. In the spring of 1777 General Howe sought vainly 
 
 * Works, vol. ix, p. 399.
 
 A CONSPECTUS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 239 
 
 to bring Washington out of his strong position in northern 
 New Jersey. He did not dare attempt a march from New 
 York to Philadelphia, lest Washington should strike him in 
 the flank as he passed by. So in July, leaving a force to hold 
 New York, he put to sea with eight thousand men to attempt 
 from the south the capture of that city. Philadelphia was 
 as large and wealthy a city as New York, and in some re- 
 spects was even more important. Surrounded by a rich and 
 populous country, situated on the Delaware midway between 
 the North and the South, and readily accessible from both 
 directions, it was the continental city of the Revolution. 
 
 XVII. General Howe landed his forces at Elkton, at the 
 head of Chesapeake Bay. Appreciating fully the impor- 
 tance of the city, Washington marched south and threw his 
 army across the line of the British advance. At Chadd's 
 Ford, on the Brandy wine, he was defeated. Howe advanced 
 and took possession of Philadelphia. Washington attacked 
 again at Germantown, and was again defeated. Forts Mif- 
 flin and Mercer, which had compelled the British general 
 to ascend the Chesapeake rather than the Delaware, soon 
 fell into his hands. General Howe proceeded to quarter 
 his troops in Philadelphia. Washington marched up the 
 Schuylkill to Valley Forge, where his army passed a miser- 
 able winter, half -fed, half -clothed, half -housed, and scourged 
 by disease. The American cause seemed almost as desperate 
 as the winter before. Still Washington managed to hold 
 his troops together. In the meantime the capture of Bur- 
 goyne was preparing important events abroad. 
 
 XVIII. Ever since the French and Indian War France 
 had hoped to see England and her American colonies es- 
 tranged. She remembered keenly her own losses in that 
 war, and still bore her traditional ill-will to England. 
 Knowing this, the American Congress had sought to bring 
 France into an American alliance. Convinced by the Dec- 
 laration of Independence that the States meant separation, 
 and by the overthrow of Burgoyne that they would not im- 
 probably succeed in the end, the French Government now
 
 240 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 yielded to persuasion, and early in 1778 entered into a treaty 
 of commerce and a treaty of alliance with the young nation. 
 This alliance proved to be of the greatest importance. The 
 next year Spain also declared war against England. 
 
 XIX. In the spring of 1778 the British line was an arc 
 extending from Newport to Philadelphia. It was too long 
 to be held against a strong and active enemy occupying a 
 position without the arc, and free to attack it with his whole 
 force, as Washington was, at any point. News now came 
 that a French fleet and army might at any time be expected 
 on the coast. Sir Henry Clinton, who had succeeded Howe 
 in the chief command, thought it necessary to evacuate 
 Philadelphia and concentrate his forces at New York. Not 
 daring to try the fortunes of the sea, for fear of the French, 
 he abandoned the city and began a march toward New 
 York across New Jersey. Washington hastened to follow 
 him, and an indecisive battle was fought at Monmouth 
 Court House. Clinton reached Sandy Hook, and arrived at 
 his destination by way of the bay. 
 
 XX. The British commanders had now failed in the 
 Middle States as well as in the North. They continued to 
 hold New York to the end of the war, while Washington 
 held, as before, his strong line extending from the Hudson 
 to Morristown. In 1778 Count D'Estaing arrived on the 
 coast with a French fleet and army ; but after threatening 
 Newport and New York, accomplishing nothing, he sailed 
 to the West Indies. After this there was little fighting 
 north of the Potomac. However, a few noteworthy events 
 on land and water should be noticed before we go to the 
 South. 
 
 XXI. In 1778-79 George Rogers Clark, acting under 
 the authority of Virginia, gathered a force west of the 
 mountains, crossed the Ohio River, and wrested from the 
 British the territory now comprising the States of Illinois 
 and Indiana. In 1779 General Anthony Wayne stormed 
 Stony Point, on the Hudson. Toward the close of the next 
 year General Arnold attempted to betray to the enemy
 
 A CONSPECTUS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 241 
 
 West Point, which he commanded, but his plan was de- 
 feated. From time to time the British commanders sent 
 marauding expeditions along the coast and these plun- 
 dered and burned some of the fairest towns of Connecticut, 
 New Jersey, and Virginia. On the frontier the Tory and 
 the Indian, each rivaling the other in deeds of blood, laid 
 waste some flourishing settlements, as Wyoming and Cherry 
 Valley. 
 
 XXII. Before the war had begun the States had reached 
 a high degree of maritime enterprise and prosperity. In a 
 single line of ocean industry they won from Edmund Burke 
 the eulogium : " No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. 
 No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the 
 perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor 
 the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever 
 carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the ex- 
 tent to which it has been pushed by this recent people a 
 people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not 
 yet hardened into the bone of manhood." Naturally such 
 a people as this sought their enemy on the water as well as 
 on the land. They were unable to cope with the English 
 navy ; but their privateers vexed British commerce and 
 seized many rich prizes. The voyages of some of the Amer- 
 ican armed vessels are tales of wild ocean romance. The 
 most famous was that of John Paul Jones along the coast 
 of England and Scotland in the autumn of 1778 a voyage 
 that ended in the terrific battle of the Bon Homme Rich- 
 ard and the Serapis. 
 
 XXIII. After the retreat from Philadelphia, in 1778, the 
 British generals turned their attention mainly to the South. 
 Late in that year an expedition from New York captured 
 Savannah, and soon all Georgia fell into British hands. In 
 September, 1779, General Lincoln and Count d'Estaing at- 
 tempted the recapture of Savannah, but failed. Early the 
 next year, General Clinton, having first caused Newport to 
 be evacuated and collected his available troops at New York, 
 sailed to Charleston. In May he compelled the surrender
 
 24:2 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 of the city and its garrison of six thousand men, commanded 
 by General Lincoln. Clinton now returned to New York, 
 leaving Lord Cornwallis with a force deemed adequate to 
 finish the conquest of the whole South. 
 
 XXIV. The Southern States were full of Tories. The 
 ferocious partisan warfare that had raged in Georgia for 
 many months now extended to South Carolina, involving 
 the State from the mountains to the sea. The history of the 
 Revolution has not its parallel. With its swamp encamp- 
 ments, night marches, hard-fought battles, desperate ven- 
 tures, and narrow escapes, this is the most thrilling chapter 
 in the whole history of the war. In these encounters Colo- 
 nel Tarleton, commander of Cornwallis's dragoons, greatly 
 distinguished himself on the one side, and Generals Sumter 
 and Marion on the other. 
 
 XXV. General Gates, the victor of Saratoga, was now 
 the commander of the Southern army ; completely defeated 
 at Camden in August, 1780, he disappeared from the scene, 
 and General Greene succeeded him. By pursuing a policy 
 at once bold and wary, now advancing and now retreat- 
 ing, now fighting and now eluding his enemy, Greene re- 
 stored the desperate fortunes of the war. General Morgan, 
 one of bis subordinates, defeated Tarleton at Cowpens, in 
 January, 1781. Greene himself was defeated at Guilford 
 Court House in March of the same year, but Cornwallis 
 gained nothing by the victory, and soon retired to Wilming- 
 ton on the coast. Greene now moved down into South 
 Carolina, where he found Lord Rawdon in command of the 
 English forces. Here Greene was generally defeated in the 
 fighting, but he conducted his campaign with such caution, 
 activity, and prudence, that by the end of the year he had 
 practically shut the enemy up in Charleston and Savannah. 
 He won also the important battle of Eutaw Springs. 
 
 XXVI. Cornwallis, at Wilmington, knew nothing of 
 Greene's march to South Carolina until it was too late to 
 stop him. So, thinking Lord Rawdon strong enough to 
 hold that State, he turned his attention to the North. Since
 
 A CONSPECTUS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 243 
 
 January a British force had been in the waters of Virginia, 
 burning towns and laying waste plantations. Cornwallis 
 took now the resolution to march to the Chesapeake, effect 
 a junction with this force, and subdue Virginia. The march 
 was made and the junction effected, and his lordship found 
 himself in command of eight thousand men. In obedience 
 to orders from New York to hold and fortify some point on 
 the coast accessible to the fleet, he made choice of the junc- 
 tion of James and York Rivers. Cornwallis arrived in Vir- 
 ginia in May, and took possession of Yorktown in August. 
 
 XXVII. General Rochambeau, with a French army, had 
 landed at Newport in the summer of 1780, and afterward 
 joined Washington on the Hudson. Early in 1781 Wash- 
 ington began to threaten New York. He expected the ar- 
 rival of a French force strong enough to enable him to 
 invest the city. But in August he learned that the fleet and 
 army about to arrive on the coast from the West Indies, 
 to remain four months only, were destined for Chesapeake 
 Bay. He now resolved to march rapidly to Virginia, join 
 the French, and capture Cornwallis before succor could 
 reach him from the North. Accordingly he put his own 
 and Rochambeau's troops in motion for the South, leaving 
 a force sufficient to hold his old line, and taking pains to 
 conceal his purpose from Clinton, until his left flank was 
 beyond striking distance from New York. 
 
 XXVIII. The fleet of Count De Grasse arrived in the 
 Capes at the end of August. This fleet closed the bay to 
 Cornwallis's escape, and beat off a British squadron sent to 
 his relief. The allied army from the North marched to the 
 head of the Chesapeake, and was then conveyed down the 
 bay in transports. Lafayette had commanded for some 
 time a small force in Virginia, with which he had vainly 
 sought to oppose the British. A junction of the various 
 forces was speedily effected, and on September 30 the invest- 
 ment of Yorktown began. So vigorously and skillfully was 
 the siege prosecuted that Lord Cornwallis, unable longer 
 to resist the attacks by land, or to escape by sea, on Octo-
 
 244: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 ber 19, 1781, surrendered his army, with all his artillery, 
 stores, and munitions of war. And this ended the Virginia 
 campaign. 
 
 XXIX. The campaign in Virginia over, De Grasse sailed 
 with the French fleet to the West Indies ; and Washington, 
 having first sent a re-enforcement to Greene, returned to his 
 watch on the Hudson. The surrender of Cornwallis was 
 the real end of the contest. Partisan warfare went on at 
 the South some time longer, but the great armies now stood 
 still, waiting the motions of the diplomatists. Yorktown 
 produced a profound impression in England. Opposition 
 to the continuance of the war became so strong, that George 
 III was compelled to consent to peace and to independence. 
 Negotiations between the representatives of the two Govern- 
 ments began in Paris in April, 1782, but events moved so 
 slowly that it was November 30th before the preliminary 
 treaty of peace was signed. In July, 1782, the British evacu- 
 ated Savannah, in December of the same year Charleston, 
 and in November, 1783, New York. Washington disbanded 
 the Continental army in April, 1783, and in December fol- 
 lowing surrendered his commission to Congress. The de- 
 finitive treaty of peace bears the date, September 3, 1783. 
 
 To put such a general view as this before a pupil when 
 he begins the history of the Eevolution would be to invite 
 failure. The pupil must begin with details, and gradually 
 work out his own generalization. A conspectus is the end 
 and not the beginning of the study. At the same time, the 
 teacher can not assist the pupil to gain that end unless he 
 clearly sees the conspectus from the beginning.
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE WAR OF 1812. 
 
 References. Bancroft, Hildreth, Bryant and Gay, Schouler, and 
 Adams: Histories of the United States; Winsor: The Narrative 
 and Critical History of America ; Hart : Formation of the Union, 
 1750-1829. 
 
 THE War of 1812 presents to our view a large number of 
 military operations scattered over wide areas, and more or 
 less isolated and disconnected in character. It is even more 
 difficult to reduce them to something like unity than it is to 
 perform the same office in the case of the Revolution. We 
 must first seize the geographical relations of the United 
 States and the American possessions of Great Britain, ob- 
 serve the distribution of population, compare the military 
 and naval strength of the two powers, and master the 
 main ideas that they desired to carry out. A glance at 
 these factors will show that, save on the ocean, the war was 
 necessarily confined to three great theaters : the Northern 
 frontier, the Atlantic seaboard, and the Gulf coast. 
 
 The naval superiority of England made an invasion of 
 Canada by the Gulf of St. Lawrence impossible, and also 
 precluded attacks upon the British West Indies. Further- 
 more, the vast wilderness extending from the St. Croix to 
 the cleft that divides the Appalachian Mountains was a se- 
 cure shield to Canada, and also to New England. The 
 Champlain-Richelieu Valley the old highway of war 
 still lay open to both powers. In the region of the upper 
 lakes the only war that was possible was a war of posts. 
 But at the narrowing of the great Northern water-way the
 
 240 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 combatants could get at and strike each other : the Detroit 
 Eiver, the Niagara River, and the upper St. Lawrence. Even 
 at these places, however, war could be carried on only under 
 great difficulties. In 1810 there was not a considerable town 
 in the western half of New York ; the names Syracuse, 
 Rochester, and Buffalo do not appear on the map. The 
 population of Ohio was 230,000, Indiana 25,000, Illinois 
 12,000, Michigan 5,000, in the first three States mostly found 
 in the southern parts, and in the fourth in and around De- 
 troit. The total population of Canada was but 400,000, of 
 which a quarter only was found in the present province of 
 Ontario. Good roads did not exist on either side of the fron- 
 tier, and transportation was difficult and expensive. The 
 lakes could not become scenes of naval conflict until both 
 powers could construct armed vessels. 
 
 The enormous preponderance of England's naval force 
 made it easy for her to blockade the whole coast from the 
 St. Croix to the St. Marys, and also to land troops at almost 
 any point that she chose. Halifax, the Bermudas, and Ja- 
 maica furnished the best possible bases of operation for these 
 purposes. In the Gulf of Mexico her naval supremacy and 
 her naval stations enabled England to do as she pleased, so 
 long as she kept within cannon shot of her ships of war. 
 
 Although the three regions now mentioned were exten- 
 sive, it would not be difficult to arrange the facts in due order, 
 were it not for the elements of time and causation. These 
 complicate the problem. Geography and causation, how- 
 ever, are so closely related that we may consider them as 
 one. Accordingly, three questions arise relating to method : 
 
 1. Shall we arrange the facts in three great groups or 
 series, as though the whole action were confined to the three 
 regions respectively? This would be excluding the time 
 element, save as it appears within the groups. It would be 
 a simple method, but it would leave wholly out of view, in 
 every case, what was going on in the two other regions at 
 the same time. The result would be that our views would 
 be partial ones.
 
 THE WAR OF 1812. 247 
 
 2. Shall we pay exclusive attention to time, arranging the 
 facts in the order of the dates on which they occur, without 
 regard to place or causation ? This would also be simple, 
 but it would be open to the fatal objection that events would 
 be thrown wholly out of geographical and causal relation, 
 and that the pupil would form a general picture of the 
 whole field, but not a clear picture of any part of it. 
 
 3. Shall we combine the two methods just suggested, par- 
 tially sacrificing time to place, and place to time, thus some- 
 what complicating the picture, but also heightening the 
 effect produced by its several parts ? This, no doubt, is the 
 proper course to follow. It can be followed the more readily 
 because, for the first year, little was done save at the 
 North. 
 
 The War of 1812 was forced upon the country, under 
 great provocation indeed, by the Young Republicans, who 
 then dominated the Republican party and the country. 
 These political leaders promised in advance that the war 
 should be one of conquest. Mr. Clay, easily the first of 
 them, declared : " We can take Canada without soldiers. 
 We have only to send officers into the province, and the 
 people, disaffected toward their own Government, will rally 
 round our standard. . . .We have the Canadas as much un- 
 der our command as Great Britain has the ocean, and the 
 way to conquer her on the ocean is to drive her from the 
 land. I am not for stopping at Quebec or anywhere else, 
 but I would take the whole continent from them and ask no 
 favors." John Randolph, ridiculing such pretensions as 
 these, said the Young Republicans looked for a "holiday 
 campaign," " with no expense of blood or treasure on our 
 part," but " Canada was to conquer herself, to be subdued by 
 the principal of fraternity." But the British did not intend 
 to permit the war to become one of defense merely ; the 
 home Government prepared to support the Canadians with 
 all the troops and ships that could be spared from the great 
 struggle then going on in Europe. 
 
 If we regard the Northern water-way as an arc of a circle,
 
 248 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 we shall see that the British stood within, the Americans 
 without that arc. This relation gave the British important 
 advantages : news, orders, troops and munitions of war, 
 could be sent from Quebec and Montreal to Mackinaw or 
 Detroit much more quickly than from Washington or New 
 York ; the British generals could move on chords of the 
 circle, while the Americans were compelled to move on 
 its circumference. General Hull, it will be remembered, 
 first heard of the declaration of war from the enemy. The 
 British had another great advantage in their Indian allies. 
 The more resolute of the Western Indians had never made 
 up their minds that the West was lost to their race ; and be- 
 fore the breaking out of hostilities, Tecumseh, passing back 
 and forth between the Indians of the North and of the South, 
 had succeeded in constructing his " dam " to hold back " the 
 mighty waters ready to overflow his people." The people 
 of Michigan complained with reason that they stood on a 
 double frontier, facing outward toward Canada and inward 
 toward the Indians. As a vigorous writer has said : 
 
 During the War of 1812 there was played out the final act in 
 the military drama of which the West had been the stage during 
 the lifetime of a generation. For this war had a twofold aspect : 
 on the seaboard it was regarded as a contest for the rights of our 
 sailors and as a revolt against Great Britain's domineering inso- 
 lence ; west of the mountains, on the other hand, it was simply a re- 
 newal on a large scale of the Indian struggles, all the red-skinned 
 peoples joining together in a great and last effort to keep the lands 
 which were being wrested from them ; and there Great Britain's part 
 was chiefly that of ally to the savages, helping them with her gold 
 and with her well-drilled mercenary troops. The battle of the 
 Thames is memorable rather because of the defeat and death of Te- 
 cumseh than because of the flight of Proctor and the capture of his 
 British regulars ; and for the opening of the Southwest, the ferocious 
 fight nt the Horseshoe Bend was almost as important as the far 
 more famous contest of New Orleans.* 
 
 * Eoosevelt : Thomas H. Benton (Commonwealth Series), p. 8.
 
 THE WAR OF 1812. 249 
 
 1812. The war opened in the Northwest. Hull's inva- 
 sion of Canada proved a miserable failure, and on August 16 
 he surrendered Detroit and all Michigan to General Brock. 
 A British force from Georgian Bay had seized Mackinaw 
 still earlier. It is evident that the British ministry medi- 
 tated the reconquest of the whole region. Their Indian 
 allies drew them to the Detroit frontier. Green Bay soon 
 followed Mackinaw, and in 1814 a strong force of Canadians 
 and Indians captured Prairie du Chien, from which point a 
 smaller force descended the Mississippi to Rock Island, 
 which it fortified and held. The purpose of the home 
 Government accounts for the course of General Proctor in 
 seeking to coerce the citizens of Detroit to take the oath of 
 allegiance to the King of England. 
 
 Hull's crossing of the Detroit was only one of several 
 projected offensive movements for the year 1812. One 
 army of invasion was collected on the Niagara, a second at 
 the foot of Lake Ontario and the head of the St. Lawrence, 
 and a third at Plattsburg, on Lake Champlain. While none 
 of these expeditions proved as disastrous as Hull's, they all 
 signally failed to accomplish their purpose. General Brown 
 repelled an attack upon Ogdensburg, but Van Rensselaer's 
 and Symthe's attempts on Queenstown Heights and Fort 
 Erie came to nothing, while Dearborn's advance upon 
 Montreal from Plattsburg did not go beyond the interna- 
 tional line. 
 
 1813. The most important operations of the next year 
 were on the Detroit River and near the head of Lake Erie. 
 In this quarter General Harrison had been put in command, 
 and he did his utmost to drive the British forces back upon 
 their own soil. The battles of the Raisin, Fort Meigs, and 
 Fort Stephenson require only mention. General Hull had 
 told the authorities at Washington, before hostilities began, 
 that the command of Lake Erie was essential to success; the 
 Government wholly neglected his advice, but the British put 
 afloat a squadron that commanded the lake and rendered 
 the possession of Detroit secure. Commodore Perry's capture 
 
 18
 
 250 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 of this squadron, on September 10, 1813, reversed the con- 
 ditions of war on that frontier. General Harrison now 
 crossed to the Canadian side and occupied Maiden, at the 
 mouth of the river, which Proctor had abandoned. The 
 evacuation of Detroit by the British, its reoccupation by the 
 Americans, the pursuit of Proctor, and the victory of the 
 Thames soon followed. These successes practically closed the 
 contest on that frontier, so far as civilized warfare was con- 
 cerned. Harrison returned from the Thames to the Detroit, 
 and sailed with the regular troops under his command for 
 Buffalo. 
 
 All this year war raged on the Niagara and the St. Law- 
 rence, with alternate successes and defeats. Late in the sea- 
 son two armies began to move upon Montreal, one down 
 the St. Lawrence under General Wilkinson, the other down 
 Lake Champlain under General Hampton, but both ex- 
 peditions were abandoned long before they reached their 
 destination. Commodore Chauncey, our naval commander 
 on Lake Ontario, rendered services less brilliant than 
 Perry's, but still efficient and valuable. 
 
 In 1813 England established an efficient blockade along 
 our whole ocean front. An ingenious writer has likened 
 the navigable waters that stretch up into Virginia to u fin- 
 gers of an ocean hand, ready to bear to all the world the 
 produce of the soil " ; they gave equal opportunities for the 
 operations of war, as the history of three wars well shows. 
 Early in the year the British seized the wrist that is, the en- 
 trance to Chesapeake Bay and prepared to make the most 
 of their success. But the principal events in that quarter 
 came the following year. 
 
 1814. The tide of battle at the North now took a favor- 
 able turn. The Americans won important advantages on the 
 Niagara. The most notable occurrence was the formidable 
 military and naval expedition that was sent from Canada to 
 effect a purpose like the one that Burgoyne had attempted 
 in 1777. It advanced to Plattsburg ; but Commodore Dow- 
 ney was compelled to strike his colors to Macdonough, and
 
 THE WAR OF 1812. 251 
 
 then Sir George Prevost, commander of the land force, beat 
 a hasty retreat to Canada. 
 
 The same year the enemy prepared to strike a fatal blow 
 in the Chesapeake region. Here the important events were 
 the British march upon Washington, the battle of Bladens- 
 burg, the capture of the city, the unsuccessful bombardment 
 of Fort McHenry, and the battle of Baltimore. These opera- 
 tions over, Admiral Cockburn established his headquarters 
 on Cumberland Island, off the Georgia coast. In 1813, also, 
 a British force seized Maine as far west as the Penobscot, 
 with a view of changing the boundary on that frontier on 
 the conclusion of peace. 
 
 At the South events may be treated consecutively. In 
 1810 Louisiana had a population of 76,000 ; the Southwest 
 Territory, now Alabama and Mississippi, 40,000 ; Tennessee, 
 261,000 ; and Kentucky, 406,000. The powerful Creek Con- 
 federacy occupied an extensive region north of the Gulf. 
 In that year the United States took possession of Mobile, al- 
 though Spain claimed it as lying within her territory. In 
 1813 the Tennessee militia were called out, under General 
 Jackson, to overawe the Creeks, but as the savages appeared 
 peaceable the troops were disbanded. Then followed the 
 bloody massacre of Fort Mimms, near Mobile, in which nearly 
 five hundred men, women, and children were slaughtered. 
 Jackson now marched into the Indian country and inflicted 
 upon the Creeks a series of defeats that effectually broke 
 their power. About this time some British forces arrived on 
 the Gulf coast, and there ensued the bombardment of Fort 
 Bowyer and the affair of Barrancas. Jackson also seized 
 Pensacola, because, as he said, the Spaniards gave aid and 
 comfort to the Indians. 
 
 In 1814 the British ministry took advantage of the lull 
 of war in Europe to send to Canada, to the Chesapeake, and 
 to the Gulf of Mexico strong forces. The objects of the 
 powerful expedition sent to the Gulf were two in number : 
 to seize the mouth of the Mississippi, so as to cut the interior 
 off once more from the sea, and to occupy and hold valuable
 
 252 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 territory that would give them an advantage in treating for 
 peace. Instructions issued to the commanders recommended 
 attempts to seduce the people of Louisiana from their alle- 
 giance to the United States and to effect the return of that 
 territory to Spain. These were large plans. Before they 
 could be executed, however, the treaty of peace negotiated 
 at Ghent adjourned them indefinitely ; hut had it not been 
 so, General Jackson's brilliant victory at New Orleans would 
 have made them impossible. 
 
 In the negotiations at Ghent the British commissioners, 
 acting under instructions, sought at first to secure large 
 territorial advantages. They demanded (1) that a neutral 
 belt between the United States and Canada should be estab- 
 lished for the perpetual occupancy of the Indians, upon 
 which neither party should be permitted to encroach, thus 
 keeping the two countries asunder ; (2) that the interna- 
 tional line should run along the southern side of the Great 
 Lakes ; and (3) that a strip of Maine should be ceded such as 
 would give England a road from Halifax to Quebec. In the 
 end the boundaries of 1783 were re-established, and commis- 
 sions were appointed to settle all disputed points respecting 
 them, as will be explained in the next chapter. The Treaty 
 of Ghent bears the date, December 24, 1814.
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE TERRITORIAL GROWTH OP THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 References. I. General View. Johnston : Lalor's Cyclopaedia of 
 Political Science (Annexations); Walker: Statistical Atlas of the 
 United States, Ninth Census ; Winsor and Channing : Narrative and 
 Critical History of the United States (Appendix to Chap. VII., Vol. 
 VII.) ; Donaldson : The Public Domain ; Hart : The Quarterly Jour- 
 nal of Economics, Vol. I., pp. 169, 251 (The Disposition of our Public 
 Lands), The Epoch Maps ; Eeclus : The Earth and its Inhabitants, 
 North America, III. (The United States, Chap. I.) ; MacCoun : His- 
 torical Geography of the United States ; McMaster : History of the 
 People of the United States, Vol. II. (map showing land acquired 
 by the United States from 1783 to 1885). 
 
 II. Treaties. Government publications: Treaties and Conven- 
 tions between the United States and other Powers : The Statutes at 
 Large of the United States ; Charters and Constitutions (edited by 
 Poore) ; The Resolution to admit Texas, Statutes at Large, Vol. IX., 
 p. 108, and Poore, Vol. II., p. 1764. 
 
 III. Territorial claims made by Congress at the Revolution. 
 The Secret Journals of the Congress of the Confederation, Vol. II., 
 pp. 225, 326, 445 ; Vol. III., p. 155 ; Winsor : Narrative and Critical 
 History, Vol. VII. (editorial notes to Chap. II.). 
 
 IV. Negotiations at Paris, 1782-'83. Diplomatic Correspondence 
 of the Revolution, Vol. X., p. 7 (report made by the American com- 
 missioners); id., Vol. VIII., pp. 21, 129 (Jay's Letters); Bancroft: 
 History, Vol. V., Chaps. V.-V1I. : Jay : The Peace Negotiations of 
 1782, 1783, an address delivered before the New York Historical 
 Society, November 27, 1883, Narrative and Critical History, Vol. 
 VII., Chap. II. (The peace negotiations of 1782-*83) ; Winsor : Nar- 
 rative and Critical History (editorial notes to Vol. VII., Chap. VII.) ;
 
 254: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Wharton : International Law of the United States, Vol. III., Appen- 
 dix ; (Peace negotiations of 1782-'83 with Great Britain) ; Angell : 
 Narrative and Critical History, Vol. VII., Chap. VII. (The diplo- 
 macy of the United States) ; Lyman : The Diplomacy of the United 
 States, Vol. I. ; Lecky : History of England in the Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury, Vol. IV., Chap. XV. ; Lord Fitzmaurice : Life of William Earl 
 Shelburne, Vol. III., Chaps. IV., VI. ; John Adams : Works, Vol. I. 
 (Appendix 6). 
 
 V. Louisiana. Adams : History of the United States of America, 
 Vol. I., Chaps. XIV.-XVIL, Vol. II., Chaps. 11.- V. (the best existing 
 account) ; McMaster : History of the People of the United States, 
 Vol. II., Chap. XIII. ; Hart : The Formation of the Constitution ; 
 Yon Hoist: Constitutional and Political History of the United 
 States, 1750-1828; Lyman, Angell, Hildreth, and Schouler: as be- 
 fore ; Jefferson's writings, Vol. IV. 
 
 VI. Florida. Adams, Lyman, Hildreth, Schouler, Angell, Von 
 Hoist, and Hart : as before ; Morse : John Quincy Adams ; Oilman : 
 James Monroe ; Sumner : Andrew Jackson. 
 
 VII. Texas. Schurz: Henry Clay; Roosevelt: T. H. Benton ; 
 Von Hoist : The Constitutional and Political History, 1828-'46, John 
 C. Calhoun ; Benton : Thirty -Years' View (passim) ; Greeley : The 
 American Conflict, Vol. I. ; Yoakum : History of Texas ; Wilson : 
 Division and Reunion ; Schouler : as before. 
 
 VIII. The first Mexican annexation. Schurz, Roosevelt, Bentou, 
 Greeley, Schouler, and Wilson : as before ; Von Hoist : Constitu- 
 tional and Political History of the United States, 1846-'50, John C. 
 Calhoun. 
 
 IX. The second Mexican annexation. Schouler and Wilson : as 
 before ; Von Hoist : Constitutional and Political History, 1850-'54. 
 
 X. Oregon. Barrows : Oregon ; Greenhow : History of Ore- 
 gon and California ; Benton : Thirty Years' View ; H. H. Bancroft : 
 History of Oregon ; Curtis : Life of James Buchanan, Life of Daniel 
 Webster. 
 
 XI. Alaska. H. H. Bancroft : History of Alaska ; Sumner : 
 Works, Vol. XI., p. 181 (The Cession of Russian America to the 
 United States). 
 
 IN 1783 the United States contained eight hundred and 
 twenty thousand square miles of territory. At present they 
 contain three million five hundred thousand square miles.
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 255 
 
 If we follow the steps of this extraordinary territorial 
 growth we shall pass in review some of the principal forces 
 that have acted in the national history, and also furnish an 
 illustration of the organization of facts. 
 
 /. The Original United States. 
 
 The Treaty of Paris, made with England at the close of 
 the Revolutionary War, established our independence, and 
 also gave us our first national boundaries, as follows : North, 
 the highlands dividing the rivers that flow to the St. Law- 
 rence from the rivers that flow to the Atlantic Ocean, the 
 Connecticut River from its source to parallel 45 north, said 
 parallel to its intersection with the St. Lawrence, the middle 
 of the Lake and St. Lawrence water-way to Long Lake, the 
 middle of this lake and the water connections beyond it to the 
 northwesternmost corner of the Lake of the Woods, and a 
 line drawn due west from this point to the Mississippi River ; 
 West, the middle of the Mississippi from this point of inter- 
 section to parallel 31 north latitude ; South, parallel 31 to 
 the Chattahoochee River, the middle of this stream to its 
 junction with the Flint, a straight line drawn from this 
 junction to the head of the St. Marys, and the middle of the 
 St. Marys to the sea ; East, the ocean, including all islands 
 within twenty leagues of the coast, save such as belonged to 
 Nova Scotia, the middle of the St. Croix River from its mouth 
 to its source, and a straight line drawn due north from such 
 source to the place of beginning. 
 
 The rule that the negotiators on both sides professed to 
 follow was, that the United States should comprise the terri- 
 tory that the thirteen colonies collectively had comprised ; 
 but the boundaries of the colonies had been so vaguely de- 
 fined that serious differences of opinion arose as to the appli- 
 cation of the rule. At first, the American commissioners 
 claimed that the St. Johns was the old boundary between 
 New England and Nova Scotia, while the English insisted 
 first upon the Piscataqua and afterward the Kennebec, and 
 the Penobscot. On the north, Congress had instructed its
 
 256 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 representatives to contend for a straight line from the inter- 
 section of the forty-fifth parallel and the St. Lawrence to the 
 foot of Lake Nipissing, and a due west line from this point to 
 the Mississippi, but afterward authorized them to accept the 
 parallel of 45 from the Connecticut River to the Mississippi. 
 On the west, the Americans, acting under instructions, con- 
 tended that the middle of the Mississippi, which was made the 
 dividing line between England and Spain in 1763, had been 
 the western boundary of the colonies since that time, and 
 was now therefore the proper limit of the States, and in sup- 
 port of this claim they advanced the ancient charters that 
 had run through the continent from sea to sea and the 
 Iroquois title of New York. The British diplomatists replied 
 that the old charters had long before been annulled, and held 
 that a royal proclamation issued in 1763 had limited the colo- 
 nies on the west by a line so drawn that it would separate the 
 heads of the streams of the Atlantic Plain from those of the 
 Mississippi Valley. Still, south of the Ohio they were will- 
 ing to yield ; north of that river the country should remain 
 a dependency of Canada. The Americans denied that the 
 proclamation of 1763 had established a new boundary line, 
 while they pointed to the facts that there were already con- 
 siderable settlements of American citizens south of the Ohio, 
 and that the region northwest of that river had been con- 
 quered by American troops in 1778, and had since been held 
 by them. Spain had ceded Florida to England in 1763, but 
 in the course of the war that she declared against England 
 in 1779 she had recovered most of it ; moreover, she was de- 
 sirous of retaining all Florida at the peace, and also of 
 obtaining possession of the eastern half of the Mississippi 
 Valley south of the Ohio. England finally agreed that the 
 parallel of 31 should be our boundary from the Mississippi 
 to the Chattahoochee, but insisted upon the insertion of a 
 secret article in the treaty, to the effect that the parallel pass- 
 ing through the mouth of the Yazoo, between these two 
 rivers, should be the boundary, provided she should still 
 retain Florida at the conclusion of peace ; but as Florida
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 257 
 
 passed to Spain in 1783 this secret article fell to the 
 ground. 
 
 Such were our first boundaries as drawn upon paper. 
 Drawn upon the earth, they led through vast wastes of forest 
 and waters of which the geography was largely unknown, 
 and nothing was more natural than that disputes should 
 arise between the parties when the time came to run out and 
 mark the lines. 
 
 First, England ceded Florida to Spain about the time 
 that she gave us our boundaries, without assigning any 
 limits whatever. As England in 1764 had bounded the west- 
 ern province of Florida on the north by the parallel passing 
 through the mouth of the Yazoo from the Mississippi to the 
 Chattahoochee, Spain now claimed that parallel as her 
 northern limit. In 1795 she yielded the point in our favor, 
 and a few years later the line was surveyed and marked. 
 
 On the north, the first controversy was as to the identity 
 of the St. Croix River. This was settled in the interest of 
 the United States in 1798, by a joint commission appointed 
 under one of the articles of Jay's treaty of four years be- 
 fore. The Treaty of Ghent (1814) divided the boundary 
 questions at issue between the two contracting powers into 
 four groups, and referred them to three joint commissions. 
 The first commission should deal with the islands in Passa- 
 maquoddy and Fundy Bays ; the second commission should 
 locate the line from the head of the St. Croix to the St. Law- 
 rence ; while the third one should first run and mark the 
 Lake and St. Lawrence boundary to the head of Lake Huron, 
 and afterward the remaining section to the farthest corner of 
 the Lake of the Woods. The first commission completed its 
 work in 1817, and the third one finished the water-way line 
 to the head of Lake Huron in 1822. The second commission 
 could not agree, nor could the third one agree as to the Lake 
 Superior division. The controversies as to these two sec- 
 tions of our northern boundary were finally disposed of by 
 the Webster- Ashburton treaty of 1842. Leng before this, it 
 had been discovered that the Mississippi could not be reached
 
 258 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 by drawing a line due west from the northwestern point of 
 the Lake of the Woods. Still further, the United States had 
 purchased Louisiana without definite limits, which made it 
 necessary for the two powers to establish a boundary between 
 that province and Canada. The two questions were dis- 
 posed of in 1818, by a treaty which provided that a due north- 
 and-south line should be drawn through the farthest point 
 of the Lake of the Woods to the forty-ninth parallel, and 
 that parallel 49 should be the boundary between the two 
 countries from the point of intersection to the Stony Moun- 
 tains. These several treaties account for the Minnesota 
 "jog." 
 
 II. Louisiana. 
 
 In a previous chapter we have seen that English settle- 
 ments west of the Alleghanies did not begin until the mid- 
 dle of the last century. Even then they increased but 
 slowly, until the close of the Revolutionary War. The cen- 
 sus takers of 1790 reported 228,758 people on the Western 
 waters, 63,518 in Pennsylvania, 55,873 in western Virginia, 
 73,677 in Kentucky, and 35,691 in Tennessee. In 1800 this 
 population had increased to 584,728, and in 1810 to 1,279,172. 
 The relative increase was even more significant. In 1790 
 the Western. population was less than six per cent of that of 
 the whole country, in 1800 more than eleven per cent, and in 
 1810 nearly eighteen per cent. For their numbers these peo- 
 ple were remarkable for enterprise and force. In respect to 
 markets and travel they had practically cut themselves off 
 from the Atlantic seaboard by crossing the mountains. The 
 only practicable roads were the Indian trails, which could be 
 traveled only by pack horses, and by the trail so widened 
 by the axe as to admit of the passage of wheeled vehicles. 
 At the beginning of this century the best road from Phila- 
 delphia or Baltimore to Cincinnati lay through the Shenan- 
 doah Valley and Cumberland Gap, and so on through cen- 
 tral Kentucky. Around the Western people lay inexhaust- 
 ible quantities of virgin lands, as productive as any in the 
 world, while their former occupations, habits, and tastes, as
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 259 
 
 well as the conditions of pioneer life, confined them to agri- 
 cultural pursuits. Andrew Ellicott, Surveyor General of 
 the United States, as he floated down the Ohio hi 1796, ob- 
 served that the country produced all the immediate neces- 
 saries of life in quantities far beyond the consumption of 
 the inhabitants, and that there was a large surplus of these 
 necessaries, together with hemp, cordage, whisky, apples, 
 cider, and salted provisions. He also observed the lack of 
 manufactures, of markets for materials, and the high prices 
 of imported goods, and reflected that to these causes was 
 due, in part, the character which had been given to the peo- 
 ple as insurgents and disorganizers. Almost the only article 
 that found a ready market at home and would command 
 cash was distilled spirits. 
 
 But while Nature had thrust a mountain barrier between 
 the Western people and the Atlantic seaboard, she had pro- 
 vided for them a grand water-way leading to the outside 
 world. The markets of New Orleans, the Gulf coast, the 
 West Indies, and the Atlantic States stood ready to take all 
 the bulky but cheap commodities that the West could pro- 
 duce. Hence it was that Mr. Jefferson wrote, in 1802 : 
 " There is on the globe one single spot the possessor of which 
 is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, 
 through which the products of three fifths of our territory 
 must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long 
 yield more than one half of our whole produce, and contain 
 more than one half of our inhabitants." Mr. Madison did 
 not exaggerate when he wrote about the same time that, to 
 the people of the West, the Mississippi was everything. The 
 Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable 
 streams of the Atlantic States formed into one stream. But, 
 unfortunately, the possession of the outlet of this great nat- 
 ural highway was in the possession of a foreign power. 
 
 After 1763 Spain owned the western side of the river 
 and the island of New Orleans, and after 1783 she owned 
 Florida also. Above the parallel of 31 the United States 
 met Spain at the middle thread of the river, but below that
 
 260 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 line they enjoyed no privileges except such as Spain saw 
 fit to grant them.* Spain's old jealousy for the Gulf of 
 Mexico had by no means burned out. The Mississippi was 
 the great road from the Ohio Valley to Mexico, Florida, and 
 the Gulf islands, as well as to New Orleans. In fact, Spain 
 valued New Orleans mainly because she thought it essential 
 to the security of possessions that she prized more highly. 
 Although she declared war against England in 1779, she 
 refused to enter into a treaty with the United States ; in 
 1782 she strove to exclude the Republic from the Mississippi 
 altogether ; and when the war was over she not only dis- 
 puted our southern boundary, and for years maintained 
 troops within our territory, but refused to come to any un- 
 derstanding with regard to navigation and commerce. 
 Sometimes the port of New Orleans was open to Ameri- 
 cans, sometimes closed ; and sometimes, as Mr. Cable has 
 said, it was " neither closed nor open" which means that it 
 was open to preferred traders who were in collusion with 
 the local Spanish authorities and closed to others. When a 
 fleet of flatboats left the Ohio for the lower Mississippi, the 
 men in charge could never certainly tell whether they 
 would safely reach their destination and dispose of their 
 commodities at remunerative prices, or whether the boats 
 would be seized and their freight confiscated. As Surveyor- 
 General Ellicott descended the river, even after the treaty of 
 1795, he was several times halted and detained by Spanish 
 officers. The National Government could not for the time 
 compel Spain to come to terms ; and the Western people, or 
 rather a portion of them, thinking the Government indiffer- 
 ent to their interests, and incited by restless and ambitious 
 
 * In 1763 France ceded to Great Britain the right to navigate the Mis- 
 sissippi in its whole breadth and length, from its source to the sea, and in 
 1782-'83 Great Britain and the United States agreed that the navigation of 
 the river, from its source to the ocean, should forever remain free and open 
 to the subjects of Great Britain and the citizens of the United States. But 
 his Catholic Majesty denied absolutely that these treaties gave the United 
 States any rights whatever below the thirty-first parallel.
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 261 
 
 spirits, sometimes thought of seceding from the Union, seiz- 
 ing the mouth of the Mississippi, and setting up for them- 
 selves, and sometimes of uniting their destiny with that of 
 the Spaniards. 
 
 In 1795 Spain entered for the first time into treaty rela- 
 tions with the United States, the treaty being known as San 
 Lorenzo. She now confirmed our southern and western 
 boundaries, promised to withdraw her troops from our terri- 
 tory, opened the navigation of the river in its whole breadth, 
 from its source to the ocean, to the citizens of the United 
 States, and also granted them for three years the right to 
 deposit and reship merchandise in the port of New Orleans 
 without duty or charge other than a fair price for storage, 
 promising also that she would, on the expiration of the 
 time, assign some other place of deposit on the bank of 
 the river. For a time matters now moved more smooth- 
 ly ; but in 1798 the local authority suspended the right of 
 deposit, and thus threw the West into a new ferment. The 
 royal Government restored the right rather than incur the 
 danger of war. Experience had now fully proved that the 
 interests of the West could never be safe so long as a foreign 
 power, even if as weak and placid as Spain, owned the mouth 
 of the Mississippi. 
 
 In 1800 Bonaparte compelled Spain, by the treaty of San 
 Udef onso, to retrocede Louisiana to France. For a time the 
 retrocession was kept secret, but on its becoming known in 
 the United States it produced great excitement, and particu- 
 larly in the West. President Jefferson wrote that France, 
 owing to the impetuosity of her temper and the restlessness 
 and energy of her character, would at New Orleans be in a 
 point of eternal friction with the United States, and that per- 
 manent peace between the two powers would be impossible. 
 He declared that the occlusion of the Mississippi was a state 
 of things in which the United States could not exist ; that 
 the river was so indispensable to them that they could not 
 hesitate for one moment to hazard their existence for its 
 maintenance ; and that whatever power other than them-
 
 262 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 selves held the island of New Orleans was their naturaJ 
 enemy. The local Spanish authority, which was still in 
 possession, added to the excitement by again withdrawing 
 the right of deposit. Congress strove to meet the emer- 
 gency by authorizing the purchase of the island for two 
 million dollars, and Mr. Monroe was sent to Paris to assist 
 Minister Livingston in the negotiation. But Bonaparte pro- 
 posed instead to sell all Louisiana, which our Government 
 hastened to purchase at the price of fifteen million dollars. 
 
 III. Florida. 
 
 The King of Spain gave up Louisiana to France simply 
 because Bonaparte compelled him to do so. He regarded 
 the province as an outwork of Mexico, and no other dis- 
 position could be made of it that would be so unwelcome 
 to him as its transfer to the United States. Naturally, 
 therefore, his Government at once set about confining the 
 province within the narrowest possible limits. 
 
 The treaty of sale merely quoted the description con- 
 tained in the treaty of San Ildefonso : " The colony or 
 province of Louisiana with the same extent that it now has 
 in the hands of Spain, and that it had when France pos- 
 sessed it, and such as it should have after the treaties subse- 
 quently entered into between Spain and other states. " What 
 this extent was could be ascertained only by appealing to 
 History, and her testimony was conflicting, as a brief re- 
 cital will show. 
 
 On April 9, 1682, La Salle, having descended the Missis- 
 sippi to its mouth, acting in the name of his royal master, 
 King Louis XIV, of France, took formal possession of the 
 region that he named Louisiana, and that he bounded as 
 follows : " Extending from the mouth of the great river St. 
 Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, as also along the river Col- 
 bert, or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge them- 
 selves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of the 
 Nadoussioux ... as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of 
 Mexico, and also to the mouth of the River of Palms." The
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 263 
 
 vast territory, lying on the Gulf coast between the Mobile 
 and the Rio Grande, and extending to the farthest sources 
 of the Mississippi and of all its affluents, was the first Lou- 
 isiana. Such were the boundaries laid down on Franque- 
 lin's great map of 1684. 
 
 La Salle based the claim that he made for France on dis- 
 covery. But as the Pope had given all North America to 
 Spain, and as Spaniards had discovered and explored por- 
 tions of this very territory, that power held the act of La Salle 
 an intrusion. In fact, she had long before declared the Gulf 
 of Mexico a closed sea to all powers but herself. But Spain 
 had lost her supremacy among the powers of Europe, and she 
 was wholly unable to exclude France, which was now in the 
 ascendant, from the Mississippi. La Salle's colony intended 
 for the mouth of the Mississippi, either by accident or design, 
 was set down on the Texas coast, far to the west, where it 
 proved a disastrous failure. At the close of the seventeenth 
 century and the beginning of the eighteenth the Spanish 
 viceroys of Mexico, acting under instructions, sent soldiers 
 and colonists into Texas to hold it for the King of Spain. 
 The French never returned to Texas, and it can not be said 
 that they were ever in actual possession of the region be- 
 tween the Sabine and the Rio Grande. Still, no boundary 
 between the French and Spanish possessions in the South- 
 west was ever agreed to, previous to the time when the 
 French gave up their dominions in North America. On 
 the east, however, the French settlements extended to the 
 Mobile. 
 
 In 1763 the Mississippi Valley was cleft in twain. 
 France drew a line through the middle of the river from 
 its source to the Iberville, and from this point a line through 
 the middle of the Iberville and Lakes Maurepas and Pont- 
 chartrain to the sea. All of her old dominions on the east 
 side of this line she ceded to England, all on the west side 
 to Spain. At the same time Spain ceded to England Flor- 
 ida. These acts limited Louisiana, save below the junction 
 of the Mississippi and the Iberville, to the western side of
 
 264 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 the great river. As Spain now owned the whole Southwest, 
 extending to the Pacific Ocean, she had no motive to estab- 
 lish a boundary line between her old and her new posses- 
 sions. Accordingly, the territory ceded by France to Spain 
 in 17G3 was the second Louisiana. 
 
 It is clear that the treaty of 1803 involved a contradiction 
 of terms. French Louisiana had extended on the east to the 
 Mobile, but Spanish Louisiana only to the Iberville and 
 the lakes. That part of French Louisiana which passed to 
 England in 1763 was immediately made a part of Florida. 
 It is true that Spain recovered all Florida in 1783, but she 
 denied that the part of Louisiana which England had re- 
 ceived from France, and which she had regained twenty 
 years later, was any part of the Louisiana that she retro- 
 ceded to France in 1800. The United States claimed the 
 coast to the Mobile, but Spain would yield only to the Iber- 
 ville. On the west there was a similar dispute. Previous 
 to 1763 France had regarded the Rio Grande the western 
 limit of Louisiana, but Spain had claimed Texas, and in 
 part occupied it. The common American view was that 
 our rightful boundary on the west, after 1803, was the Rio 
 Grande from mouth to source, and north of that the water- 
 parting to the possessions of Great Britain. Spain, how- 
 ever, maintained her claim to Texas. 
 
 The acquisition of New Orleans left all the other Gulf 
 ports in Spanish hands ; and this fact was so keenly felt by 
 those more directly interested, that some suggested whether 
 it would not be wise to exchange all Louisiana west of the 
 Mississippi for the two Floridas. Important rivers that 
 headed in the United States had their mouths in Spanish 
 territory, thus presenting the Mississippi question over again 
 on a smaller scale. Indians living on the Spanish side of 
 the line, and also outlaws and desperadoes, committed out- 
 rages on the American side. To redress such wrongs Gen- 
 eral Jackson twice crossed the frontier at the head of an 
 American army, once in 1814 and once in 1818. The South- 
 ern people, and particularly the Georgians, demanded, first,
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 265 
 
 that the Government at Washington should insist upon the 
 Perdido boundary, and afterward that it should take steps to 
 acquire east Florida, using force if necessary. And so the 
 feeling continued to grow, and not unnaturally, that the 
 possession of the whole Gulf coast east of the Mississippi 
 was essential to the peace and security of the frontier and 
 to the geographical completeness of the United States. Still 
 more, the Spanish Government was indebted to American 
 citizens in large sums on account of Spanish depredations 
 committed on American commerce. These causes, including 
 the serious disputes about boundaries, virtually forced our 
 second extension of territory. 
 
 Spain retained possession of the coast east of the Iberville 
 until 1810, when our Government took possession of the 
 major part of the district that was in dispute. It also con- 
 tinued to press his Catholic Majesty for a settlement of all 
 pending controversies, until in 1819 he sold Florida for five 
 million dollars, the money to be applied to the payment of 
 American claims, and also agreed to the following boundary 
 line between the United States and Mexico on the southwest : 
 The west bank of the Sabine River from the Gulf to parallel 
 32, a due north line to Red River, the south bank of the Red 
 River to longitude 100 west from Greenwich, this meridian 
 to the Arkansas, the south bank of the Arkansas to its source, 
 from this point south or north, as the case might be, to paral- 
 lel 42, and then along that parallel to the Pacific Ocean : 
 " The whole being as laid down in Mellish's Map of the United 
 States, published at Philadelphia, improved to Jan. 1, 1818." 
 
 The truth is, that what the United States really wished 
 to buy in 1803 was the island of New Orleans and west 
 Florida, and not the western half of the Mississippi Valley. 
 At that stage of their development the Gulf coast from the 
 mouth of the Mississippi to the Perdido was much more 
 valuable to them than the region of the Missouri. They did 
 not get all that they wanted. Furthermore, owing to the 
 haste with which the negotiations were conducted, the con- 
 cealment practiced by Bonaparte's Government, the vague- 
 19
 
 266 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 ness of the old boundaries, and the uncertainty as to what 
 actually passed from Spain to France, they did not clearly 
 know what they were buying. For the time, therefore, 
 the purchase proved something of a disappointment. 
 
 The causes that brought about the annexation of Louisi- 
 ana and Florida lie upon the surface. In addition to the 
 earth hunger of the Anglo-Saxon race,* we note the constant 
 pressure southward and westward of a large and rapidly 
 growing population, made aggressive by industrial and com- 
 mercial necessities, and by natural and historical environ- 
 ment. The American did not like the Spaniard. As na- 
 tional boundaries, rivers yield to mountains. River valleys 
 generally contain populations related by blood and history, 
 while mountains often mark differences of race and civiliza- 
 tion. In 1800 there were 585,000 Americans west of the 
 Alleghany Mountains, while Louisiana did not contain 
 more than 60,000 Frenchmen and Spaniards. In vigor, 
 and in capacity for subduing and replenishing the Great 
 West, the disparity between these two populations was 
 greater than it was in numbers. Taking these facts into 
 account, and also the geographical relations of the two 
 halves of the Mississippi Valley to each other, and of the 
 Gulf coast to the original United States, the annexation of 
 Louisiana and Florida could not long remain doubtful. 
 The treaty of 1803 restored the political unity of the great 
 valley, and made the next annexation inevitable. 
 
 * Mr. Sumner, referring to the growth of our national dominion, once 
 eaid: " It was land, not gold, that roused the Anglo-Saxon phlegm. I 
 doubt, however, if this passion be stronger with us than with others, ex- 
 cept, perhaps, that in a community where all participate in government 
 the national sentiments are more active. It is common to the human fam- 
 ily. There are few anywhere who could hear of a considerable accession 
 of territory, obtained peacefully and honestly, without a pride ot country, 
 even if at certain moments the judgment hesitated. With increased size 
 on the map there is increased consciousness of strength, and the heart of 
 the citizen throbs anew as he traces the extending line."
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 267 
 
 IV. Texas. 
 
 Previous to 1819 the feeling was general, at least at the 
 South and West, that the Louisiana purchase extended to 
 the Rio Grande. Still, public opinion accepted the Sabine 
 hi its stead, since " the alienation of Texas," as some called 
 it, was commonly counted a part of the price of Florida. 
 But this acquiescence did not prevent the taking of imme- 
 diate steps to secure that territory. 
 
 In 1821 occurred the revolution that led to the establish- 
 ment of the republic of Mexico, of which Texas and Coa- 
 huila was one of the states. About the same time adven- 
 turous persons from the United States, mainly from the 
 South, acting in concert with a political propaganda, began 
 to found settlements in that state on lands obtained from 
 the Mexican Government. Constantly re-enforced from the 
 South and West, this population grew, until in 1836 the 
 Texans seceded from Mexico and established the "Lone 
 Star" republic. From the first, the men who promoted 
 these movements looked to the ultimate incorporation of 
 Texas into the United States ; and after various attempts 
 and failures that end was finally accomplished in 1845, thus 
 correcting the " alienation " of 1819. This was done in pur- 
 suance of a joint resolution of Congress. 
 
 In this third annexation the old causes acted with un- 
 diminished power. The feeling prevailed that Nature and 
 History had made Texas ours ; the idea of reclamation also 
 exerted an influence. But a new cause now declared itself. 
 This was the need of the Slave Power for new territory out 
 of which to make new slave States, as related in a future 
 chapter. One of the conditions of the annexation of Texas 
 was that it might be cut up into several States. 
 
 V. First Mexican Annexation. 
 
 Texas brought with her into the Union a quarrel. 
 Mexico had never acknowledged her independence, and, 
 what was more serious, did not acknowledge the western
 
 288 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTOKY. 
 
 boundaries that Texas claimed. Texas insisted that her 
 right extended westward to the Bio Grande ; Mexico that 
 hers extended eastward to the Nueces. The United States 
 sent an army into the disputed territory to maintain the 
 Texan claim. Mexico sent an army to defend her claim. 
 In the war that ensued the United States forces not only 
 held the territory lying between the two rivers, but also con- 
 quered New Mexico and Upper California, as previously re- 
 lated. From the beginning of hostilities our Government 
 had made an acquisition of territory a principal object of 
 the war, as " indemnity for the past and security for the fu- 
 ture " ; and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, entered into 
 in 1848, secured to us the territories just named on the 
 payment of fifteen million dollars. These were the new 
 boundaries : The deepest channel of the Rio Grande from its 
 mouth to the southern boundary of New Mexico, the south- 
 ern and western boundaries of that territory to the river 
 Gila. the Gila to the Colorado, and from their junction a 
 line drawn across the Colorado and between Upper and 
 Lower California to the Pacific Ocean. 
 
 VI. Second Mexican Annexation. 
 
 Soon there arose a dispute over the new boundary line 
 in the Gila River region : both parties claimed the Mesilla 
 Valley, in southern Arizona. For a time war seemed immi- 
 nent, but in 1853 a treaty was negotiated by which the 
 United States obtained a new accession of territory on pay- 
 ment of ten million dollars. This is sometimes called the 
 "Gadsden Purchase," from General Gadsden, who negoti- 
 ated the treaty on our part. 
 
 These two annexations were effected by the action of 
 causes already enumerated, but the ambition of the Slave 
 Power was the master motive. Still, not a foot of the soil 
 acquired by the treaties of 1848 and 1853 ever became slave 
 soil. 
 
 About the year 1730 Bishop Berkeley wrote his familiar
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 2(59 
 
 verses on the prospect of planting arts and learning in 
 America, of which this is the best known stanza : 
 
 Westward the course of empire takes its way ; 
 
 The first four acts already passed, 
 A fifth shall close the drama with the day ; 
 
 Time's noblest offspring is the last. 
 
 These lines expressed a sentiment that was more or less 
 current before the American Revolution, and thus naturally 
 became connected with the history of the United States. 
 At the opening of the Revolution the American patriots 
 adopted the names America and American, continent and 
 continental. In part this language was due to the habit of 
 large speech that prevailed at the time, but it was not with- 
 out its influence on the course of events. In 1787 John 
 Adams wrote that the United States were destined to spread 
 over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe. 
 In 1823 President Monroe promulgated the Monroe doc- 
 trine, which was merely a notification to the Holy Alliance 
 of Europe that the United States would regard any attempt 
 of the powers composing it to control the destinies of the 
 American states that had declared themselves independent 
 of Spain as the manifestation of an unfriendly spirit toward 
 themselves, but it was often assumed to be a promise of a sort 
 of political protection or guardianship of the two Americas 
 on the part of the United States. All these factors, energized 
 by the spontaneous vigor of a free and growing people, cul- 
 minated, about the time of the Mexican War, in what was 
 called Manifest Destiny, or the belief which many people 
 entertained, and which some statesmen fostered, that the 
 republic was destined to occupy the continent. 
 
 VII. Oregon. 
 
 On no other part of the map of America do we find such 
 a variety of geographical names as on the Northwest coast. 
 Spanish, English, Greek, Dutch, Russian, German, and 
 American names, to say nothing of native ones, jostle one
 
 270 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 another. This diversity is typical of the diversity of nation- 
 alities that participated in exploration and discovery on that 
 coast, and also helps to explain the conflicting titles that 
 we are now to describe. 
 
 First, Spain claimed the coast from California to a high 
 latitude, basing her right on numerous voyages of discovery 
 that run back to the year 1543. At no time, however, did 
 she plant colonies north of parallel 43. Russia asserted 
 a claim that extended far down the coast, resting it on 
 discoveries, explorations, and trading operations. Sir Fran- 
 cis Drake visited the coast in 1580, Captain Cook in 1778, 
 and Vancouver in 1793. These voyages gave England a 
 color of title, but she rested her claim mainly on certain 
 trading posts that fur traders, who came overland from Can- 
 ada in 1793, 1806, and 1811, had established. Before this 
 time, however, the country north of California had been 
 named. The name Oregon is said to be the Spanish Ore/on, 
 " big ear " u The designation in that language of a tribe of 
 Indians living high up on the [Columbia] River, and chief- 
 ly known to us by the French name, Pends d'Oreilles, from 
 the habit which they formerly had of enlarging the lobe of 
 the ear to a monstrous size by the insertion of metal or wood 
 into a cut made for that purpose." The Spaniards called the 
 river that we now know as the Columbia, Rio de los Ore- 
 jones, and from the river the name passed to the country 
 that it drained. A familiar line of Bryant's Thanatopsis 
 commemorates the first use of Oregon. In 1792 Captain 
 Gray, of Boston, first entered the river, if he did not indeed 
 first see it, and gave to it the patriotic name of his ship, The 
 Columbia. In due time Columbia superseded Oregon as 
 the name of the river, but not as the name of the country. 
 
 The claim of the United States to territory on the North- 
 west coast originated in Captain Gray's discovery. In 
 1803-1806 Captains Lewis and Clarke, United States officers, 
 acting under the direction of President Jefferson, crossed 
 the Rocky Mountains and explored the valley of the Colum- 
 bia south of parallel 49. It is noteworthy that this expe-
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 271 
 
 dition was organized before the purchase of Louisiana. In 
 1811 Mr. Astor established at the mouth of the Columbia 
 the trading post that he named Astoria. In 1819 Spain 
 ceded to the United States all her right and title to territory 
 north of the forty-second parallel. In 1824 Russia agreed 
 not to make settlements south of 54 40', and the United 
 States agreed not to make them north of that line, and the 
 ensuing year Russia and England entered into similar en- 
 gagements. These treaties fixed the boundaries of Oregon 
 on the north and on the south, and also excluded Spain and 
 Russia from the further competition for its ownership, thus 
 leaving the United States and England to settle that ques- 
 tion between themselves. The United States claimed the 
 whole region between those parallels west of the mountains, 
 while England asserted that she also had rights there, al- 
 though she did not claim an exclusive ownership. The two 
 powers not being able to agree, and the question not being 
 then a pressing one, the treaty of 1818, which made the 
 forty-ninth parallel the boundary from the Lake of the 
 Woods to the Stony Mountains, provided that for ten years 
 Oregon should be open to the citizens and subjects of both 
 alike, without prejudice to the claims of either. In 1828 
 this joint occupancy was extended indefinitely, with the 
 proviso that either nation might terminate it by giving a 
 year's notice to the other. About 1832 American citizens be- 
 gan to make settlements in the valley of the Columbia, and by 
 1845 they had become three thousand in number and were con- 
 stantly increasing. A boundary had now become impera- 
 tive ; and in 1846 it was agreed that the parallel of 49 from 
 the Rocky Mountains to the channel between Vancouver's 
 Island and the mainland, and a line drawn through the 
 middle of this channel and the Strait of Fuca, should be the 
 line of demarcation, with free navigation of the channel 
 and of the Columbia to both parties. Later, a difference 
 arose as to the identity of the main channel a question that 
 the Emperor of Germany, as an arbitrator, decided in our 
 favor in 1872.
 
 272 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 The title of the United States to the territory west of the 
 Rocky Mountains, between the forty-second and forty-ninth 
 parallels of latitude, is made up of the following facts : 1, 
 Gray's discovery of the Columbia in 1792 ; 2, Lewis and 
 Clarke's explorations, 1803-1806 ; 3, the founding of Astoria in 
 1811 ; 4, the Spanish treaty of 1819 ; 5, the Russian treaty of 
 1824 ; 6, the settlements made in the period 1832-1846 ; 7, 
 the treaty of 1846 ; 8, the treaty of 1872, under which the 
 Emperor William rendered his decision. It should be added 
 that the representatives of the United States, in pressing our 
 claims upon England, laid stress upon contiguity that is, 
 the fact that the geographical relations of Oregon to the 
 abutting territory east of the mountains formed a quasi title. 
 It should be further observed that the statement sometimes 
 made to the effect that Oregon was a part of the Louisiana 
 purchase is without foundation ; all books and maps mak- 
 ing such a representation are misleading.* 
 
 Slavery played no direct part in the Oregon contest. 
 Owing to the influence of the Slave Power in national af- 
 fairs in those years, manifest destiny was less active at the 
 North than at the South. In domestic discussions more or 
 less was said about the Monroe doctrine. It was alleged 
 that to yield any part of Oregon to England would be con- 
 senting to the formation of a new American colony in North 
 America, and that as a next-door neighbor. However, this 
 was not the first time that jealousy of England had played 
 a part in the extension of American territory. It was seri- 
 
 * Mr. Jefferson wrote to Hellish, a map-maker, in 1816 : " The western 
 boundary of Louisiana is, rightfully, the Rio Bravo (its main stream), from 
 its mouth to its source, and thence along the highlands and mountains 
 dividing the waters of the Mississippi from the waters of the Pacific. . . . 
 On the waters of the Pacific we can found no claim in right of Louisiana." 
 Works, vol. mi, p. 51. M. Marbois, who negotiated the treaty of 1803 
 on the part of France, wrote as follows in his History of Louisiana : " The 
 shores of the Western ocean were certainly not included in the cession, but 
 the United States are already established there." English Translation^ 
 p. 286. Philadelphia, 1830.
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 273 
 
 ously feared, in 1803, that in the event of war between Eng- 
 land and France the mouth of the Mississippi would fall 
 into her hands. It was also charged, prior to 1845, that she 
 was intriguing for Texas ; and, in 1846, fear that she would 
 pounce upon Upper California hastened its occupation by 
 the forces of the United States. 
 
 VIII. Alaska. 
 
 Bering, a German navigator in the Russian service, dis- 
 covered the strait that bears his name in 1728, and the 
 North American continent in latitude 58 28' in 1741. The 
 title to the region that these discoveries gave to Russia was 
 duly completed by further discoveries and by a sort of occu- 
 pancy that Senator Sumner thus described in 1867 : " Her 
 Government is little more than a name or a shadow. It is 
 not even a skeleton. It is hardly visible. Its only repre- 
 sentative is a fur company, to which has been added latterly 
 an ice company." The total population of Russians and 
 Creoles at that time was estimated at 3,500. The limitation 
 on the south, established in 1824 and 1825, has been already 
 described. 
 
 The idea of the accession of Russian America to the 
 United States was broached, it is said, in the administration 
 of President Polk. It was more seriously considered in the 
 administration of President Buchanan. A considerable in- 
 terest in the scheme was manifested on the Pacific slope at 
 the close of the Civil War, particularly in Washington Ter- 
 ritory, and on March 30, 1867, a treaty of cession was con- 
 cluded at Washington, the United States agreeing to pay 
 seven million two hundred thousand dollars for Russia's 
 right and title. On the east the line of demarcation between 
 Russia and Great Britain, established in 1825, was followed, 
 viz. : A line drawn from the southern point of island Prince 
 of Wales, in parallel 54 40', northward along Portland 
 Channel to 56 north latitude, but giving the whole of the 
 island to the United States ; a line from this point follow- 
 ing the summit of the mountains, running parallel to the
 
 274 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 coast, to the meridian 141 west, provided that said line 
 should never be more than ten marine leagues from the 
 shore, and then the meridian 141 to the frozen ocean.* 
 The western boundary runs southwest through Bering 
 Strait and Bering Sea to the meridian of 172 west, and 
 thence southwesterly to the meridian of 193 west, so as to 
 include in the territory conveyed the whole of the Aleutian 
 Islands east of that meridian. Mr. Sumner proposed the 
 name Alaska, the native name for the American continent, 
 but at the time appropriated to the great southwestern 
 peninsula. 
 
 Those who advocated this purchase laid much stress upon 
 the China and Japan trade, and especially upon its advan- 
 tages to our Pacific coast. Conviction had for some time 
 been growing that the Pacific Ocean was to play a new part 
 in the life of the world. President Garfield, for example, 
 was fond of calling it "the historic sea of the future." The 
 opening of the Suez Canal, the building of the Panama Rail- 
 road, the projected canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific 
 Oceans, the building of the several contemplated lines of 
 Pacific railroads, promised to give to the great commerce of 
 the world more of an east-and-west movement. Much was 
 said at the time about the so-called " commercial equator." 
 Men who shared these large views generally thought it 
 highly desirable that the United States, from their geo- 
 graphical position, should control as much of the western 
 shore of North America as possible. It is significant that 
 the purchase of Alaska practically coincided with the opening 
 of the Union and Central Pacific Railroads and the negotia- 
 tion of the treaty establishing closer relations with China, in 
 1868. Extension of dominion was also dwelt upon. An- 
 other favorite argument was the extension of republican in- 
 stitutions. Mr. Sumner, it has been said, was unwilling to 
 miss the opportunity of dismissing another European sover- 
 
 * Commissioners appointed by the United States and Great Britain are 
 now engaged in surveying their joint boundary.
 
 TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE UNITED STATES. 275 
 
 eign from our continent, predestined, as he believed, to be- 
 come the broad, undivided home of the American people. 
 Still other arguments were a desire to anticipate England, 
 that some believed was ready to move in the same direction, 
 and a feeling of amity toward Russia because she had been 
 friendly to the National cause in the Civil War. The terri- 
 tory was also considered valuable on account of its resources 
 of lumber and timber, minerals, fisheries, and furs. 
 
 Since the annexation of Alaska keen regrets have been 
 expressed that the United States did not in 1846 insist upon 
 the line of 54 40'. It has been predicted that the gap be- 
 tween our territories on that coast will some day be closed. 
 At the time of his visit to the Pacific coast, in 1869, Mr. 
 Seward said : " Although British Columbia remains . . . 
 subject to a European monarchy, I nevertheless found exist- 
 ing there commercial and political forces which render a 
 permanent political separation of British Columbia from 
 Alaska and Washington Territory impossible." 
 
 In the preceding sketch nothing has been said about the 
 character and necessities of the nations with which we have 
 dealt. Bonaparte sold Louisiana without regard either to 
 the resident population, which was strongly adverse to the 
 transfer, or to the French people. It was solely his act. 
 Spain was very jealous of her American possessions, but she 
 was degenerate, and wholly unable to resist the constant and 
 growing pressure upon those possessions from the north 
 and east. Much the same may be said of Mexico : she 
 was forced to submit to the inevitable. Russia appears 
 never to have regarded her distant American possessions as 
 a real part of her system ; besides, rumors of war were afloat 
 in 1867, and she naturally preferred the purchase money to 
 the precarious ownership of a distant and unprofitable de- 
 pendency. In every case the condition of the power with 
 which we have had to deal has been favorable to our wishes. 
 On the side of Canada, where we have constantly faced a 
 great and ambitious imperial power, we have never extended
 
 276 
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 our boundaries a single foot. On this side, however, it must 
 be said that the necessities of our material development have 
 not hitherto required territorial enlargement ; the logic of 
 events has moved rather southward and westward. Still it 
 is easy to see that had we been bounded on the west and 
 south, in 1783, by Great Britain rather than by Spain, the 
 results would have been somewhat different. We should 
 have reached the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, no doubt, 
 but at the expense of more time and effort. 
 
 The Area of (he United States, with Dates of Acquisition.* 
 
 
 Sq. miles. 
 
 Dates. 
 
 1. Original United States 
 
 819,815 
 
 1783 
 
 2. Louisiana purchase 
 
 877,268 
 
 1803 
 
 3. Oregon 
 
 284.828 
 
 1792, 1805, 1811, 
 
 4. The Floridas 
 
 64,030 
 
 1819, 1846, 1872 
 1819 
 
 
 262,290 
 
 1845 
 
 6. First Mexican annexation 
 
 614,439 
 
 1848 
 
 7. Second Mexican annexation 
 8. Alaska 
 
 47,330 
 531,409 
 
 1853 
 1867 
 
 
 
 
 Total.. 
 
 3,501.509 
 
 
 Mr. Gladstone once described our territory as " a natural 
 base for the greatest continuous empire ever established by 
 
 man. 
 
 * The authority for this table is Prof. A. B. Hart, of Harvard Univer- 
 sity. See Practical Essays on American Government, Chap. X., " The 
 Public Land Policy of the United States." The areas differ more or lees 
 widely from those given in the Government publications. The principal 
 discrepance, however, arises from the fact that the Government officers 
 persist in including Oregon in the Louisiana purchase. See the Statistical 
 Atlas, 1874, and The Public Domain, 1882. Keclus gives statistics still 
 different The United States, p. 5.
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 PHASES OP INDUSTRIAL AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 References. Washington : Writings of, edited by Sparks (Let- 
 ters to Chastellux, VIII., 488, Jefferson, IX., 31, Harrison, id., 58, and 
 Lee, id., 117) ; H. B. Adams : Maryland's Influence upon Land Ces- 
 sions to the United States ; Henry Adams : The Life of Albert Gal- 
 latin ; Gannett and Hewes : Scribner's Statistical Atlas ; Walker : 
 Statistical Atlas of the United States, Ninth Census ; Johnston : 
 Political History of the United States, Lalor's Cyclopaedia of Politi- 
 cal Science (Internal Improvements, The Cumberland Road, Con- 
 struction, State Sovereignty, Federal Party, Democratic- Republican 
 Party) ; Jeans : Water Ways and Water Transport (Sec. I., Chap. 
 XIV.) ; Summer : Lectures on the History of Protection in the 
 United States; Taussig: Tariff History of the United States; 
 Ford : Lalor's Cyclopaedia (Tariffs in the United States) ; Hil- 
 dreth : History of the United States, Vol. V., Chap. XV. 
 
 BUT few years of American history, counting even from 
 Jamestown and Plymouth, have been years of war. While 
 some of the wars in which the country has been engaged 
 hold an important place in history, its genius is still essen- 
 tially civil and pacific. The United States are an industrial, 
 commercial, and political nation rather than a martial one. 
 The lessons that they teach the world are mainly lessons of 
 peace. No historical studies of the kind can be more profit- 
 able or interesting to the American student than those that 
 deal with this characteristic side of the national develop- 
 ment. It is therefore to be regretted that disproportionate 
 attention is so often given to the military side of our his- 
 tory. In the present work, however, nothing more can be
 
 278 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 attempted than to sketch some of the leading features of 
 this field of study. We may first look at the establishment 
 of means of communication between the several divisions 
 of the country. 
 
 In the colonial period the sea and its tributaries were 
 large factors in travel and transportation. The great 
 length of the sea front, the shallow depth of the Atlantic 
 slope, and the number and distribution of navigable rivers, 
 together with the undeveloped state of the country, furnish 
 the ready explanation. Vermont, admitted to the Union in 
 1791, was the first inland State. Roads were poor, and the 
 most important ones connected the rivers and other bodies 
 of navigable water. A man could journey on horseback 
 from Providence to Savannah one thousand two hundred 
 and forty-three miles in seventy days, spending every 
 night in some town furnishing comfortable accommo- 
 dations. Previous to the French and Indian War the 
 only persons who passed and repassed the mountains that 
 shut in the Atlantic Plain on the west were hunters and 
 Indian traders, who followed paths that the deer and the 
 buffalo had made through the passes. Naturally enough, 
 these adventurers were found at the southward ; for, al- 
 though the Pennsylvanians and the Virginians were con- 
 fronted by the continuous parallel ridges of the Alleghanies, 
 they were much nearer the Great West than the New Eng- 
 landers or the people of New York, while they were not 
 exposed to the jealousy of the Six Nations or the competi- 
 tion of the French. English-speaking men chased game in 
 the valley of the Tennessee much sooner than on the shore 
 of the Great Lakes. The Ohio Valley was far better known 
 to them in 1755 than the Lake Erie Basin. 
 
 No country in the world offers to man better facilities 
 for inland navigation than the United States, or at least that 
 portion of it lying between the Appalachian and Cordilleran 
 mountain systems. In addition to the abundance of navi- 
 .gable waters, Nature opposes no serious obstacles to connect- 
 ing the several river systems or parts of systems ; while the
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 279 
 
 problems offered to the engineer and capitalist by the moun- 
 tains themselves, although serious, are not insuperable. The 
 eastern mountain system offered the first great problem of 
 the kind that the country solved. 
 
 The first road through the forests that clothed the Alle- 
 ghanies was cut by Braddock's troops, from Cumberland to 
 the Monongahela, in 1755 ; the second one by Forbes's troops, 
 from the upper Susquehanna to the forks of the Ohio, in 1758. 
 At the close of the Revolution the only real thorough- 
 fare to the West was the road leading from Philadelphia to 
 Pittsburg, the western part of which was the Forbes road. 
 Before the opening of the Erie Canal the major part of the 
 freight conveyed between tide water and the West was 
 hauled over this road in Conestoga wagons, at a cost of one 
 hundred and twenty dollars a ton. Pittsburg was the most 
 important Western town, and the first inland manufactur- 
 ing center in the whole country. In 1796 no road had been 
 opened between the Mohawk and Lake Erie ; Canandaigua 
 was the western outpost on what soon became a great line 
 of travel. The surveyors of the Connecticut Laud Company, 
 on their way to the Western Reserve in the spring of that year, 
 having rendezvoused at Schenectady, ascended the Mohawk 
 to Fort Stanwix, now Rome, whence they passed with their 
 boats and stores over the portage to Wood Creek, and then 
 proceeded by that stream, Oneida Lake, and Oswego River to 
 Lake Ontario, from which point they made their way by 
 water to Niagara, and then by the Indian trail to the present 
 site of Buffalo. A large part of the New England emigration 
 to northern Ohio crossed the Hudson at Fishkill and the 
 Delaware at Easton, and reached their destination by the 
 Pennsylvania route. Farther to the south Nature had an- 
 ticipated man. The Wilderness Road led through the Val- 
 ley of Virginia and Cumberland Gap, uniting the Potomac 
 and the Tennessee, and even at the beginning of this cen- 
 tury it furnished the most desirable route for the traveler 
 from Philadelphia or Baltimore to Cincinnati or Louisville. 
 
 The early population of the West was distributed by the
 
 '280 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 rivers far more than by all other agencies. The hunter and 
 the trader used the horse and the pack train as well as the 
 canoe and the bateau, but the emigrant, as a rule, followed the 
 water courses. Arrived at the Ohio or the Tennessee, the 
 Great West was spread out before him. All the early towns 
 were built on rivers. The river craft that appear so pictur- 
 esque in the letters and diaries of tourists and emigrants 
 of a literary turn, such as the " ark " and the " keel boat," 
 were the sole means of transportation for both goods and 
 persons until the advent of steam navigation. The first 
 steamboat to descend the Mississippi reached New Orleans 
 in 1811 ; the first to ascend Lake Erie reached Detroit in 
 1818. But the steamboat only increased the emigrants' im- 
 mediate dependence upon the rivers. The second transpor- 
 tation question in the West was the crossing of the water 
 partings dividing different systems of waters, or different 
 branches of the same system ; and this was accomplished 
 for the time, first by utilizing and then by improving the 
 trails across the portages over which the Indian, and often 
 the Frenchman, had shouldered his canoe. In that period 
 of history small streams often had an importance that it is 
 now hard to understand, while small posts buried in forests 
 were sometimes ports of entry. Upon the whole, it would 
 be hard to exaggerate the part that navigable waters, and 
 particularly the steamboat, played in the development of 
 the West. 
 
 Lines of communication that should connect the Atlantic 
 seaboard and the interior of the continent occupied the at- 
 tention of far-seeing men many years before the States de- 
 clared their independence. The question engaged the mind 
 of Washington while he was still a youth. In 1754 he 
 wrote a report on the navigation of the Potomac, and in 
 1770 he urged that subject upon the Governor of Maryland. 
 He saw in the Potomac and the portage to the Ohio " a means 
 of becoming the channel of conveyance of the extensive and 
 valuable trade of a rising empire." He interested himself 
 in the Potomac and James River Improvement Companies,
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 2 SI 
 
 and lie wrote to Mr. Jefferson, in 1784, that the plan which 
 embraced those works was in a relatively good train when 
 he went to Cambridge to assume command of the army, and 
 would have been in an excellent way had it not been for 
 the opposition of the Baltimore merchants, who dreaded the 
 consequences of water transportation to Georgetown. The 
 war put an end to all plans for the time. 
 
 The leadership of Virginia in the work of internal im- 
 provement on a large scale is easily explained. It was due 
 to the close geographical and commercial connections of 
 that State with the West, to the development of her indus- 
 trial system, and the prescience of her statesmen. Still, citi- 
 zens of New York were already stirred by similar thoughts. 
 In the spring of 1776 General Schuyler explained to Dr. 
 Franklin, who was one of the commission of three that 
 Congress had dispatched to Canada, and that Schuyler as- 
 sisted to cross the portage from the Hudson to Lake Cham- 
 plain, that an uninterrupted water-carriage between New 
 York and Quebec might be perfected at fifty thousand 
 pounds sterling expense. 
 
 The war was hardly over before Washington took up the 
 subject again. In July, 1783, while the army was disband- 
 ing, in company with Governor Clinton, he examined the 
 portages between the Mohawk and the Susquehanna on the 
 one side and Lake Ontario on the other. "Prompted by 
 these actual observations," he wrote, " I could not help tak- 
 ing a more extensive view of the vast inland navigation of 
 these United States from maps and the information of oth- 
 ers." He desired to extend his visit to the Niagara, but de- 
 sisted because the British still held that frontier. He de- 
 clared that he should not rest contented until he " had ex- 
 plored the Western country, and traversed those lines, or a 
 great part of them, which have given bounds to a new em- 
 pire." This pledge he redeemed in September, 1784, when 
 he made his last visit to the West, his object being not so 
 much to look after his own property interests in those re- 
 gions as to study on the ground the portages uniting the 
 20
 
 282 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Potomac and the James with the Ohio and Kanawha.* On 
 his return he sketched out lines of communication hetween 
 those rivers, and also between the Ohio and the Cuyahoga, 
 and the mouth of the Cuyahoga and Detroit. His letters 
 written at this period are a magazine of information relat- 
 ing to this interesting subject. 
 
 To the mind of Washington industrial and commercial 
 reasons had ceased to be the strongest ones for carrying out 
 his plans. He emphasized the swelling volume of emigra- 
 tion, and particularly the weakness of the ties which, in 
 that time of disorganizing tendencies, bound the Western 
 population, under the conditions of Western life, to the 
 Union. In his famous letter to Governor Harrison, written 
 soon after his return from the Ohio, he argued that the 
 flanks and rear of the United States were possessed by other 
 powers, and formidable ones too ; that it was necessary to ap- 
 ply the cement of interest to bind all parts of the Union to- 
 gether by indissoluble bonds, especially the Ohio Valley and 
 the Middle States. He pointed out how discontented those 
 people would be, and what troubles might be apprehended 
 if Spain and Great Britain should hold out luras for their 
 trade and alliance. The Western States stood upon a pivot ; 
 the touch of a feather would turn them any way. They 
 had looked down the Mississippi until the Spaniards threw 
 
 * " Wherever he came, he sought and -closely questioned the men famed 
 for personal observation of the streams and paths on each side of the Alle- 
 ghanies. From Fort Cumberland he took the usual road over the moun- 
 tains to the valley of the Yohogany, and studied closely the branches of 
 that stream. The country between the Little Kanawha and the James 
 River being at that moment infested with hostile Indians, he returned 
 through the houseless solitude between affluents of the Cheat River and 
 of the Potomac. As he traced the way for commerce over that wild re- 
 gion, he was compelled to pass a night on a rough mountain side in a pour- 
 ing rain, with no companion but a servant and no protection but his cloak ; 
 one day he was without food ; sometimes he could find no path except the 
 track of buffaloes ; and in unceasing showers his ride through the close 
 bushes seemed to him little better than the swimming of rivulets." Ban- 
 croft, History of the United States (author's last revision), vol. vi, pp. 125, 126.
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 283 
 
 difficulties in their way ; and they looked that way for no 
 other reason than because they could glide gently down the 
 stream, and because they had no means of carrying on trade 
 with the East but by long land transportation and unim- 
 proved roads. These causes had hitherto checked the in- 
 dustry of the settlers ; but " smoothe the road," he said, " and 
 make easy the way for them, and then see what an influx 
 of articles will be poured upon us ; how amazingly our ex- 
 ports will be increased by them, and how amply we shall be 
 compensated for any trouble and expense we may encounter 
 to effect it ! " 
 
 Washington was more than willing to defer for the time 
 the navigation of the Mississippi, which was then denied by 
 Spain, assigning as his reasons that, until a little time had 
 been allowed to open and make easy the ways between the 
 Atlantic States and the Western territory, the obstructions 
 to this navigation had better remain. Without the cement 
 of interest the Western inhabitants could have no predilec- 
 tion for the Union, and a commercial connection was the 
 only tie that would bind them. It was clear to him that 
 the trade of the lakes and of the river Ohio as low as the 
 Kanawha, if not the Falls, might be brought to the Atlantic 
 ports easier and cheaper than it could be carried to New 
 Orleans ; but let trade with that city be well established, 
 and it would be found to be no easy matter to divert it ; and 
 vice versa. When the settlements were stronger and more 
 extended to the westward, the navigation of the Mississippi 
 would be an object of importance, and we should then be 
 able, reserving our claims, to speak a more efficacious lan- 
 guage than policy for the time dictated. 
 
 Interest in internal improvements grew with the popu- 
 lation and wealth of the country. In 1792 the Legislature 
 of New York chartered two companies, one to build a canal 
 with locks from the Mohawk to Lake Ontario, the other to 
 bind together in a similar way the Hudson and Lake Cham- 
 plain. In 1808 Mr. Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, laid 
 before the Senate, in response to a resolution that it had
 
 284 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 adopted, an elaborate scheme of internal improvements to 
 be undertaken by Congress, the grand features of which Mr. 
 Adams has classified as follows : 
 
 I. Those parallel with the seacoast, viz., canals cutting Cape Cod, 
 New Jersey, Delaware, and North Carolina, so as to make continu- 
 ous inland navigation along the coast to Cape Pear, at an estimated 
 cost of $3,000,000 ; and a great turnpike road from Maine to Geor- 
 gia, at an estimated cost of $4,800,000. 
 
 II. Those that were to run east and west, viz., improvement of 
 the navigation of four Atlantic rivers, the Susquehanna, the Poto- 
 mac, the James, and the Santee, and of four corresponding Western 
 rivers, the Alleghany, the Monongahela, the Kanawha, and the Ten- 
 nessee, to the highest practicable points, at an estimated cost of 
 $1,500,000 ; and the connection of these highest points of naviga- 
 tion by four roads across the Appalachian range, at an estimated 
 cost of $2,800,000 ; and, finally, a canal at the falls of the Ohio, 
 $300,000, and improvement of roads to Detroit, St. Louis, and New 
 Orleans, $200,000. 
 
 III. Those that were to run north and northwest to the lakes, 
 viz., to connect the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, $800,000 ; 
 to connect the Hudson River with Lake Ontario at Oswego by canal, 
 $2,200,000; a canal round Niagara Falls, $1,000,000. 
 
 IV. Local improvements, $3,400,000. 
 
 The entire estimated expense was $20,000,000. By an appropria- 
 tion of $2,000,000 a year the whole might be accomplished in ten 
 years. By a system of selling to private parties the stock thus cre- 
 ated by the Government for turnpikes and canals, the fund might be 
 made itself a permanent resource for further improvements. 
 
 This scheme is interesting for numerous reasons. It 
 shows careful study of the physiography of the country, 
 and a firm grasp of its industrial and commercial needs and 
 relations, and evinces a remarkable anticipation of enter- 
 prises that have in some form been accomplished. It is not 
 a little remarkable, moreover, that neither Gallatin nor his 
 predecessors projected a line of communication from the 
 Hudson direct to Lake Erie the more remarkable as it was 
 by this very route that the first line to the West was actually
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 285 
 
 constructed. The obvious cause of the omission was the 
 strong hold that natural water courses, as means of convey- 
 ance, then had upon men's minds ; it was assumed that the 
 northern line to the West would run from the Mohawk to 
 Lake Ontario, and then to the mouth of the Niagara River, 
 around the falls of which Gallatin's scheme did provide a 
 canal. 
 
 The great difficulty and cost of transporting troops and 
 military stores to the West in the War of 1812 taught the 
 country that war, as well as peace, required that the sea- 
 hoard and the interior should be more closely connected. 
 The danger of a Western secession had passed away since 
 Washington's day ; the annexation of Louisiana had more 
 than doubled the national area, but Great Britain and Spain 
 were still on our flanks and rear, and there was no telling 
 how soon we might become involved in war with either 
 power. Several great lines of communication were soon 
 taken in hand, New York leading the way. 
 
 In 1823 the Lake Champlain Canal, uniting the Hud- 
 son and Lake Champlain, was completed ; in 1825, the Erie 
 Canal, uniting the Hudson and Lake Erie. The comple- 
 tion of the second of these works contributed amazingly 
 to the development of the West on the one hand, while it 
 made the State of New York the Empire State, and the city 
 of New York the metropolis of the country on the other. 
 Next came a line of canal and railroad connecting Philadel- 
 phia and Pittsburg. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, be- 
 gun in 1828, reached Cumberland in 1850 and there stopped ; 
 nor was the canal from the James to the Kanawha ever 
 finished. 
 
 In the West, as in the East, the canal problem was to 
 unite different river systems ; no one thought of competing 
 directly with navigable rivers or lakes. In Ohio and In- 
 diana the great canal lines connected Lake Erie and the 
 Ohio River ; in Illinois and Wisconsin, Lake Michigan and 
 the Mississippi. A canal was projected across the lower 
 Michigan peninsula, but never built. By the time that the
 
 286 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 States beyond the Mississippi were ready for public improve- 
 ments the canal-boat period had ceased and the locomotive 
 period had begun. 
 
 In its largest features the early railroad system resem- 
 bled the canal system. The great trunk lines, as the New 
 York Central, the Erie, and Pennsylvania roads, led to the 
 West. The Baltimore and Ohio road, which reached the 
 Ohio in 1850, fulfilled the ideas of Washington ; one of its 
 branches extending from Cumberland to Pittsburg, the 
 other to Parkersburg and Wheeling. In the Old Northwest 
 also Nature surveyed the railway lines. In Ohio, Indiana, 
 Illinois, and Wisconsin, the first roads bound together the 
 lakes on the one side and the Ohio and the Mississippi on 
 the other. The Michigan roads connecting the waters east 
 and west are much older than the roads running north and 
 south. South of the Ohio the first necessity was to unite 
 that river with the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Gulf 
 of Mexico. Between the Mississippi and the Missouri, it was 
 to unite those rivers. Beyond the Missouri and in the 
 Southwest the great railroads have sought the Pacific 
 Ocean. 
 
 At first it was confidently assumed that the railroad train 
 could not compete with the steamboat for either freight or 
 passengers, or with the canal boat for heavy freight an 
 assumption which explains why, for example, Cleveland 
 was connected by roads with both Pittsburg and Cincinnati 
 earlier than with either Buffalo or Toledo. But as the 
 value of rapid transit became more and more apparent, and 
 the cost of railroad communication was gradually reduced, 
 these ideas were thrown aside ; and to-day it would not be 
 easy to find an important river or lake shore that has not 
 been paralleled by one or more lines of road. 
 
 No inventions proclaim a greater triumph of man over 
 Nature than those which enable him to utilize the power of 
 steam. The steamship defies wind and wave. 
 
 The pulses of her iron heart 
 Go beating through the storm.
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 287 
 
 The locomotive engine emancipates man from dependence 
 upon water courses, natural and artificial. At first the loco- 
 motive like the canal boat followed the van of civilization 
 at a distance ; but in the later period, striking through un- 
 peopled regions, it has led the march. In the more re- 
 cent westward movements of population the engineer and 
 the contractor have literally been pioneers for the emigrant. 
 As a result, natural means of transportation are no longer 
 necessary for the existence or prosperity of cities. For ex- 
 ample, a few years ago the export of cotton from the port of 
 New Orleans had fallen from 70 to 22 per cent of the total 
 export of the country, while the import of coffee had fallen 
 from 80 to 7 per cent. The locomotive had built up rivals 
 for the Metropolis of the Southwest. A distinguished econ- 
 omist has announced that a Massachusetts mechanic can 
 pay for the transportation of a year's supply of food one 
 thousand miles with the proceeds of one day's labor. The 
 introduction of electricity, especially if it should become 
 practicable to transport power long distances, may redress 
 the balance of water and steam in respect to stationary ma- 
 chinery ; but for purposes of land transportation the victory 
 of steam is apparently irreversible. 
 
 In course of time internal improvements became a great 
 political question. Beginning with the act authorizing the 
 construction of the Cumberland Road, passed in 1806, Con- 
 gress voted large sums of money for turnpikes, canals, river 
 improvements, and railroads. For some years no constitu- 
 tional objection was heard ; President Madison was the first 
 to raise that issue, in 1817. At a later day the subject en- 
 tered deeply into party politics, the Whigs taking the 
 affirmative and the Democrats the negative side of the ques- 
 tion. Since that division, however, Senators and Represent- 
 atives have often deferred to State or local interests in de- 
 fiance of party creeds. 
 
 While party policy, the personal ends of politicans, and 
 sheer accident have played their part in the tariff history of 
 the country, that interesting subject can be understood only
 
 283 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 when studied in connection with certain general causes and 
 conditions that revealed themselves at an early day and con- 
 tinue to exist to the present time. The moderate protection 
 given to certain industries in 1789 provoked little opposition 
 from any quarter ; nor was there any organized resistance to 
 the various extensions of the principle that were made down 
 to 1816. Partly in consequence of the stimulus that protec- 
 tion had afforded, partly in consequence of the restrictions on 
 commerce that finally culminated in the War of 1812, there 
 was in those years a considerable growth of manufactures. 
 Capital that had heen invested in shipping and trade was 
 now employed in production. As the return of peace and 
 the re-establishment of commercial relations with Europe 
 threatened disaster to the new industries, an act was passed 
 increasing both the number and the amount of protective 
 duties. About this time public opinion began to crystallize, 
 and four great interests progressively declared themselves 
 in the field of tariff legislation. 
 
 1. The manufacturing interest favored protection to 
 home industries as a matter of course, meaning by that 
 phrase not merely the capitalists who owned the manu- 
 factories, but also the laborers employed in them, and other 
 classes, such as tradesmen, who were directly dependent upon 
 them. Still further, as manufacturing depended upon certain 
 conditions, as power agents, capital, raw material, labor, and 
 superintendence, the protective doctrine tended strongly 
 to root itself in particular States and districts of country 
 where these conditions were found. 
 
 2. The shipping and importing interests, with the classes 
 dependent directly upon them, tended toward a revenue 
 tariff, or what is commonly called free trade. A large de- 
 velopment of home production would tend to lessen the 
 demand for foreign products, and so reduce commerce. 
 Again, shipping and commercial interests depended also upon 
 certain natural and economical causes, as navigable waters, 
 ports, ship timber and shipyards, shipbuilders and sailors. 
 As New England was much more interested in commerce and
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 shipping than in manufactures, her Senators and Represent- 
 atives, led by Mr. Webster, voted against the act of 1816 by a 
 strong majority. But at a later day New England ranged 
 herself decisively on the protective side. Mr. Webster, who 
 went with his section, defended the change when the tariff 
 of 1828 was under discussion by alleging that the tariffs of 
 1816 and 1824 had led New Englanders to invest great 
 amounts of capital in manufactures, which could be protect- 
 ed against loss or destruction only by continuing and 
 strengthening the protective policy. 
 
 Nothing could be more natural than this divergence of 
 the manufacturing and commercial classes. On the subject 
 of protection, a great manufacturing city like Philadelphia 
 and a great commercial city like New York, would be quite 
 certain to go different roads. 
 
 3. The planting interest strongly supported the act of 1816. 
 Southern statesmen, as Mr. Calhoun, argued that it was 
 necessary to promote domestic manufactures in order that 
 the country might be prepared for war ; they also hoped 
 that protection would stimulate manufactures, and particu- 
 larly cotton manufactures at the South. In a few years, 
 however, a change came over the Southern mind; the 
 planters had learned that manufactories could not thrive 
 in the midst of slavery ; they realized keenly that they 
 must buy the bulk of the goods that they needed either of 
 Europe or at the North ; and as they believed that pro- 
 tection enhanced prices they declared in favor of free trade. 
 Still more, they feared that European nations would, in the 
 spirit of retaliation for the high American duties, levy taxes 
 upon the American cotton that they imported, thus reducing 
 its price at home. How great the change of opinion was, is 
 shown by the fact that in 1832 South Carolina nullified laws 
 similar to one that only sixteen years before she had warmly 
 supported. But into nullification there also entered deeply 
 sectional and personal views and feelings that are beyond 
 the present purpose. 
 
 4. The agricultural districts have not pursued an alto-
 
 290 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 gether even course on protection. The great agricultural 
 States of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky 
 voted for the act of 1816 ; they desired protection for their 
 iron, wool, hemp, and flax. The belief was also common in 
 those States that although protection might enhance the 
 prices of protected articles, yet it would bring a compensa- 
 tion in the form of an enlarged home market for domestic 
 products, as for the farmer's grain and meat. The agricul- 
 tural States occupied much the same position in 1824, but 
 afterward they wavered or changed ground. 
 
 Thus, of the three great interests that protection may be 
 said to antagonize, commerce was the first and farming the 
 last to array itself in opposition.* 
 
 It was many years before the constitutional right of Con- 
 gress to lay protective duties was denied, or before such 
 duties became a party question. The Democratic party, 
 when reorganized under General Jackson, took up the line of 
 free trade ; the Whig party, which then appeared in opposi- 
 tion, the line of protection. The geographical strength of 
 the two parties, so far as it was affected by the tariff, turned 
 mainly upon the business interests of localities, which again 
 depended upon natural and economical causes. The pro- 
 tective sentiment in Kentucky was due as much, perhaps, to 
 the interest of the State in dew-rotted hemp as to the admi- 
 ration of Kentuckians for their great fellow-citizen Henry 
 Clay. The link that bound Louisiana to the Whigs was 
 sugar cane. In Pennsylvania the situation was most anom- 
 alous. From the beginning that State was strongly pro- 
 tectionist. Her mines of coal, iron, and limestone turned 
 her in that direction as strongly as the rice swamps and cot- 
 
 * Prof. Sumner gives this account of the situation on the passing of 
 the Act of 1828 : " New England and the Adams men wanted high duties 
 on woolens and cottons, and low duties on wool, iron, hemp, salt, and mo- 
 lasses (the raw material of rum). Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky 
 wanted high taxes on iron, wool, hemp, molasses (protection to whisky), 
 and low taxes on the raw materials used. The Southerners wanted low 
 taxes on everything, but especially on finished goods."
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. i;91 
 
 ton fields of South Carolina turned her in the opposite one. 
 And yet Pennsylvania commonly cast her electoral votes 
 for Democratic Presidents. 
 
 At present it is common to describe the Republican party 
 as protectionist, the Democratic party as free trade. But 
 special causes acting in certain States or districts sometimes 
 bring the two parties together upon that issue. General 
 Garfield said, in the House of Representatives in 1870 : 
 " West of Ohio, north of Arkansas, and east of the Rocky 
 Mountains, there are nine States represented here, all of 
 them Republican, some of them overwhelmingly Republi- 
 can in politics. Yet if I understand correctly the opinions 
 of the fifty-seven Democratic and Republican Representa- 
 tives in this House from those nine States, there are at least 
 fifty of them who are in favor of some reduction in the 
 present rates of our tariff." 
 
 We may now take a view of another group of political 
 effects caused by natural forces working through industrial 
 and social life. Soon after 1789 the country divided politi- 
 cally on the subject of constitutional interpretation, the Fed- 
 eralists emphasizing the National element, the Republicans 
 the State element of our dual system of government. As Mr. 
 Hildreth characterizes the two parties, " The Federal party, 
 with Washington and Hamilton at its head, represented the 
 experience, the prudence, the practical wisdom, the disci- 
 pline, the conservative reason and instinct of the country. 
 The opposition, headed by Jefferson, expressed its hopes, 
 wishes, theories, many of them enthusiastic and impracti- 
 cable, more especially its passions, its sympathies and antipa- 
 thies, its impatience of restraint." The geographical dis- 
 tribution of two parties answering to these descriptions 
 could hardly fail to be instructive. " The Federalists," Mr. 
 Hildreth proceeds, " had their strength in those narrow dis- 
 tricts where a concentrated population had produced and 
 contributed to maintain that complexity of institutions and 
 that reverence for social order which, in proportion as men 
 are brought into contiguity, become more absolutely neces-
 
 292 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 saries of existence " ; while '" the ultra democratical ideas of 
 the opposition prevailed in all that more extensive region in 
 which the dispersion of population and the despotic author- 
 ity vested in individuals over families of slaves kept society 
 in a state of immaturity, and made legal restraints the 
 more irksome in proportion as their necessity was the less 
 felt." 
 
 With such an analysis as this before him, any student 
 who is familiar with the general condition of the country 
 at the close of the last century could with measurable cor- 
 rectness indicate, without historical investigation, where the 
 two parties would have their principal strength. New Eng- 
 land, Delaware, Maryland, and for a time South Carolina, 
 constituted the strength of Federalism ; Virginia, North 
 Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, the strength 
 of Republicanism. The decision between the two, as Mr. 
 Hildreth tells us, " depended on the two great and growing 
 States of Pennsylvania and New York ; and from the very 
 fact that they were growing, that both of them had an ex- 
 tensive backwoods frontier, and that both were constantly 
 receiving accessions of political enthusiasts from Europe, 
 they both inclined more and more to the Republican side." 
 In a word, it was the rapid growth of the West, and of those 
 States and parts of States where society most closely resem- 
 bled the West, that, more than anything else, caused the 
 downfall of the Federal party. Moreover, it was a clear 
 perception of this tendency, and of the loss of political con- 
 sequence that the growth of the West would cause the New 
 England States, which led the Federalists of that section, as 
 a class, to look with jealousy or hostility upon the West, and 
 to oppose any acquisition of territory out of which addi- 
 tional States could be made. 
 
 Still the contentions of the Federalists and the Republi- 
 cans were not over the barren abstraction of a strong or a 
 weak government, but over practical living questions ; and 
 an examination of these questions, one by one, confirms the 
 general view already advanced.
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 293 
 
 The first political measures to arouse the country were 
 Hamilton's propositions that the National Government 
 should assume the debts that the States had contracted in 
 carrying on the war, that it should then fund the consoli- 
 dated public debt, and that it should create a National bank 
 commensurate with the financial affairs of the Government 
 and with the business affairs of the country. These were 
 all propositions that conservative communities, molded by 
 industrial and commercial ideas and habits, and possessing 
 more than their proportional share of wealth, would natu- 
 rally favor, and that agricultural and planting districts, less 
 wealthy and less schooled in the ways of commerce, would 
 as naturally oppose. Then, upon the breaking out of the 
 French Revolution, England and France became the leaders 
 of the conservative and reactionary and of the innovating 
 and revolutionary influences of Europe and of the world. 
 For more than twenty years this issue was closely drawn, 
 and it could not fail to enlist the interests and the passions 
 of the great body of the American people. Still more, while 
 Federalists might condemn the arbitrary course that Eng- 
 land often followed, and Republicans denounce the frequent 
 violence of France, nevertheless, given the ideas and the 
 temper of the two parties, it was natural that the two bodies 
 should move on diverging lines. The New England manu- 
 facturer or merchant could no more sympathize with France 
 than the Western farmer or Southern planter could sympa- 
 thize with England. 
 
 Personal slavery is despotism in a revolting form, and its 
 prevalence in a democratic state might at first seem an im- 
 possibility. The fact is otherwise. Discussing the discon- 
 tents in America in 1775, Mr. Burke said that " where multi- 
 tudes of slaves are found those who are free are by far the 
 most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to 
 them not merely an enjoyment but a kind of rank and priv- 
 ilege. . . . Such were all the ancient commonwealths ; such 
 were our Gothic ancestors ; such in our days were the Poles ; 
 and such will be all masters of slaves who are not slaves
 
 294: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 themselves. In such a people the haughtiness of domina- 
 tion combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and 
 renders it invincible." We may add, and all the more where 
 the slave owner and the slave belong to different and repel- 
 lent races. 
 
 The fondness of the Southern slaveholders for States 
 rights was perfectly natural ; the State governments they 
 might fairly hope to control in the interests of slavery, but 
 the National Government might become too large for them 
 to manage. Then, their habit of personal domination caused 
 them to look upon a vigorous central authority much as 
 feudal barons looked upon the king. In Delaware and 
 Maryland, and in South Carolina for a time, special forces 
 overcame the natural tendencies of slave societies, causing 
 them to adhere to the Federal party ; some of the slave 
 States at a later day followed more or less constantly the 
 fortunes of the Whig party ; but, all in all, the gravita- 
 tion of the South toward the party that Mr. Jefferson 
 founded is one of the most significant facts of our political 
 history. 
 
 The divergent tendencies that appeared in our early pol- 
 itics, while sometimes modified or repressed, have never 
 ceased to act. The relative density of population and the 
 relative wealth of different districts, acting through industry 
 and social life, have made themselves felt in the sphere of 
 financial, economical, and political ideas. Until slavery be- 
 came the overmastering political question, new States on 
 their admission to the Union nearly all gravitated toward 
 the Democratic party. Of the total amount of public debts 
 repudiated by States and localities down to the present time, 
 an overwhelming preponderance has been repudiated at the 
 South and West. The explanation is easy. The hopeful- 
 ness, ambition, and fiscal inexperience of new communities 
 cause them to undertake enterprises beyond what their re- 
 sources will justify ; while the pressure of heavy taxation, 
 and the prevalence of loose ideas and traditions in respect 
 to public obligations, together with disappointment at fail-
 
 PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT. 295 
 
 ure to realize expectations, lead them to hold lightly engage- 
 ments which have been contracted. At the South since the 
 War a large amount of public indebtedness has been dis- 
 owned on account of its political parentage. Schemes to 
 repudiate or impair the validity of the National debt con- 
 tracted during the War, at one time so rife, had a much 
 greater proportionate following at the West than at the 
 East. Between 1837 and 1863 the country suffered enor- 
 mous losses from incapable and dishonest banking. With 
 few exceptions the good banking systems were found in the 
 old States, the bad ones in the new States. Similar tenden- 
 cies have shown themselves in connection with the National 
 currency. Inflation and cheap money have proved very at- 
 tractive to the younger, poorer, and less mature parts of the 
 country. 
 
 We need not suppose that the greater fidelity of the old 
 States to sound finance has been due to superior native vir- 
 tue. It is rather a matter of interest and habit. These 
 States own the greater share of the public indebtedness held 
 in the country ; their banks and other financial institutions, 
 as trust and insurance companies, are buttressed upon se- 
 curities ; many private persons are holders of bonds, while 
 the discipline that the people have received in the school of 
 experience enables them the better to understand the con- 
 ditions of prosperity, public and private. Communities 
 where credits far outweigh debts are not likely to hold 
 either public or private faith in small esteem, or to place a 
 low valuation upon vested rights. At the East the Conti- 
 nental finance is remembered after the lapse of more than a 
 century. 
 
 It is worth observing that the planting and farming dis- 
 tricts have commonly looked with distrust upon the manu- 
 facturing and commercial districts, and particularly the 
 cities. This distrust it was that in 1790 located the National 
 capital in a forest on the Potomac, much to the disgust of 
 the more cultivated classes at the North. The proposition 
 to select a city, as New York or Philadelphia, was vigorously
 
 296 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 opposed. Cities were held to be the home of extravagance 
 and corruption, the country of frugality and honesty. 
 Speeches that great statesmen then made upon this ques- 
 tion hreathe an idyllic faith in woods, streams, and farms 
 that is very refreshing. 
 
 NOTE. Prof. A. B. Hart, discussing the causes that have controlled 
 the location and growth of cities, reminds us that most ancient or mediaeval 
 cities were grouped about a hill, or on an island, or on a promontory, or if 
 in flat land they were not immediately on the coast ; but not one of our 
 cities owes its growth to its protected situation. Commerce is as effective 
 now as ever. It is much less important for a city to have a great river 
 behind it than to have a good harbor before it. The farther a harbor ex- 
 tends into the land the more valuable it is. The point where the tidal 
 water of an estuary meets the fresh water of a river is marked for the site 
 of a settlement. The depth of harbors was once of less consequence than 
 their accessibility and protection ; but now the increasing size and draft of 
 seagoing steamers have caused a concentration of trade into the few large 
 and deep harbors, and this is doubtless one cause of the growth of the large 
 cities of the United States. The effect of railroads has been to utilize more 
 fully the best harbors wherever found, and to make large areas of rich 
 country tributary to the cities built upon them. When manufactures began 
 to grow on a large scale, the advantages of water-power were highly ap- 
 preciated, but now where coal is cheap steam-power is equally or more ad- 
 vantageous. Urban life has great attractions, and when it is once started 
 a city is likely to grow from sheer force of gravitation. The crossings of 
 railroads invite business and population far more than the junctions of 
 rivers. In America, good connections with the interior are a great advan- 
 tage. " When the Alleghanies were pierced, Western commerce poured 
 down into the termini of the railroads. The keen eye of Calhoun early 
 saw that the ship must come to meet the car, and he earnestly advocated a 
 railroad from Charleston northwestward. But Baltimore, and a little later 
 Philadelphia, had Western lines years before Charleston or Mobile or Sa- 
 vannah or Norfolk or Kichmond, and even before New York, Boston, Port- 
 land, or Montreal. The passes now occupied by the New York Central, 
 Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Ohio, and Chesapeake and Ohio .Railroads, 
 are as much trade routes as the Suez Canal or the Bosporus: no rival 
 roads can compete on equal terms ; and no neighboring cities can outstrip 
 the termini of these great trunk lines." Practical Essays on American 
 Government, Chap. VIII.
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 
 
 References. Greeley : The American Conflict, Vol. I., Chaps. 1.- 
 XXII. ; Cairnes : The Slave Power ; De Tocqueville : Democracy in 
 America, Vol. L, Chap. XVIII. ; Johnston : Political History of the 
 United States, Lalor's Cyclopaedia (Slavery in United States History, 
 Territories, Annexations, Abolition and Abolitionists); Shaler: 
 Nature and Man in America ; Goldwin Smith : The United States ; 
 Wilson : History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in Amer- 
 ica. 
 
 Beginning with the landing of the fourteen negroes at 
 Jamestown in 1619, slavery gradually extended to all the 
 English Colonies. At the close of the Revolution it had a 
 legal existence in all the States except New Hampshire and 
 Massachusetts. However, by far the larger numher of 
 slaves had always been at the South, as shown by the follow- 
 ing table 
 
 
 1715. 
 
 1775. 
 
 1790. 
 
 North 
 
 10,900 
 
 46,100 
 
 40,300 
 
 South 
 
 47,900 
 
 455,000 
 
 657.000 
 
 
 
 
 
 At the last of these dates slavery was on the decline at the 
 North, and its final extinction there was soon anticipated. 
 At the South, although slaves were multiplying rapidly in 
 numbers, opposition to the institution was general, and few 
 men of character could have been found to say that its in- 
 21
 
 298 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 definite existence was either possible or desirable. Virginia 
 opinion is well expressed in three quotations from as many 
 prominent statesmen. Mason : " Slavery discourages arts 
 and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed 
 by slaves. They prevent the immigration of whites, who 
 really enrich and strengthen a country." Jefferson : "In- 
 deed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is 
 just, and that his justice can not sleep forever." Washing- 
 ton : " I can only say that there is not a man living who 
 wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for 
 the abolition of it." Three months before the Declaration of 
 Independence Congress adopted a resolution " that no more 
 slaves should be imported into any of the thirteen colonies." 
 At the same time the framers of the Constitution were com- 
 pelled to reckon with slavery ; they left it where they found 
 it, an exclusively State institution, but defined its relations 
 to the Union in various compromises. 
 
 At the North the expectations of 1787 were fulfilled ; 
 slavery continued to decline, and came to an easy death. At 
 the South events took a wholly unexpected turn. In sixty 
 years the slaves increased from 657,000 to 3,204,000 ; the 
 slave States, from six to fifteen in number, extending not 
 merely to the sources of the rivers flowing to the Atlantic, but 
 to the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Rio Grande. Antislavery 
 sentiment died out, or its utterance was stifled. Slavery took 
 a firmer hold of State laws and institution s. In time business, 
 politics, and religion were all adjusted to the new center. 
 It was pronounced an industrial and social necessity and a 
 divine institution. " Sir," said Mr. Dixon, of Kentucky, in 
 1854, " sir, upon the question of slavery I know no Whig- 
 gery and I know no Democracy ; I am a proslavery man." 
 Nor was this all. The Slave Power controlled or modified 
 National legislation affecting its interests, dictated the nom- 
 ination and election of Presidents, and extorted from the 
 Supreme Court a decision that reversed the policy that the 
 Government had pursued on one important feature of the 
 subject for nearly seventy years. More even than this its
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 299 
 
 influence extended beyond the Ocean, reaching the marts 
 and cahinets of the Old World. 
 
 In searching for the causes of the contrast between the 
 course of things at the North and at the South, we must lay 
 aside the idea that it was due primarily to moral differences. 
 Morality played its part in both sections, but the causes that 
 we seek lay in quite another quarter. In stating them I 
 shall draw largely upon Professor Cairnes's admirable work, 
 The Slave Power. " The true causes of the phenomenon 
 will appear," he tells us, " if we reflect on the characteristic 
 advantages and disadvantages which attach respectively to 
 slavery and free labor as productive instruments in connec- 
 tion with the external conditions under which those forms 
 of industry came into competition in North America." 
 
 The economic advantages of slavery are two in number : 
 (1) The employer of slaves has absolute power over his 
 workmen, and (2) he enjoys the disposal of the whole fruit 
 of their labors. As a consequence slave labor admits of the 
 most complete organization ; it may be combined on an ex- 
 tensive scale and directed by a controlling mind to a single 
 end, while its cost can never be more than the cost of main- 
 taining the slave in health and strength. Its economical de- 
 fects are three in number : (1) It is reluctant, (2)it is un- 
 skillful, (3) it is wanting in versatility. The slave works 
 reluctantly, because he works for another and not for him- 
 self. Fear and not hope is his strongest stimulus. He is 
 unskillful both because he has no personal interest in his 
 work and so has no motive to improve, and because he is 
 condemned to ignorance by his status as a slave. He lacks 
 invention and adaptability for much the same reasons. He 
 uses his muscles and not his brains. When a slave has been 
 taught to do a certain thing he must be kept at that thing, 
 and so he becomes the merest creature of routine and habit.* 
 
 * Dr. Carpenter remarks upon the power of habit in those persons who 
 lack general culture and volitional control, their whole course of action 
 being determined rather by what they have been " used to " than by what
 
 300 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Because he is reluctant, unskillful, and stupid, the slave 
 must be constantly watched or superintended. Hence slave 
 labor, to be profitable, must be capable of being brought 
 within a narrow field of observation. It may pay to provide 
 an overseer for a gang of men, but not for one or two, or 
 even a few. 
 
 Both by its advantages and by its disadvantages slave 
 labor, as a rule, was excluded from a large part of the field 
 of production. It could not be employed advantageously 
 where workmen were widely scattered or where work was 
 on a small scale ; it could not be employed where skill and 
 versatility were required ability to think, and so to deal 
 with cases outside of the ordinary routine ; the same must 
 be said, and with even more emphasis, of employments re- 
 quiring the use of machinery and tools save of a coarse and 
 bungling sort. Even the animals used must be such as 
 
 even ordinary common sense would tell them was the best for them. He 
 mentions a family reduced to absolute want who refused a supply of ex- 
 cellent soup thickened with barley merely because " they had not been 
 used to barley." He says females of the humbler classes in England hav- 
 ing been accustomed to one pattern of prints refuse to accept departures 
 from it, and mentions a case where the workman of an outfitter refused for 
 two weeks to work because a slight alteration had been made in the pattern 
 of a particular garment, although the new pattern imposed no more labor 
 than the old. Mental Physiology, chap. mii. Northern men who went 
 into the business of planting at the South after the War sometimes fur- 
 nished the negroes whom they employed with unproved tools, but only to 
 have them broken. President Lincoln did not emancipate the slaves from 
 routine. 
 
 " I am here shown tools," says Mr. Olmsted, " that no man in his senses 
 with us would allow a laborer to whom he was paying wages to be en- 
 cumbered with, and the excessive weight and clumsiness of which, I would 
 judge, would make work at least ten per cent greater than with those ordi- 
 narily used with us. And 1 am assured that, in the careless and clumsy 
 way they must be used by the slaves, anything lighter or less rude could 
 not be furnished them with good economy, and that such tools as we con- 
 stantly give our laborers, and find our profit in giving them, would not 
 last out a day in a Virginia cornfield much lighter and more free fron: 
 stones though it be than ours." The Seaboard Slave States, p. 46.
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 301 
 
 could stand hard usage mules, and not horses. According- 
 ly slave labor was mainly cut off from small and diversi- 
 fied farming, from all kinds of manufacturing, and from 
 navigation. The slave is too dull to rise to the level of 
 these employments. On the other hand, the advantages and 
 disadvantages of slave labor confined it mainly to those oc- 
 cupations in which numbers of men could be directed by 
 one head, in which the processes were of a coarse and routine 
 character, and in which costly appliances were not neces- 
 sary. Even to-day, while the common negro laborer can be 
 profitably employed on a cotton or rice plantation in Georgia, 
 he can not be so employed on a wheat farm in the Dakotas. 
 Such were the principal characteristics of slave labor as 
 it formerly existed in the United States. It was confronted 
 one hundred years ago by a system that Professor Cairnes, 
 speaking in the language of his science, calls " peasant pro- 
 prietorship," but that we may call farm ownership. Here 
 all the former conditions are reversed. Both when the 
 work is on a small scale and when the laborer works on his 
 own account, no considerable organization of labor is pos- 
 sible. There is small room for classification and combina- 
 tion. "Occupation may be found for a whole family of 
 slaves according to the capacity of each member in perform- 
 ing the different operations connected with certain branches 
 of industry say the culture of tobacco, in which the women 
 and children may be employed in picking the worms off the 
 plants, or gathering the leaves as they become ripe, while 
 the men are engaged in the more laborious tasks ; but a 
 small proprietor, whose children are at school, and whose 
 wife finds enough to occupy her in domestic duties, can 
 command for all operations, however important or however 
 insignificant, no other labor than his own, or that of his 
 grown-up sons." The farm owner is his own director, and 
 superintendency is abolished. He works freely since he 
 works for himself ; he tends to become skillful and versatile 
 because necessity prompts and interest invites him to use his 
 brains ; and he takes care to inform and expand his mind
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 by acquiring a school education. Paid labor was often em- 
 ployed under this system, but the facts already stated deter- 
 mined its characteristic features. Free labor is indeed capa- 
 ble of extensive organization on public works or in manu- 
 facturing establishments, but this does not affect the argu- 
 ment. 
 
 The line that divided the free from the slave States also 
 divided one system of agriculture from another. On the 
 north side of this line the soil and climate were adapted to 
 cereal crops and small farming ; on the south side, to tobacco, 
 cotton, rice, indigo, and sugar. Now, while slave labor was 
 ill adapted, as the results proved, to the culture carried on at 
 the North, it was admirably adapted to the culture carried 
 on at the South. It met the necessities of planting but not 
 of farming. No great skill was required to raise the South- 
 ern staples, while the conditions of organization and super- 
 intendence were fully met. Under the old regime one man 
 could cultivate ten times as many acres of wheat or corn as 
 of tobacco or cotton. On the other hand, while farm owner- 
 ship was well adapted to cereal farming, it was ill adapted, 
 at least in competition with the plantation system, to the 
 production of the Southern staples. Farm ownership met 
 the one set of conditions as slavery did the other. At the 
 North the capitalist possessed no advantage as a farmer ; at 
 the South the free laborer was at a disadvantage. This 
 reasoning is enforced by the fact that in those parts of the 
 South where cereal crops were cultivated, as in portions of 
 Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and along the slopes of the 
 Alleghany Mountains, the slave could not compete with the 
 free man ; but in the cotton and tobacco field, the rice 
 swamp and sugar plantation, the free man could not com- 
 pete with the slave. Using the names of the two staples as 
 types, we may say that slavery died out in the North be- 
 cause the North raised corn, and lived on in the South be- 
 cause the South raised cotton. Still cotton was much more 
 than a type, as we shall soon see. 
 
 But these facts alone do not explain why a century ago
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 303 
 
 slavery was thought to be doomed at the South, or why it 
 soon after entered upon a period of extraordinary growth. 
 Still other facts must be brought into view. 
 
 An intelligent observer wrote in 1773 that every colony 
 had its peculiar commodity : Massachusetts, fish ; Connecti- 
 cut, timber ; New York and Pennsylvania, wheat ; Virginia 
 and Maryland, tobacco ; North Carolina, pitch and tar ; South 
 Carolina, indigo; Georgia, rice and silk. Neither one of 
 the typical commodities is here mentioned. Slave labor 
 was employed upon the characteristic productions of the 
 South; tobacco had indeed enriched the planters of Vir- 
 ginia and Maryland, but neither tobacco nor all the 
 peculiar Southern productions together promised slavery 
 a long life. The great industrial, political, and moral 
 system that we call the Slave Power never could have 
 been built up upon any economical basis existing at the 
 South at that time. 
 
 The cotton plant was little known in the colonies save as 
 a garden plant before the Revolution. Seven bags were ex- 
 ported from Charleston in 1748. In 1784 the custom officers 
 at Liverpool seized eight bales on an American ship because, 
 as they said, it was impossible that so large a quantity could 
 have been produced in the United States. The exports for 
 the next six years respectively were 14, 6, 104, 389, 842, and 
 81 bags. Chief -Justice Jay apparently did not know in 1794 
 that cotton was an article of export from his country. Al- 
 though cotton fabrics had been introduced into Europe 
 from Asia before the Christian era, they never became the 
 object of large manufacture and sale previous to our own 
 century. The forty thousand bales that the West Indies 
 furnished England at the close of the last century are said 
 to have been three-fourths of the total cotton supply at that 
 time. 
 
 A mighty impulse was given to cotton culture in the 
 United States, and through that culture to slavery, by a 
 series of remarkable inventions made in the second half of 
 the eighteenth century. In 1750 Kaye invented the fly
 
 3U4: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 shuttle ; in 1770 Hargreaves, the spinning jenny ; in 1775 
 Crompton, the mule jenny ; in 1769-75 Arkwright made the 
 inventions that bear his name ; in 1783 Watts fitted the 
 steam engine, which he had already improved, to carding 
 and spinning ; and in 1785-'87 cylinder printing and the 
 use of acids for bleaching were introduced. But these in- 
 ventions did not solve the problem ; the series was not com- 
 plete ; the inventor was needed on the plantation as well as 
 in the factory. Cotton fabrics could not enter largely into 
 the commerce of the world until they became cheap, and 
 they could not become cheap so long as a day's labor of a 
 slave was required to clean five or six pounds of cotton for 
 market. So everything turned on a cheap and expeditious 
 mode of separating the cotton seed from the fiber. In 1793 
 Eli Whitney, a Connecticut schoolmaster, invented the cot- 
 ton gin, and thus completed the series of inventions con- 
 necting the plantations of the South with the markets of the 
 world. With this engine a slave could clean a thousand 
 pounds of cotton in a day. Immediately the growing of 
 cotton began to show fresh signs of life, and soon to increase 
 by leaps and bounds. The export was 89,000 pounds in 
 1791 ; 138,000 in 1792 ; 487,000 in 1793 ; 1,600,000 in 1794 ; 
 6,276,000 in 1795 ; 38,118,000 in 1804. " Within five years 
 after Whitney's invention," it has been said, "cotton had 
 displaced indigo as the great Southern staple, and the slave 
 States had become the cotton field of the world/' The 
 world would take an indefinite amount of cotton goods if 
 they could be furnished cheap ; the manufacturers of Eng- 
 land would furnish them cheap if the staple could be had at 
 a low price ; the Southern States with their abundance of 
 new lands well adapted to the culture, their system of slave 
 labor, and Whitney's gin would provide the staple at a low 
 price. The circle of inventions was completed, and events 
 were put in train for crowning cotton king, and for building 
 up the Slave Power. The demand for cotton enhanced the 
 value of slave labor and of cotton lands ; the enhanced 
 value of slave labor and cotton lands stimulated slave breed-
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 305 
 
 ing and Western emigration, and these in turn led to the 
 formation of new slave States. , 
 
 Before Whitney made his invention population had be- 
 gun to flow from the old States into the wilderness west of 
 the Alleghanies, those from the South taking with them 
 their slaves. Here the conditions of soil and climate that 
 they found were similar to those that they had left behind 
 them ; the line separating the conditions favorable to cereal 
 crops from the conditions favorable to the Southern staples 
 extended westward. In other words, the natural causes that 
 were bringing slavery to an end in New England and in 
 the Middle States and those that were about to give it a 
 new lease of life in the South, declared themselves. The 
 total results were the formation of a new South and the for- 
 mation of a new North on opposite sides of the Ohio River. 
 
 Two subsidiary causes accelerated the westward exten- 
 sion of slavery, one industrial and one political. Cotton 
 production as carried on proved very exhausting to the soil. 
 In a few years even the best lands were worn out and had 
 to be abandoned. Hence resulted a constant demand for 
 new lands even to maintain the former production, leaving 
 increased production out of sight, which could be found 
 only in the West. Then the political status of slavery was 
 always peculiar and even precarious. Against the institu- 
 tion were arrayed, in the long run, the forces of modern civ- 
 ilization. All over the civilized world slave labor had 
 shown itself incapable of competing with free labor, save 
 under unusual circumstances. For example, so far as we 
 can see, the cotton gin alone saved slavery in the old South- 
 ern States from death. The maintenance of the unusual 
 conditions essential to the continued existence of slavery 
 as need of virgin lands and immunity from interference 
 gave rise to those political necessities which in turn con- 
 tributed to the consolidation of the Slave Power. Not only 
 must the State governments be kept friendly, but the Na- 
 tional Government must at least be kept from becoming 
 hostile. This second end again could be accomplished only
 
 306 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 by maintaining the largest possible representation in the 
 two Houses of Congress, and by controlling the executive 
 and the judiciary. And this involved, once more, the rela- 
 tive numbers of slave and free States, or what was some- 
 times called " the balance of the Constitution." 
 
 In 1787 there were seven Northern and six Southern 
 States. In 1820 there were eleven of each ; the balance that 
 many statesmen thought necessary to political equilibrium 
 and the stability of the Union had been maintained for a 
 full generation. Thus far the formation of new slave States 
 had come about spontaneously, without reference to a politi- 
 cal programme, as population had extended westward in 
 obedience to general causes. Neither was the annexation 
 of Louisiana or of Florida due to slave influence ; both of 
 those accessions of territory flowed rather from general than 
 from local causes. Still further, slavery, while a sectional 
 interest, had not thus far directly influenced party politics. 
 Hitherto it had not been objected to the admission of any 
 State to the Union that it offered either a free or a slave con- 
 stitution. 
 
 The State of Missouri balanced Maine, but its admission 
 with slavery was secured by the South only by conceding 
 the restriction which accompanied it, namely : " That in all 
 that territory ceded by France to the United States under 
 the name of Louisiana which lies north of 36 30' north 
 latitude, excepting only such part thereof as is included 
 within the State contemplated by this act [that is, Missouri], 
 slavery and involuntary servitude, otherwise than in the 
 punishment of crime whereof the parties shall have been 
 duly convicted, shall be and hereby is forever prohibited." 
 On the conclusion of this famous compromise this was the 
 situation : At the South, territory for only two more slave 
 States, Arkansas and Florida, remained ; while at the North 
 the territory out of which Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Min- 
 nesota, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and parts of other 
 States have since been carved lay open to free labor. Con- 
 fronted by this situation the Slave Power thought it neces-
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 3Q7 
 
 sary to secure new territory adapted to cotton culture that 
 could be cut up into new States, unless, indeed, the old 
 balance were to be abandoned. This belief, combined in 
 the first two instances with other causes, led, first, to the 
 admission of Texas with a proviso that it might be di- 
 vided into five States ; second, to the two Mexican annexa- 
 tions ; and, third, to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise 
 with a view of making slave States north of the line drawn 
 in 1820. 
 
 While slavery wholly died out in the Northern States, 
 still the North for a time paid little attention to the change 
 that was going on at the South. Opposition to the spread 
 of slavery in the Northwest was general; also a quiet ac- 
 quiescence in its extension in the Southwest ; but of active 
 opposition to the institution as such there was very little. 
 About the time that the change of front had been fully ac- 
 complished a new opposition began to declare itself. The 
 New England Antislavery Society was organized in 1832, 
 the American Antislavery Society in the year following, 
 both on abolition lines. The opinions that slavery was a 
 grave economical mistake, a serious political evil, and a 
 great moral wrong began to take root in the Northern 
 mind. More and more the conviction prevailed that free 
 labor and slave labor were antagonistical, and that slavery 
 was a standing menace to the peace of the country. Mr. 
 Seward said that the conflict between the two was irrepres- 
 sible, and Mr. Lincoln that the republic could not perma- 
 nently endure half slave and half free. Practical oppo- 
 sition assumed different forms. The abolitionists called for 
 immediate abolition ; originally this was a moral and not a 
 political movement. Political opposition, expressed in the 
 Liberty party 1840-'48, in the Free-Soil party 1848-'54, 
 and in the Republican party 1854 and years following, 
 strove to restrict the further spread of slavery in any quar- 
 ter, but did not directly oppose its continued existence at 
 the South. Directed as it was against what Southern men 
 freely called the corner stone of Southern society, opposi-
 
 308 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 tion of any kind could not fail to awaken a bitter sectional 
 controversy. 
 
 The contest that had now been joined between the two 
 systems of labor turned more and more against the South. 
 Texas, admitted in 1845, was the last of the slave States. 
 Population that would justify the division of that State was 
 not forthcoming, the Mexican annexations did not for the 
 time enlarge the area of slave territory, and the attempt to 
 carry slavery north of the parallel of 36 30' met with fail- 
 ure. While slavery extended only to the Rio Grande, the 
 admission of California and Oregon gave the Pacific slope 
 to freedom, and furnished the strongest pledge that the new 
 States yet to be formed in the West and Northwest would 
 be free States also. Kansas was demanding admission with 
 a free-state constitution, and other States would be ready in 
 the near future. In 1860 there were eighteen free States to 
 fifteen slave States. With all the rest, the Northern States 
 surpassed the Southern in population and in wealth even 
 more than in numbers. 
 
 The repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854 brought 
 into the field a great political party distinctly pledged to 
 oppose the very policy that was essential to the growth of 
 the Slave Power, and in the end to its very existence. The 
 National Republican platform of 1856 contained the declara- 
 tion : " That the Constitution confers upon Congress sover- 
 eign power over the Territories of the United States for their 
 government, and that in the exercise of this power it is both 
 the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the Terri- 
 tories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." 
 With slavery in the States and in the District of Columbia 
 the party did not propose to interfere. The same year the 
 Democrats laid down the rule of " non-interference of Con- 
 gress with slavery in the States and Territories or the Dis- 
 trict of Columbia." In 1860 the Republicans stood upon the 
 same ground as before ; while the Democrats, unable to 
 agree as to the meaning of non-interference, split into two 
 factions, one declaring it the duty of the Supreme Court to>
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 309 
 
 determine what power a Territorial legislature had over 
 the subject of slavery, the other that the citizens of every 
 State had an equal right to carry their property (slaves of 
 course included) into any Territory without being disturbed 
 by either Congressional or Territorial legislation. The elec- 
 tion of Mr. Lincoln signified the future limitation of the in- 
 stitution within the bounds in which it then existed and the 
 loss of its prestige in National politics ; and the Slave Power, 
 discerning this fact, seeing also that the old balance between 
 slavery and freedom was at an end, and believing, or affect- 
 ing to believe, that the next step would be interference with 
 the institution in the States where it already existed, pre- 
 cipitated the secession of eleven States from the Union, and 
 brought on the Civil War. 
 
 Throughout the long struggle that culminated in the 
 War the better adapted any State or district was to slave 
 cultivation, the more firmly was the institution intrenched 
 and the more aggressive was its spirit. The border States, 
 both because they adjoined the North and because the con- 
 ditions of slave cultivation were less favorable than they 
 were farther South, hesitated on the brink of secession. In 
 Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri the Union 
 sentiment was so strong that, re-enforced by Union troops, 
 it kept those States from seceding, while Virginia went with 
 the Southern Confederacy only when the resort to arms 
 came, giving as her reason for seceding that States were 
 sovereign, and that she could not sit idly by and see sister 
 States coerced, and much less assist in their coercion. Nor 
 is this all : numbers of men in most or all of the seceding 
 States adhered to the Union. These were nearly all found 
 in districts where slavery had a feeble hold of the industrial 
 system, and accordingly where the conditions of slave cul- 
 tivation were not well developed. The Virginians west of 
 the mountains refused to follow the Old Dominion, and 
 formed a new State loyal to the Union. Moreover, while 
 the Unionists of the Appalachian Mountain system below 
 the Virginia line may not have been in a majority, they
 
 310 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 nevertheless furnished many regiments of excellent troops 
 to the National cause. On the other hand, we never read of 
 similar enlistments in tide-water Virginia or the " black 
 belt" of South Carolina, save of negroes. Besides the at- 
 tachment of the cereal farmer of the mountain regions to 
 the Union, he had nothing in common with the plantation 
 and plantation life, but rather felt for them an invincible 
 repugnance. In fact, the tendency to division in Virginia, 
 where perhaps the two conditions were more plainly marked 
 than in any other State, antedated the war. Speaking of 
 Kentucky at the opening of the struggle, Professor Shaler 
 puts forward a view with which this branch of the subject 
 may well be dismissed : 
 
 When in 1861 it was to be determined whether Kentucky should 
 go with the South or North, the question turned in the main on 
 the occupations of the population. Where the soils were rich the 
 plantation system was possible, the slave element was large, and in 
 general the voice of the people was for union with the South. Where 
 the soils were thin the people had no interest in slavery, for they 
 owned no negroes. Old frictions with the slave-holding portions of 
 the State existed, and consequently the people of this sterile land 
 were generally devoted to the Union. A soil map of Kentucky 
 would in a rude way serve as a chart of the politics of the people in 
 this crisis in the nation's history. If Kentucky possessed a soil al- 
 together derived from limestone there is no question but that it 
 would have cast in its lot with the South. 
 
 Only one or two further facts require to be mentioned. 
 At the South, manufactures barely existed, while commerce 
 and agriculture, as compared with the North, were greatly 
 restricted. Slavery served to discredit all kinds of produc- 
 tive labor. The first result of these causes was that indus- 
 try and trade were far less attractive than at the North, and 
 men of character and standing were accordingly thrown 
 back upon the professions or a life of leisure. To such a 
 life also the climate somewhat invited. The second result 
 was the enhanced attention paid to law and politics to 
 which also the political necessities of slavery invited and
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 311 
 
 to military and other similar exercises. The political and 
 military virtues were well developed. At the North, on the 
 other hand, while law and politics were by no means neg- 
 lected, society took on an industrial and commercial cast 
 heyond anything elsewhere known. The genius of the peo- 
 ple was pacific. Not only Southerners, but also foreigners, 
 often reproached the people of the North for their devotion 
 to money-making. If the military virtues were not despised, 
 they were little cultivated. These factors affected the war 
 in two ways : in its early stages, and to some extent through- 
 out, the South enjoyed a certain advantage arising from its 
 military qualities ; but in the end the superior population 
 and material resources that freedom had fostered won the 
 battle. 
 
 At the close a note that has already been sounded may 
 again be struck. History is not an exact science. Phys- 
 ical causes alone do not control the life of man. Individu- 
 alities, as Carlyle calls them free wills not to speak of haz- 
 ard or accident, make definite prediction of the future im- 
 possible. The statesmen of the Revolution did not foresee 
 the future course of slavery ; the statesmen of 1850 did not 
 anticipate its final catastrophe. There is the more reason 
 for repeating this note here because no chapter in our his- 
 tory more strongly tends to establish the doctrine of uni- 
 versal physical causation than the chapter relating to slavery. 
 But even here the argument fails. It required a statute to 
 put an end to the institution in all the old States, and in 
 New York that statute did not come until 1817. One half 
 each of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio was quite as well adapted 
 to slave labor as one half of Missouri ; and it would un- 
 doubtedly have established itself in all those States had it 
 not been for the ordinance of 1787. As it was, the prohibi- 
 tion was maintained with much difficulty. If Mr. Clay's 
 emancipation plan had been adopted by Kentucky early in 
 the century not a violent thing to suppose there is little 
 reason to think that the action would have been afterward
 
 312 HOW TO STUDY AND TE^CH HISTORY. 
 
 reversed. Even at the last there was a considerable num- 
 ber of men at the South who did not accept the doctrines 
 of their section, while at the North the champions or the 
 apologists of the Slave Power were a multitude. 
 
 Again, the action of great political parties can not be posi- 
 tively predicted, even within the limits of their traditions 
 and platforms. Responding to impulses imparted to them 
 by their leaders, swerved by the pressure of particular situa- 
 tions, or overzealous for immediate advantage, they all tend 
 more or less to play fast and loose with their principles. 
 With the exception of that lull in political activity follow- 
 ing the War of 1812, called the Era of Good Feeling, there 
 has been a Strict-construction party and a Loose-construc- 
 tion party in the United States from the organization of the 
 Government, the Democratic-Republicans and the Demo- 
 crats forming the one line of succession, the Federalists, the 
 Whigs, and the Republicans the other line.* But what in- 
 consistencies do we not find on both sides ! Following 1801 
 Mr. Jefferson and his opponents seemed to change places. 
 The Slave Power, while adhering to States rights and de- 
 veloping within its bosom the dogma of secession, never 
 scrupled to use the power of the National Government to 
 promote its interests. And finally the Republicans, while 
 emphasizing National principles in the strongest manner, 
 have sometimes been found upon ground that more proper- 
 ly belonged to the Democrats. 
 
 Still we must not press such facts as the foregoing to the 
 extent of denying the existence of general causes or of dis- 
 crediting history as a guide in practical affairs. There is a 
 moral order : similar causes produce similar effects. Trees 
 
 * " This question of a strict or a loose construction of the Constitution 
 has always been at the root of legitimate national party differences in the 
 United States. All other pretended distinctions have been either local and 
 temporary or selfish and misleading, and the general acceptance of any 
 such party difference would mark an unfortunate decline in the political 
 intelligence of the people." Johnston : Political History of the United 
 jStates, Introduction.
 
 THE SLAVE POWER. 313 
 
 bring forth fruit after their kind ; men do not gather grapes 
 of thorns, or figs of thistles. The great source of difficulty 
 is that moral problems are very likely to be complex and so 
 confused. Man and Nature together make history ; and 
 man's powers of prevision and of lordship, although limited, 
 are the more important factors in the product.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 
 
 References. Of literature dealing with the academical side of 
 the subject, there is an abundance. A few titles are given without 
 distinguishing between general treatises and text-books. Story: 
 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (fourth edi- 
 tion, edited by Cooley) ; Cooley : A Treatise on the Constitutional 
 Limitations which rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of 
 the American Union (sixth edition, edited by Angell) ; the General 
 Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America ; 
 Bryce : The American Commonwealth ; Andrews : A Manual of the 
 Constitution of the United States ; Desty : The Constitution of the 
 United States, with Notes ; Lalor : Cyclopaedia of Political Science, 
 etc.; Wilson: Congressional Government, The State, Elements of 
 Historical and Practical Politics ; Fiske : Civil Government in the 
 United States considered with Some Reference to its Origins ; Hitch- 
 cock : American State Constitutions, a Study of their Growth ; 
 Ford : The American Citizen's Manual ; O'Neill : The American 
 Electoral System ; Macy : Our Government : How it Grew, what it 
 does, and how it does it ; Nordhoff : Politics for Young Americans ; 
 Mowry : Elements of Civil Government, Local, State, and National ; 
 Hinsdale : The American Government, State and National (the au- 
 thor has taken particular pains to discriminate the National and 
 the State sides of our dual system, and has given unusual space to 
 the State governments) ; Jameson : The Constitutional Convention. 
 
 Of pedagogical literature relating to the subject, there is very 
 little. Com pay re: Lectures on Practical Pedagogy (Morals and 
 Civic Instruction) ; Spencer : Education (I, What Knowledge is of 
 most Worth?); Crehore : Education, vol. vii (1887), p. 264 (The 
 Teaching of Civics in Schools), p. 456 (Foundation Principles of 
 Government), p. 547 (A Primary Study in Government) ; Vose : id.,
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 315 
 
 vol. vii, pp. 531, 617 (Methods of Instruction in Civics) ; MacDonald : 
 The Academy, vol. v (1890), p. 373 (Teaching Civics) ; Bryce : The 
 Contemporary Review, July, 1893, p. 14 (The Teaching of Civic 
 Duty ; an admirable article, written from the English point of view, 
 but of universal utility) ; Mace : Hints on Teaching Civics. 
 
 FOR a decade and more increasing attention has been 
 paid in our schools to teaching the branch of study called 
 Civics or Civil Government. The aim has been to teach 
 certain facts and principles relating to government in gen- 
 eral, and to our own Government in particular, in such a 
 manner as to enlarge the intelligence of the pupils, and to 
 inspire them with the spirit of civic duty and of patriotism. 
 The tendency is a healthy one. Civics is closely affiliated 
 with history ; it is emphatically an historical study. On the 
 one hand a knowledge of political science is necessary to the 
 successful pursuit of history; on the other, history is the 
 torch that illuminates political science. Indeed, the two 
 studies are so closely related that they can be carried on 
 together with hardly more expenditure of time and effort 
 than either one alone that is, if really valuable work is 
 done. In the elementary and the high school the two sub- 
 jects are commonly taught by the same teacher. These 
 facts are a sufficient reason for closing this book with a 
 chapter on Teaching Civics. 
 
 In previous chapters some remarks were made upon the 
 value to historians of a practical knowledge of public affairs. 
 Mr. John Morley has illustrated this thought by some ex- 
 tremely interesting examples. 
 
 It would perhaps not be too bold to lay down this proposition : 
 that no good social history has ever been written by a man who has 
 not either himself taken a more or less active part in public affairs, 
 or else been an habitual intimate of persons who were taking such a 
 part on a considerable scale. Everybody knows what Gibbon said 
 about the advantage to the historian of the Roman Empire of having 
 been a member of the English Parliament and a captain in the Hamp- 
 shire grenadiers. Thucydides commanded an Athenian squadron, 
 and Tacitus filled the offices of praetor and consul. Xenophon, Po-
 
 316 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORV. 
 
 lybius, and Sallust were all men of affairs and public adventure. 
 Guicciardini was an ambassador, a ruler, and the counselor of rulers ; 
 and Machiavel was all these things and more. Voltaire was the 
 keen-eyed friend of the greatest princes and statesmen of his time, 
 and was more than once engaged in diplomatic transactions. Rob- 
 ertson was a powerful party chief in the Assembly of the Scotch 
 Church. Grote and Macaulay were active members of Parliament, 
 and Hallam and Milman were confidential members of circles where 
 affairs of state were the staple of daily discussion among the men 
 who were responsible for conducting them to successful issues. 
 Guizot was a prime minister, Finlay was a farmer of the Greek 
 revenue. The most learned of contemporary English historians a 
 few years ago contested a county, and is habitually inspired in his 
 researches into the past by his interest in the politics of the present. 
 The German historians, whose gifts in reconstructing the past are 
 so valuable and so singular, have for the most part been as actively 
 interested in the public movements of to-day as in those of any cen- 
 tury before or since the Christian era. Niebuhr held more than one 
 political post of dignity and importance ; and of historical writers 
 in our time, one has sat in several Prussian parliaments ; another, 
 once the tutor of a Prussian prince, has lived in the atmosphere of 
 high politics ; while all the best of them have taken their share in 
 the preparation of the political spirit and ideas that have restored 
 Germany to all the fullness and exaltation of national life.* 
 
 These examples point directly to the first fact that should 
 be borne in mind in respect to political education : it always 
 begins with public affairs, and never with books or formal 
 teaching. Some first-hand practical knowledge is as essential 
 in civics as some first-hand natural knowledge is in geogra- 
 phy. The examples point also, though less directly, to a sec- 
 ond fact that is hardly less important : school study of the 
 subject should begin with facts and not with definitions. The 
 simple concrete elements of civil government are not unlike 
 the similar elements of family and school government, and 
 they are acquired quite as easily in their proper time. On 
 the other hand, the fundamental terms of political science are 
 
 * Critical Miscellanies, second series, pp. 2, 3.
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 317 
 
 abstract, and the definitions of some of them are disputed. 
 Accordingly, to give as first lessons definitions and discus- 
 sions of nation, state, sovereignty, and the like would be the 
 extreme of folly. Nor can anything better be said of the 
 National and States rights theories of our own Government. 
 
 Some very simple lessons in civics may be given from 
 the very beginning of school life ; they should be brought 
 in incidentally in connection with geography and history, 
 should be oral in form, and should relate to matters proxi- 
 mate to the daily life of children ; formal instruction upon 
 the subject should not be deferred beyond the eighth year 
 in school. By that time the boy, if really intelligent, by 
 observation, by hearing conversation, and by reading the 
 newspapers, has accumulated a store of political facts and 
 ideas that will be of the greatest service to him. His facts 
 are concrete facts, relating to local government, to State 
 government, and to the National Government He has 
 also elaborated or received some political ideas and theories 
 which will probably stand in need of future correction. 
 Back of this knowledge is the somewhat similar life of the 
 home and school, for the boy's first king is his father, his 
 first queen his mother, and his first law and authority those 
 that his father and mother have taught him. Taking the 
 boy where he finds him, the teacher must seek to enlarge his 
 range of facts, to clarify his ideas, to give system and body 
 to his knowledge, and progressively lead him to comprehend 
 the nature and functions of the government and of the state 
 and his relations to them. Nowhere is it more important 
 to remember that a child of fourteen is not a philosopher ; 
 nowhere more indispensable to avoid nice criticisms and ab- 
 stract views ; nowhere more important to keep in close and 
 constant touch with reality. What shall the method be ? 
 
 Before answering this question directly it will be well to 
 state briefly the reasons why we teach civics at all. First, 
 the discipline and the culture derived therefrom are the 
 same that have been claimed for history in the first chapter 
 of this work : the science demands observation and refl.ec-
 
 318 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 tion in relation to a very important class of facts, the affairs 
 of government, the activities of the state. But the great 
 reason for teaching the subject in the elementary and high 
 schools is its practical uses ; the pupil needs the informa- 
 tion, the guidance, and the civic spirit that it affords. But 
 that the study may accomplish these ends we must begin at 
 home and not abroad. A second reason impels us to the 
 same conclusion, viz., the pedagogical law relative to pro- 
 ceeding from the known to the unknown. 
 
 Our fundamental question is still left unanswered. No- 
 where is there a greater distribution of political powers than 
 in our own country, nowhere a greater variety of govern- 
 ments. We have National and State governments, county, 
 city, and town governments, not to speak of still smaller 
 jurisdictions. With which of these shall we begin, and 
 how shall we proceed ? Shall we begin with the nation 
 and proceed analytically ? Or shall we begin with the local 
 elements and proceed synthetically ? With advanced pupils 
 it is no doubt better to begin with the grand whole ; but 
 with elementary scholars it is better to begin at home, at 
 the center, as in the case of geography, and to work out- 
 ward. This is both pedagogical and practical ; pedagogical, 
 because the child's first political information and training 
 relate to his environment ; practical, because his environ- 
 ment concerns him above all other matters. In strictest 
 sense there is no room for choice ; we get our first social ex- 
 perience in the family and the school, and our first political 
 experience in the meeting of the town council, in the court 
 of the village magistrate, and on election day. Still, it 
 must be said that when a boy is old enough to take up an 
 elementary schoolbook on civics he has generally acquired 
 much of this primary instruction and is also familiar with 
 facts of broader scope. 
 
 Perhaps no government can be named that presents to 
 the student, whether child or adult, greater difficulties than 
 our own. This is owing to that very distribution of powers 
 just mentioned. "The simplest governments are despotic
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 319 
 
 ones," Mr. Webster once said ; " the next simplest, limited 
 monarchies ; but all republics, all governments of law, must 
 impose numerous limitations and qualifications of authority, 
 and give many positive and many qualified rights." But 
 this is not all ; greater than the complexity that arises from 
 our institutions as republican is the complexity that grows 
 out of their double character. The course of history be- 
 tween 1607 and 1789 made our Government federal. Before 
 independence it was the colony on the one part and the 
 Crown and Parliament on the other ; since independence it 
 is the State and the Union. What the Revolution did was, 
 first to make the colonies free and independent States, and, 
 second, to bind them together in one federal state. Our 
 Government is not unitary, like England or France, but 
 dual, composed of States that, in some respects, are inde- 
 pendent and sovereign, and of a Union that within its own 
 sphere is supreme and paramount. Every American citizen 
 residing in a State is subject to two jurisdictions, or, as 
 Professor Bryce has put it, he has two loyalties and two 
 patriotisms. Our Constitution is peculiar. As a distin- 
 guished writer states the case : " The Constitution of the 
 United States is a part of the Constitution of each State, 
 whether referred to in it or not, and the Constitutions of 
 all the States form a part of the Constitution of the United 
 States. An aggregation of all these constitutional instru- 
 ments would be precisely the same in principle as a single 
 constitution, which, framed by the people of the Union, 
 should define the powers of the General Government, and 
 then by specific provisions erect the separate governments 
 of the States, with all their existing attributions and limita- 
 tions of power." No person can make anything of our 
 political history or of our institutions who does not firmly 
 seize these fundamental facts. 
 
 Which of the two sides of this system shall the elemen- 
 tary pupil first attack ? Evidently the State, using the term 
 State in a sense that includes all local authorities. At this 
 point a serious mistake has been made in the past. This
 
 320 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 mistake is well illustrated by most of the text-books formerly 
 used, and by many of those still used. Apparently the 
 authors of these books have thought it necessary to exclude 
 mainly the State or the Nation in the interest of simplicity, 
 and then have thrown out the State as the less imposing of 
 the two. Still President Garfield stated the exact truth 
 when he said : 
 
 It will not be denied that the State government touches the 
 citizen and his interests twenty times where the National Govern- 
 ment touches him once. For the peace of our streets and the 
 health of our cities ; for the administration of justice in nearly all 
 that relates to the security of person and property and the punish- 
 ment of crime ; for the education of our children and the care of 
 unfortunate and dependent citizens ; for the collection and assess- 
 ments of much the larger portion of our direct taxes, and for the 
 proper expenditure of the same ; for all this, and much more, we 
 depend upon the honesty and wisdom of our General Assembly [at 
 Columbus, Ohio], and not upon the Congress at Washington. 
 
 Mr. Woodrow Wilson, comparing our system with that 
 of England, says that the twelve greatest subjects that have 
 occupied the public mind of the latter country in the present 
 century are Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, 
 the abolition of slavery, the amendment of the poor laws, 
 the reform of municipal corporations, the repeal of the corn 
 laws, the admission of the Jews to Parliament, the disestab- 
 lishment of the Irish Church, the alteration of the Irish 
 land laws, the establishment of national education, the in- 
 troduction of the ballot, and the reform of the criminal law. 
 All of these subjects, except the corn laws and the abolition 
 of slavery, under our system would have been brought, so 
 far as they could be dealt with at all, under the exclusive 
 jurisdiction of the State. 
 
 The study of a government may be brought under two 
 general heads : its organization and its powers ; its frame- 
 work or mechanism, and what it may do. Under the first 
 head our governments, State and National, conform to the 
 same model. They both have three branches, legislative,
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 321 
 
 executive, and judicial. The legislatures are all bicameral, 
 composed of two houses. The executive branches present 
 hierarchies of officers, extending in the one line from the 
 constable and policeman up to the Governor of the State, 
 and in the other from the marshal and his deputy up to the 
 President of the United States. The respective judiciaries 
 are systems of courts reaching from the justice's or mayor's 
 court up to the State Supreme Court or Court of Appeals, 
 and from the commissioner's court up to the Supreme 
 Court of the United States. The two governments as ma- 
 chines do not present to the pupil very great difficulties. 
 Such difficulties as do arise are likely to grow out of the 
 elections and appointments of officers. Here, however, he 
 deals with matters of fact that are not very intricate unless 
 he goes into too much detail. For example, the National 
 Constitution provides that each House of Congress shall be 
 the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its 
 own members (Art. I, sec. 5, clause 1), and a similar pro- 
 vision will be found in every State constitution. It would 
 not be advisable, even in a high school, to describe minutely 
 the methods by which Congress or a legislature exercises 
 this power ; it suffices to teach that every legislative house, 
 like every other deliberative assembly, has such power. 
 
 The main sources of difficulty lie in the other field. The 
 life and activities of an organism present more and more 
 difficult problems than its skeleton or anatomy. Here it is, 
 too, that we run at once upon the line separating National 
 powers and functions from State powers and functions, 
 along which hard questions are thickly strewed. It is 
 scarcely necessary to remark that it is very desirable that 
 every citizen should know wherein he is subject to the one 
 jurisdiction and wherein to the other. 
 
 Here it will be found helpful to remember that the States, 
 as political societies, are older than the Union, and that the 
 National Government is a government of delegated powers. 
 Article X of Amendments to the Constitution expressly de- 
 clares that the powers which are not delegated to the Nation
 
 322 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 or are not prohibited to the States are reserved to the States 
 or to the people, which means that the State or the people 
 may exercise such powers if they see fit. In dealing with 
 this question, the convention that framed the Constitution 
 inquired what powers were really national, and so necessary 
 to the common defense and common welfare, and what were 
 not ; the first they undertook to delegate to the National 
 Government, leaving all others to the States, save where 
 they saw reason for prohibiting their exercise. But it will 
 by no means suffice merely to state this general rule ; the 
 instructor must descend to particulars, or rather begin with 
 particulars and end with the rule. 
 
 The National Government is a government of laws, and 
 the teacher can not do better than to ask on what subjects 
 Congress can legislate. The general answer to this ques- 
 tion is found in Art. I, sec. 8, of the Constitution. It is 
 very true that Congress exercises some powers that are not 
 here enumerated ; at the same time it may be said that the 
 springs of National power must be sought in this section. 
 Were it cut out of the document, our whole political system 
 as it now exists would tumble into ruins. Too much pains 
 can hardly be taken to make the nature and the extent of 
 these legislative powers clear to the pupil. This is far more 
 important than to discuss many questions about the frame- 
 work of the Government or the jurisdiction of the courts. 
 The section referred to is here quoted in extenso ; following 
 it, two or three provisions will be considered in detail. 
 
 SECTION 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect 
 taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for 
 the common defense and general welfare of the United States ; but 
 all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the 
 United States. 
 
 To borrow money on the credit of the United States. 
 
 To regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the sev- 
 eral States and with the Indian tribes. 
 
 To establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws 
 on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States.
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 323 
 
 To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, 
 and fix the standard of weights and measures. 
 
 To provide for the punishment of counterfeiting the securities 
 and current coin of the United States. 
 
 To establish post offices and post roads. 
 
 To promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing 
 for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to 
 their respective writings and discoveries. 
 
 To constitute tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court. 
 
 To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high 
 seas, and offenses against the law of nations. 
 
 To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make 
 rules concerning captures on land and water. 
 
 To raise and support armies ; but no appropriation of money to 
 that use shall be for a longer term than two years. 
 
 To provide and maintain a navy. 
 
 To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and 
 naval forces. 
 
 To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the 
 Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions. 
 
 To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, 
 and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the 
 service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively the 
 appointment of the officers and the authority of training the militia 
 according to the discipline prescribed by Congress. 
 
 To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over such 
 district (not exceeding ten miles square) as may by cession of par- 
 ticular States and the acceptance of Congress become the seat of the 
 Government of the United States, and to exercise like authority over 
 all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the State 
 in which the same shall be, for the erection of forts, magazines, 
 arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings. And 
 
 To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carry- 
 ing into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested 
 by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in 
 any department or officer thereof. 
 
 Revenue is the motive force of government. In- England 
 the throne is the fountain of honor, but the treasury is the 
 seat of power. Revenue means taxes, and taxes, since they
 
 324: HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 touch everybody sooner or later, are of universal interest. 
 So central is the subject of revenue and expenditure, that a 
 distinguished statesman already quoted was accustomed to 
 say that the person who could track every dollar in the 
 Treasury to its source, and then follow it to its destination, 
 would be a master of our whole system. We may here 
 bring together all the provisions of the Constitution in re- 
 spect to National taxation. 
 
 " The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, 
 duties, imposts, and excises," etc. (Art. I, sec. 8, clause 1). 
 
 "Representative and direct taxes shall be apportioned 
 among the several States which may be included within this 
 Union according to their respective numbers " (Art. I, sec. 2, 
 clause 3). 
 
 " No capitation or other direct tax shall be laid unless in 
 proportion to the census or enumeration" (Art. I, sec. 9> 
 clause 4). 
 
 " No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from 
 any State " (Art. I, sec. 9, clause 5). 
 
 To explain these provisions the teacher must be able to 
 think clearly, and must have at hand a store of facts for 
 illustrating the points that will arise. Tax is a general 
 term, meaning a regular pecuniary charge that a govern- 
 ment makes upon the people for its own support. It in- 
 cludes duties, imposts, and excises. The Constitution recog- 
 nizes two kinds of taxes. 
 
 First, direct taxes, which, as defined by the Supreme 
 Court, consist of capitation or poll taxes, taxes on land, and 
 taxes on incomes, all of which must be divided among the 
 States according to their representative population. While 
 the power of Congress to levy such taxes is unlimited save 
 in respect to population, they cut a small figure in our fiscal 
 history, having been levied for but five different years : 1798, 
 1813, 1815, 1816, 1861. The several acts have declared the 
 amount to be raised, ranging from $2,000,000 in 1798 to 
 $20,000,000 in 1861 ; have apportioned these amounts among 
 the States according to the prescribed rule ; have defined the
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 325 
 
 property on which the amounts so apportioned should be 
 assessed, and provided for assessors to levy and for collectors 
 to collect the tax. The early acts put the taxes on slaves 
 and land ; the act of 1861 on land alone. 
 
 Second, the Constitution seems to regard all other taxes 
 as indirect, but does not so call them. They are styled duties, 
 imposts, and excises. It is impossible closely to distinguish 
 these terms. Duties are customs levied on imported goods ; 
 imposts are sometimes duties or customs, but commonly the 
 word is used in a broader sense as synonymous with tax ; 
 excises are internal taxes, such as the present taxes on 
 whisky, malt liquors, and tobacco. The word excise does 
 not occur in our laws, internal taxes and internal revenue 
 having taken its place. To distinguish between direct and 
 indirect taxes has given rise to some litigation. The Su- 
 preme Court has decided that taxes on carriages, on incomes, 
 and on bank-note circulation are not direct taxes but ex- 
 cises. 
 
 Such is the compass of the National taxing power. All 
 the taxes that Congress has levied since the direct tax of 
 1861 are divisible into two classes: customs and internal 
 taxes. The first are collected by customs officers called 
 collectors of the port, the second by collectors of internal 
 revenue. The first are all paid in the first instance by im- 
 porters of dutiable goods, the second at the present time by 
 the manufacturers of whisky, malt liquors, and tobacco. To 
 avoid confusion, the teacher must point out that this use of 
 direct and indirect tax differs from the use of the political 
 economists. The economists call a tax direct when it is 
 really paid by the person on whom it is assessed, as the 
 owner of a farm ; indirect, when it is added to the price of 
 goods and is passed along by the importer or manufacturer 
 to the retailer for the consumer to pay. 
 
 A few words in relation to the State will suffice. Only 
 two provisions relating to the subject of taxation are found 
 in the National Constitution. 
 
 " No State shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay
 
 326 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what 
 may be absolutely necessary for executing its inspection 
 laws " (Art. I, sec. 10, clause 2). 
 
 '* No State shall, without the consent of Congress, lay 
 any duty of tonnage" (Art. 1, sec. 10, clause 3). 
 
 These are the only restrictions that the Nation has laid 
 upon the State's taxing powers ; and outside of them the 
 State regulates the matter for itself in its constitution and 
 laws. As a consequence, the taxing powers of Congress and 
 of the State legislature to a great extent coincide or overlap. 
 The State may tax whisky, beer, and tobacco, for example, if 
 it pleases ; but there has been a strong tendency on the part 
 of both jurisdictions to avoid double taxation as far as pos- 
 sible, lest property and industry be unduly burdened. The 
 teacher will not find it superfluous to point out when and 
 where and by whom State taxes are collected, at least in the 
 State where his pupils reside ; for persons who consider 
 themselves intelligent can be found in every community 
 who suppose that the taxes paid to the town or county 
 treasurer or tax collector go in whole or hi part to support 
 the Government at Washington. 
 
 Particular attention should be drawn to the powers with 
 which the two governments are clothed, enabling them to 
 execute their respective functions. Those of the Nation are 
 of the amplest sort. At no point is it dependent upon the 
 State, in which respect it differs wholly from the Conti- 
 nental Congress and the Congress under the Articles of 
 Confederation. If its operations are interfered with in any 
 manner it acts through both its executive and its judicial 
 branch. What is more, it has at its command, or can 
 create, all the physical force that is required to meet any 
 emergency that may arise. Witness clauses 10-16, Article I, 
 section 8, of the Constitution, quoted above. If the civil of- 
 ficers are unable to enforce the laws, the President, as com- 
 mander in chief, can employ the army and navy, and even the 
 State militias, for that purpose (Art. II, sec. 2, clause 1). The 
 President is sworn to execute his office, and to the best of
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 527 
 
 his ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of 
 the United States (Art. II, sec. 1, clause 8). What the Presi- 
 dent can do in this direction, acting under the Constitution 
 and laws, President Lincoln showed in the Civil War. 
 
 The State also is fully armed with power to do its part 
 of the work of government. It acts through its executive 
 and judicial departments, and if its civil officers prove in- 
 competent to execute the laws, the Governor, as commander 
 in chief, must call out the State militia. Nor is this all : 
 the State may invoke the power of the Union, if necessary. 
 Here it should be observed that the State is shorn of many 
 powers that belong to a nation. For example, we read in 
 the Constitution : " No State shall, without the consent of 
 the Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops or ships 
 of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or com- 
 pact with another State, or with a foreign power, or engage 
 in war, unless invaded, or in such imminent danger as will 
 not admit of delay " (Art. I, sec. 10, clause 3). The reasons 
 for these prohibitions lie upon the surface. If the States 
 could maintain armies and navies at all times, could enter 
 into treaties and compacts with one another and with 
 foreign nations, and engage in war at their own discretion, 
 the Union would speedily fall to pieces. It was necessary 
 to prohibit these powers to the State, and to delegate them 
 to the United States for the sake of the common defense and 
 of the general welfare. But to compensate the State for the 
 denial of the power of peace and war, certain obligations were 
 laid upon the United States. "The United States shall 
 guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of 
 government, arid shall protect each of them against invasion, 
 and, on application of the legislature, or of the executive 
 (when the legislature can not be convened), against domes- 
 tic violence" (Art. FV, sec. 4). 
 
 The suppression of domestic violence and the mainte- 
 nance of domestic order falls to the duty of the State ; but if 
 for any reason the State is unable to perform this duty, the 
 United States are pledged to come to its rescue. In such a
 
 328 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 case the Legislature, or the Governor, as the case may be, 
 calls upon the President for assistance, and it then becomes 
 the President's duty, provided he deems the emergency suf- 
 ficient, to employ the army and navy, and even the State 
 militias, to protect the menaced member of the Union. In 
 the case of foreign invasion, the President need not wait on 
 the action of the State authority, for such an invasion of a 
 State is an invasion of the Union itself. 
 
 In one case the Nation may deal with domestic violence 
 directly. If such violence is directed against itself, or if it 
 interferes with the operations of the National Government, 
 then the President can interpose at once, so far as its own 
 protection renders this necessary. The criterion in such 
 cases is not the character of the acts performed or the per- 
 sons who perform them, but the authority that is interfered 
 with. Reference to a single branch of the National service 
 will make this plain. 
 
 Acting under the power to establish post offices and post 
 roads, Congress has created the vast postal system that covers 
 the whole Union. It is that branch of the Government 
 which comes into practical relation with the largest number 
 of people. More than this, its operations are so familiar 
 that in teaching civics it furnishes the best possible approach 
 to the National jurisdiction. This service is under the pro- 
 tection of the United States throughout all its operations. 
 From the moment that a letter is deposited in a Government 
 mail box on the street until it is delivered it is in the custody 
 of the United States. An assault upon the letter carrier go- 
 ing his rounds, or upon the postmaster in the discharge of 
 his duty, is an attack upon the General Government ; but 
 before the letter is deposited, or after it is delivered, the 
 General Government is in no way responsible for it. To 
 abstract letters from the postal mail box is an infraction of 
 the National law; to abstract letters from a citizen's own 
 private box nailed up beside his door is an infraction of 
 State law. Again, the National authority is in duty bound 
 to protect by armed force, if necessary, a mail train in its
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 329 
 
 passage across the country ; but it is not in duty bound to 
 protect a passenger train that runs a mile ahead or a mile 
 behind unless it has been duly called upon to do so. Still, 
 if a railroad has been placed in the hands of a receiver 
 by a United States court, the United States must protect the 
 road. Still another case may be supposed. A village post 
 office is kept in a store. Two men break into this store at 
 the same time ; one removes letters and money from the 
 post office, the other removes bags of coffee and money from 
 the store ; both have robbed the same man, and yet one has 
 robbed the postmaster and the other the merchant, the one 
 committed a National offense and the other a State offense. 
 Verily, it is not strange that foreigners should find it diffi- 
 cult to understand our Government, and that many of our 
 own countrymen should be confused. 
 
 Undoubtedly the most difficult branch of our government 
 both to understand and to teach is the judiciary. But it is 
 not its organization that causes the trouble so much as its 
 powers and functions. The operations of courts of law 
 come under the common observation, particularly of chil- 
 dren, much less than the operations of the political branches, 
 the executive and the legislative. Moreover, these opera- 
 tions are often intricate and confusing, springing out of 
 technical rules that few besides lawyers understand. Here 
 is the source of much of the law's delay. Now pupils in 
 schools are not, and can not be made, lawyers, and it is 
 mere waste of effort to multiply details in teaching this 
 branch of our subject. An outline somewhat like the fol- 
 lowing may be presented : 
 
 I. Both the Nation and the States have their systems of 
 courts created by their constitutions and laws. The courts 
 of different States differ in many minor points of organiza- 
 tion and function and in name. Generally speaking, a 
 State system is uniform throughout the State, as the Federal 
 courts are throughout the Union. It is desirable that the 
 pupil be taught the names and organization of the National 
 courts, and of the courts of his own State. 
 23
 
 330 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 II. The business of a court is to decide cases, or what are 
 popularly called lawsuits, that grow out of the legal rela- 
 tions of men in society. To do this it must define or de- 
 clare the law, and apply it to the pending case. Moreover, 
 since our governments are based upon written constitutions 
 that define their powers, cases arise involving the conformity 
 of laws to the constitutions. Such are called constitutional 
 cases, and the courts of final resort, or the higher courts, are 
 authorized to pass upon the laws authoritatively, declaring 
 whether they are or are not constitutional. When a law is 
 pronounced unconstitutional it is null, void, and no law. 
 
 III. By the jurisdiction of a court is meant its power to 
 try and pass upon cases and to administer remedies. The 
 meaning of original, appellate, concurrent, and final juris- 
 diction should be clearly taught. Again, a general account 
 should be given of the jurisdiction of the several courts, or 
 at least of those that are in closest contact with the people. 
 As the larger part of the judicial business done in any State 
 is done by the State courts, these courts should receive the 
 greater attention. For a boy to know what is done in the 
 court of the village magistrate or of the county in which he 
 lives is more important than the same knowledge relating to 
 the Supreme Court at Washington. 
 
 IV. In the main the jurisdiction of the State courts is 
 separate from and independent of the National courts, and 
 vice versa, but there are some exceptions. The following 
 are the principal ones : 
 
 1. The judicial power of the United States extends to 
 controversies between citizens of different States, and be- 
 tween citizens of the same State claiming lands under grants 
 of different States (Constitution, Art. HI, sec. 2, clause 1). 
 At the same time the State courts are open to such cases. 
 Hence a citizen of New York or Ohio may bring an action 
 to collect a debt against a citizen of Michigan or Indiana at 
 his option, either in a National court or a Michigan court of 
 competent jurisdiction, and either may try the case. 
 
 2. The judicial power of the United States extends to all
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 331 
 
 cases that affect or involve the Constitution, the laws, and 
 the treaties of the United States (Constitution, Art. Ill, 
 sec. 2, clause 1). Hence, any case of this character that 
 arises in a State court may he removed from such court to a 
 National court by taking certain steps prescribed by law. 
 Such a case is said to involve a Federal question that is, 
 the authority of the United States. Acting under this 
 power, the National courts have often declared State laws in 
 conflict with the National Constitution. But this is the 
 limit of their right to pass upon State laws. Whether the 
 laws of a State are in agreement with the State's own con- 
 stitution is a question for its courts to decide. It may be 
 further observed that State judges themselves, as well as 
 State Senators and Eepresentatives, and all executive and 
 judicial officers, are bound by the National Constitution, 
 laws, and treaties, anything in the constitution and laws of 
 their own State to the contrary notwithstanding (Constitu- 
 tion, Art. VI, sec. 1, clause 2). The meaning of this is that 
 State judges must set aside State laws if they find them in 
 conflict with the National authority. 
 
 3. Save in a few instances the Constitution does not ex- 
 clude the State courts from the field covered by the National 
 judicial power. The subject was left to the discretion of 
 Congress. Congress has given the National courts exclusive 
 jurisdiction in certain classes of cases, such as in patent 
 rights and admiralty, but within certain limits it grants to 
 State courts a civil jurisdiction concurrent with that of the 
 National courts. This is a permitted and not a vested juris- 
 diction, for the Supreme Court has decided that Congress 
 can not vest any portion of the judicial power of the 
 United States except in courts ordained and established by 
 itself. In a large range of legal business, therefore, the 
 citizen may appeal to the State or the National courts for 
 relief, as he may see fit, the ultimate authority of course 
 residing in the latter. Some offenses against National laws 
 may be prosecuted in State courts, as offenses against postal 
 laws.
 
 332 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 How far the teacher should enter into these particu- 
 lars, if at all, must depend upon the age and fitness of his 
 pupils. The same may he said of many other phases of the 
 general subject. In no study are clear and correct ideas 
 more important ; in none are confused and false ideas more 
 harmful. It is often painful to listen to recitations in civics, 
 even in high schools, so hazy is the thinking and so inaccu- 
 rate are the facts. The criterion by which to determine what 
 should be attempted is what can be really done. It is very 
 desirable, or rather necessary, to keep on the safe side. Such 
 topics as attainder and corruption of blood should be left 
 until the pupil grows up to them. 
 
 It has been said above that lessons in civics should begin 
 with facts and not with definitions. However, the pupil 
 should not be finally left without definitions. Professor 
 Bryce observes that we should not be prevented by fear of 
 the abstract " from trying to make the pupil understand the 
 meaning of such terms as the nation, the state, and the 
 law." "You need not trouble yourselves," he goes on to 
 say, "to find unimpeachable, logical definitions of these 
 terms ; that is a task which still employs the learned. What 
 is wanted is that he should grasp the idea, first, of a com- 
 munity a community inhabiting a country, united by vari- 
 ous ties, organized for mutual protection, mutual help, and 
 the attainment of certain common ends ; next, of the law, as 
 that which regulates and keeps order in this community; 
 next, of public officers, great and small, as those whom the 
 law sets over us and whose business it is to make us obey the 
 law, while they also obey it themselves." A pupil properly 
 taught will not leave the elementary school until these 
 fundamental ideas are firmly rooted in his mind. 
 
 It has been said, too, that instruction in civics should 
 begin at home, and sufficient reasons have been given for 
 so saying. But before the pupil has left the high school 
 behind he should have paid some attention to the compara- 
 tive study of political institutions. Points of agreement 
 and of contrast between our own Government and the gov-
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 333 
 
 ernments of other countries, as France, Germany, and Eng- 
 land, should be taught, care being taken to have it under- 
 stood that the first of these countries is a republic, the second 
 a federal empire, and the third a so-called limited monarchy. 
 Not only would the information thus obtained be valuable, 
 but, what is even more important, the faculty and habit of 
 comparing political institutions would be stimulated. Nor 
 should comparative study be limited to governments that 
 now exist ; it should also extend into the past, at least to the 
 extent of the cardinal political features of Greece and Rome 
 in the cases of those pupils who study ancient history. The 
 work in civics should always be kept in touch with history 
 and geography. Nor is it necessary to postpone a kind of 
 comparative study to the high school ; for example, many 
 facts relating to the Government of England can be taught, 
 and should be taught, in connection with our own early 
 history. It is difficult to exaggerate the value of large 
 knowledge of the present to the student who is exploring 
 the past. 
 
 Along with the study of the Government should go the 
 study of the political organizations and the political ma- 
 chinery by which it is carried on. The great features of 
 the party system that has grown up in the country, with 
 its committees, caucuses, and conventions, are of more prac- 
 tical importance than many features of the Government it- 
 self. The election of a President and Vice-President involves 
 these steps : (1) The nomination of candidates by the National 
 Conventions; (2) the nomination of State electoral tickets 
 by State and district conventions; (3) the appointment, by 
 popular election on Tuesday following the first Monday in 
 November, of the electors ; (4) the meeting of these electors 
 at their respective State capitols, the casting of their ballots, 
 and the dispatch of the lists to Washington ; (5) the opening 
 and counting of the returns at Washington in the presence 
 of the Senate and House of Representatives on the second 
 Wednesday in February, and the declaration of the result. 
 Here are five steps, the first two of which lie wholly outside
 
 334 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 the law in the field of voluntary political agency. Our party 
 system has made the third of these steps the real presidential 
 election, whereas the people in 1789 intended that the fourth 
 one should be such election. 
 
 Perhaps it will not be superfluous to remark that this 
 chapter is not an attempt to describe the whole compass of 
 teaching political science in its substance and methods. It 
 is only an attempt to emphasize the value of the study, to 
 relate it with history, to state where, as determined by the 
 author's own experience as a teacher, the main points of 
 difficulty arise in teaching the Government of the United 
 States, and to suggest methods for overcoming these diffi- 
 culties. 
 
 The leading points that have been made may be sum- 
 marized. Instruction in civics, while it has disciplinary 
 power, should look mainly to practical or guidance ends ; it 
 should begin with concrete facts and not with general defi- 
 nitions ; it should first deal with the political facts forming 
 the child's own environment and gradually work outward; 
 it should therefore at first concern itself more with the 
 State element than with the National element of our dual 
 system ; the distinction between the framework of govern- 
 ment and its powers must be emphasized, due effort being 
 made to overcome the difficulties that the second phase of 
 the subject presents ; great pains should be taken, by means 
 of striking and apt illustrations, to make plain the line 
 separating the State authority from the National authority, 
 and the important part played by political parties must be 
 recognized. 
 
 The highest ends of the study will be defeated in great 
 part provided the instruction consists of mere enumeration 
 of facts or definition of abstractions. Nor is it sufficient to 
 organize the facts and make the definitions real. The study 
 should look to patriotism and the civic spirit that is, to love 
 of country and disposition to insist upon the rights and 
 perform the duties that spring out of the citizen's relations
 
 TEACHING CIVICS. 335 
 
 to civil society and the state. The ends of human govern- 
 ment are these rights and duties. Dr. Lieber, the distin- 
 guished publicist, was accustomed to say, " No right without 
 its correlative duty, no duty without its correlative right." 
 The highest aims of civics, as a branch of education, are the 
 instruction of youth in these ends, and the formation of char- 
 acters that will maintain the one and perform the other. 
 
 Additional References. Report of the Committee on Secondary 
 School Studies, appointed at the meeting of the National Education 
 Association, July 9, 1892 (commonly called "The Report of the 
 Committee of Ten "), p. 162 (The Report of the Conference on His- 
 tory, Civil Government, and Political Economy. Contains much 
 useful discussion). 
 
 For the comparative study of foreign governments the following 
 authorities will be found useful : 
 
 Lamed : History for Ready Reference from the best Historians, 
 Biographers, and Specialists. In five volumes (Constitution of the 
 Argentine Republic ; Constitution of Brazil ; Constitution of Can- 
 ada; Constitution of England; Constitution of France; Constitu- 
 tion of Germany ; Constitution of Japan ; Constitution of Lycur- 
 gus ; Constitution of Mexico ; Constitution of Norway ; Constitu- 
 tion of Prussia ; Constitution of Sweden ; Constitution of the Swiss 
 Confederation ; Constitution of Venezuela ; also the references and 
 notes to still other constitutions) ; Old South Leaflets : Magna 
 Charta ; Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation ; Keltie : 
 The Statesman's Year Book, Statistical and Historical Annual of 
 the States of the World. An invaluable annual compendium. 
 
 Canada. Munro : The Constitution of Canada ; Bourinot : A 
 Manual of the Constitutional History of Canada from the Earliest 
 Period to the Year 1888, including the British North American Act 
 of 1867, etc. 
 
 England. Fonblanque : How We are Governed, or, The Crown, 
 the Senate, and the Bench ; Bagehot : The English Constitution, 
 New and Revised Edition; Dicey: Lectures Introductory to the 
 Study of the Law of the Constitution ; Anson : The Law and Cus- 
 tom of the Constitution, Part I., Parliament, Part II., The Crown ; 
 Craik : The English Citizen, a Series of Short Books on hj Rights 
 and Responsibilities. 12 volumes.
 
 336 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 Switzerland. Vincent : State and Federal Government in Swit- 
 zerland ; Adams and Cunningham : The Swiss Confederation : 
 Lowell : The Atlantic Monthly, April, 1894 (The Referendum in 
 Switzerland and America). 
 
 Germany. James : The Federal Constitution of Germany, with 
 an Historical Introduction ; Dawson : Germany and the Germans ; 
 Turner : A Sketch of the German Empire from Early Times to the 
 Dissolution of the Empire ; Bryce : The Holy Roman Empire. 
 
 France. Lebon and Pelet : France as It Is. Specially written 
 for English readers, and translated from the French ; Annals of the 
 American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. III., Sup- 
 plement, March 3, 1893 (Constitution and Organic Laws of France 
 from 1875-1889, translated, with an Historical Introduction, by 
 C. F. A. Currier). 
 
 Lowell, A. Lawrence : Governments and Parties in Continental 
 Europe. In two volumes. This is a work of great value, embracing 
 in its field France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Switzer- 
 land; with an appendix containing the Constitutional Laws of 
 France, the Statuto (Constitution) of Italy, the Constitution of the 
 German Empire, the Fundamental Laws of Austria, and the Con- 
 stitution of Switzerland.
 
 SYLLABUS OF 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 PREPARED BY THE AUTHOR. 
 
 I. THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF HISTORY. 
 
 X. STUDIES divided into four groups: Instrumental, 
 information or guidance, disciplinary, and culture 
 studies, 1-4. 
 
 a. History considered : (i) Its subject-matter facts or 
 events; (2) subject-matter to be elaborated, thus 
 introducing a logical element ; (3) history tests 
 and verifies its own methods and results, 4, 5. 
 
 3. History three kinds of value : (i) guidance Milton, 
 
 Guizot, Locke, Carlyle, Macaulay, and Morley, 
 quoted, 5-7; (2) disciplinary, 7-13; (3) culture, 
 
 '3, 14- 
 
 4. History is motive power and a school of patriotism, 
 
 and cultivates a conservative spirit, 14-16. 
 
 5. The teacher to have (i) an educational ideal, and (2) 
 
 a scheme of educational values, 17. 
 
 II. THE FIELD OF HISTORY. 
 
 6. History is the story of man living in social relations 
 
 in the world as contained in records : it comprises 
 the actions of men, 18. 
 
 7. History divisible into universal and special history, 
 
 18, 19. 
 
 8. The model set by Herodotus, 19, 20. 
 
 337
 
 338 SYLLABUS OF 
 
 9. Dr. Freeman and Herbert Spencer quoted, 20. 
 
 10. The current conception of general history populat 
 
 or democratic, 21. 
 
 11. Lord Macaulay's qualities as an historian, 22. 
 
 12. Green, McMaster, and Carlyle quoted, 23, 24. 
 
 13. The contrast between Europe and Asia and Africa 
 
 25, 26. 
 
 III. SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 
 
 14. Text-books of history, 28. 
 
 15. Larger works covering the same ground, 28-30. 
 
 16. Biographies, series of, 30, 31. 
 
 17. Books summing up salient features, 31. 
 
 1 8. Books dealing with epochs, " The Epoch Series,' 
 
 3'i 32. 
 
 19. Books relating to government, law, etc., 32. 
 
 20. Books relating to special subjects, 32, 33. 
 
 21. Books devoted to minor political communities, States, 
 
 counties, etc., 33, 34. 
 
 22. Maps and graphic illustrations, 34, 35. 
 
 23. Original materials : documents, monuments, histor- 
 
 ical geography, natural science, 35-41. 
 
 IV. THE CHOICE OF FACTS. 
 
 24. The number of facts infinite; choice to be made 
 
 with reference to judicious criteria, 43. 
 
 25. First criterion the pupil's stage of progress; ele- 
 
 mentary, secondary, and higher schools, 43-47. 
 
 26. Second criterion only characteristic facts to be 
 
 taught, 47-5 2 -
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 339 
 
 V. METHODS OF TEACHING. 
 
 27. History teaching in German schools ; stress laid on 
 
 the teacher and on biography, 54 ; Dr. L. R. Klemm 
 quoted on German schools, 55-57; Herbart-Ziller 
 pedago gists, 57. 
 
 28. Points in foregoing description discussed ; oral les- 
 
 sons and text-books, 58, 59; topical method, 60. 
 
 29. The lecture method, 60, 61. 
 
 30. Dr. Bain on the art of study quoted, 62 ; discussed, 
 
 63- 
 
 31. Historical readers and text-books, 63, 64. 
 
 32. Topics, quizzes, etc., 64, 65. 
 
 33. The historical seminary, 55, 56. 
 
 VI. THE ORGANIZATION OF FACTS. 
 
 34. Organization defined, 67 ; logical studies and fact 
 
 studies, 67, 68 ; fact studies, 68-70. 
 
 35. Three things involved in teaching history : facts, re- 
 
 lations in general, and causal relations in particu- 
 lar, 70 ; three grades of distinctive work, the ele- 
 mentary, secondary, and higher, 71, 72. 
 
 36. Facts of history to be organized with reference to 
 
 three criteria : time, place, cause and effect, 73, 74. 
 
 VII. THE TIME RELATION IN HISTORY : CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 37. Dates : What, how many, and how taught, 76. 
 
 38. Method of the child's lessons in chronology, 76-79. 
 
 39. Methods of writing history : external, internal, com-. 
 
 bination, 80-82. 
 
 40. The historical period, 82, 83. 
 
 41. The century, the dynasty, the reign, the administra< 
 
 tion, 84, 85.
 
 340 SYLLABUS OF 
 
 42. How many and what dates ? and how to teach them ? 
 
 85,86. ' 
 
 43. Carlyle on the character of action quoted and com- 
 
 mented upon, 86, 87. 
 
 44. Criteria in respect to dates : not too many, 88 ; not 
 
 too few, 88 ; much depends upon the subject, 89 $ 
 the importance of dates and the age of pupil to be 
 considered, 90 ; one country a chronological stand- 
 ard for another, 90, 91. 
 
 VIII. THE PLACE RELATION: GEOGRAPHY. 
 
 45. Historical bearings of geography static and dy- 
 
 namic, 92-94. 
 
 46. Additional reasons for emphasizing geography, 94, 
 
 95- 
 
 47. Facts of history to be associated with places where 
 
 they occur, 95 ; illustration from Mexican War, 
 95-97 5 illustration from Revolutionary War, 97, 
 98; illustrations from Chesapeake Bay, Lakes 
 George and Champlain, and Delaware Bay, 98, 
 
 99- 
 
 48. Historical essays to illustrate grouping, 99, 100. 
 
 IX. CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HISTORY. 
 
 49. Two kinds of knowledge, that and why, 101, 102. 
 
 50. Savage and civilized modes of thought, 102. 
 
 51. Progress of the conceptions of law and order: Po- 
 
 lybius, Froissart, Pascal, and Montesquieu quoted, 
 102-104. 
 
 52. Causation makes history a practical guide, 104. 
 
 53. Historical lessons: Mr. Lecky quoted on, 106 ; Lord 
 
 Bacon, 107 ; Pascal, 108.
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 34! 
 
 54. Caution : In early stages of history-teaching inter- 
 
 pretation not to be pressed, 108, 109 ; Guizot 
 quoted, 109. 
 
 X. PHYSICAL CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 
 
 55. Reciprocal influence of Man and Nature, in ; views 
 
 of Aristotle, Bodin, Montesquieu, Mr. Buckle, Dr. 
 Draper, M. Taine, and G. P. Marsh, 111-113. 
 
 56. The human will and environment factors in history, 
 
 113; environment exerts two kinds of influence, 
 
 "3- 
 
 57. Professor Bryce's division of environment: config- 
 
 uration of the earth's surface, 114-116; meteor- 
 ology and climate, 116; productions, 116-118. 
 
 58. Illustrations of physical influence from Egypt and 
 
 other countries, 118, 119. 
 
 59. Greek history an example of physical influence, 119, 
 
 120. 
 
 60. Causes that effect the location of cities, 120-124. 
 
 61. Effect of the sea and of insular position upon the 
 
 history of countries illustrated by Great Britain, 
 124-126. 
 
 XL HUMAN CAUSES THAT ACT IN HISTORY. 
 
 62. Human nature the only proper historical cause, phys- 
 
 ical nature only a condition, 127, 128. 
 
 63. Race and national character considered: Aristotle 
 
 and Montesquieu quoted, 128, 129. 
 
 64. The Time-Spirit, 129, 130. 
 
 65. Individual genius : Mr. Buckle and Mr. Lecky quoted, 
 
 130, 131 ; the middle ground stated, 131, 132. 
 
 66. Ideas and sentiments historical causes, 133, 134; 
 
 business of the historian to discover them, 134, 135.
 
 342 SYLLABUS OF 
 
 67. Relations of human and natural factors: Shaler, 
 
 Bryce, and Mackinder quoted, 135 ; man's reaction 
 upon Nature, 136; M. Lavisse quoted, 136, 137. 
 
 68. Integration of the three categories, time, place, and 
 
 causation in teaching, 137. 
 
 XII. THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS. 
 
 69. Qualifications of the teacher of history different from 
 
 those of the teacher of science, 138, 139. 
 
 70. Same as those of the successful historian, 139. 
 
 71. Illustrated in J. R. Green; grasp of the subject, 
 
 sense of perspective, desire to know and tell the 
 truth, ability to tell a tale, enthusiasm, and insight, 
 139-141. 
 
 72. Divisions of knowledge with which the teacher of 
 
 history should be acquainted, 142-146. 
 
 73. Mrs. Green on Mr. Green's preparation for his work, 
 
 146-148. 
 
 74. United States compared with England and other 
 
 countries in respect to historical scenery and monur 
 ments, 148-150. 
 
 75. Compensating advantages arising from the youth of 
 
 our country, 150; use of poets and novelists, 151, 
 152. 
 
 XIII. HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY: THE OLD WORLD. 
 
 76. Dr. Freeman on the two aspects of geography as 
 
 bearing upon history, 153. 
 
 77. Names of the old continents, 153-155. 
 
 78. Geographical and political names distinguished, 155, 
 
 156. 
 
 79. Greece and the Greeks, 156, 157.
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 343 
 
 80. Italy and the Romans. 157, 158. 
 
 81. Gaul and the Gauls, 158. 
 
 82. Different significations of Germany at different 
 times, 159-161. 
 
 83. Austria-Hungary, 161. 
 
 84. Prussia, 162. 
 
 85. Division of Francia ; modern France, 162, 163. 
 
 86. Spain, 163, 164. 
 
 87. Britain and England, 164, 165. 
 
 88. Caledonia and Scotland, 165, 166. 
 
 89. Mountains and plains as affecting character, 167, 
 
 168. 
 
 90. Openness of some countries to invasion, 168. 
 
 91. Origin and meaning of geographical names: Clas- 
 sical examples, 169; Central Europe, 169, 170; 
 Great Britain, 170, 171 ; meaning of particular local 
 names, 171-173. 
 
 XIV. HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY : THE NEW WORLD. 
 
 92. The naming of America, 175-179. 
 
 93. Names that commemorate blunders, 179, 180. 
 
 94. Religious creeds written on the map of North 
 America, 180. 
 
 95. " Codfish Land," 180, 181. 
 
 96. Names that have disappeared from the map, 181, 
 
 182. 
 
 97. The name California, 182, 183. 
 
 98. Examples of name expansion, 183, 184. 
 
 99. Capricious part played by the Muse of History, 
 
 185- 
 
 100. Aboriginal names, 185, 186. 
 
 101. Names given by colonizing nations, 187. 
 
 102. The names Virginia and New England, 187, 188.
 
 344 SYLLABUS OF 
 
 103. Lessons taught by State maps, 189, 190. 
 
 104. Names and nationalities, 190, 191. 
 
 XV. NORTH AMERICA IN OUTLINE. 
 
 105. The teacher to carry in his mind outline maps of 
 
 historical theaters, 192. 
 
 1 06. Cordilleran Mountain system divides the continent, 
 
 193- 
 
 107. Western division described : Subdivisions, 193 ; ele- 
 
 vations, 193; shore-line, 194; rivers, 194; closed 
 side of the continent, 195. 
 
 108. Eastern division described : Simple structure, 195 ; 
 Appalachian Mountains, 195; Atlantic Plain, 196; 
 Central Plain and its division, 196, 197 ; compara- 
 tive sizes of physical divisions, 197 ; three great 
 water-ways, 197, 198; elevations, 199; intercom- 
 munication between subdivisions, 199-202 ; east- 
 ern side of the continent the approachable side, 
 202. 
 
 109. Historical consequences of the facts set forth, 202, 
 203. 
 
 XVI. THE COLONIZATION OF NORTH AMERICA. 
 
 no. The division of the heathen world between Spain 
 and Portugal, 204, 205. 
 
 in. The Spaniards in the Gulf of Mexico: Discoveries, 
 206; opportunity to take possession of the Mis- 
 sissippi Valley lost, 206, 207 ; reasons why lost, 
 207, 208. 
 
 122. The French in the Lake and St. Lawrence Basin: 
 Port Royal, 208 ; Quebec, 208, 209 ; Montreal and 
 discoveries in the Northwest, 209-211; posts and 
 stations, 211.
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 345 
 
 113. The English on the Atlantic Plain: Ground of 
 claim, 212; slow to find their way to the back 
 country, 212-214. 
 
 114. The French and English in contrast : Three regions 
 of colonization harmonize with the genius of the 
 three peoples, 214, 215; advantages and disad- 
 vantages of French colonists, 215, 216; advan- 
 tages and disadvantages of the English colonists, 
 216-218. 
 
 XVII. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND 
 ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA. 
 
 115. Causes of the struggle, 218. 
 
 116. Champlain's ideas, 220. 
 
 117. Extent of English claim, 220, 221. 
 
 118. King William's War and peace following, 221, 222. 
 
 119. Queen Anne's War and peace following, 222. 
 
 120. King George's War and peace following, 223, 224. 
 
 121. French and Indian War: Its causes, 224-228; 
 routes to Canada, 228; fall of Canada, 229; the 
 issue of the struggle, 230. 
 
 XVIII. A CONSPECTUS OF THE AMERICAN 
 REVOLUTION. 
 
 122. Need of a conspectus, 230. 
 
 123. War opens in New England, 231-233. 
 
 124. The colonies described, 233, 234. 
 
 125. Attack on Charleston and fall of New York, 234, 
 
 235- 
 
 126. Washington in New Jersey and the British in New 
 
 York, 236. 
 
 127. Capture of the Lake Champlain posts and invasion 
 of Canada, 237, 238. 
 
 24
 
 346 SYLLABUS OF 
 
 128. Burgoyne's invasion, 238. 
 
 129. General Howe captures Philadelphia, 239. 
 
 130. The French treaty and the retreat of the British 
 from Philadelphia, 240. 
 
 131. George Rogers Clark in the Northwest, 240. 
 
 132. War on the sea, 241. 
 
 133. War in the South, 241, 242. 
 
 134. Lord Cornwallis and Yorktown, 242-244. 
 
 XIX. THE WAR OF 1812. 
 
 135. Fields of military operations open, 245, 246. 
 
 136. Questions as to method, 246, 247. 
 
 137. Advantages of British position in Canada, 248. 
 
 138. 1812 : War in the Northwest, 249. 
 
 139. 1813 : The Northwest, the Niagara and St. Law- 
 rence, and the seacoast, 249, 250. 
 
 140. 1814: War in the North, 250, 251; in the Chesa- 
 peake region and in the South, 251, 252. 
 
 XX. THE TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF THE 
 UNITED STATES. 
 
 141. The original United States, with causes that fixed 
 their boundaries, 255-258. 
 
 142. The Louisiana accession, 258-262. 
 
 143. The acquisition of Florida, 262-266. 
 
 144. The admission of Texas, 267. 
 
 145. The first Mexican annexation, 267. 
 
 146. The second Mexican annexation, 268, 269. 
 
 147. The Oregon controversy and its settlement, 269- 
 
 273- 
 
 148. The purchase of Alaska, 273-275.
 
 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 347 
 
 XXI. PHASES OF INDUSTRIAL AND POLITICAL 
 DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 149. Travel and transportation at the close of the eight- 
 
 eenth century, 278, 279. 
 
 150. Rivers as means of communication, 280. 
 
 151. Washington and internal improvements, 280-283. 
 
 152. Mr. Gallatin's scheme, 284. 
 
 153. The era of canals, 285, 286. 
 
 154. The era of railroads, 286, 287. 
 
 155. Internal improvements in politics, 287. 
 
 156. Sketch of tariff history, with causes, 287-291. 
 
 157. Distribution of first political parties in the United 
 States, 291, 292. 
 
 158. Sketch of slavery, with causes, 293-296. 
 
 XXII. THE SLAVE POWER. 
 
 159. Opinion in relation to slavery at the time of the 
 Revolution, 298. 
 
 160. Different course of events at the North and at the 
 South, 298. 
 
 161. Causes of the difference as developed by Professor 
 Cairnes : Economic advantages and disadvantages 
 of slave labor, 299, 300 ; economic advantages and 
 disadvantages of free labor, 301, 302; the adap- 
 tation of the North and South to slave and free 
 labor, respectively, 302. 
 
 162. Cotton culture, 303-306. 
 
 163. Balance of free and slave States, 306, 307. 
 
 164. Sketch of the struggle between freedom and slav- 
 ery, 3 7-3i i. 
 
 165. History not an exact science, 311, 312.
 
 348 HOW TO STUDY AND TEACH HISTORY. 
 
 XXIII. TEACHING Civics. 
 
 166. Relation of civics to history, 315. 
 
 167. John Morley quoted on the value of public life to 
 historians, 315, 316. 
 
 1 68. Character of first lessons in civics, with reasons 
 why the subject should be taught, 316-318. 
 
 169. Difficulties attending the study of American gov- 
 ernment growing out of its dual character, 318, 319. 
 
 170. Importance of studying the State side of our gov- 
 ernment, 320. 
 
 171. The organization of government and its powers: 
 the two aspects under which it may be studied, 320 ; 
 difficulty in first field, 320; in second field, 321. 
 
 172. General powers of Congress, 322, 323. 
 
 173. Revenue powers of the United States, 324, 325. 
 
 174. Revenue powers of the States, 325, 326. 
 
 175. Powers of National and State governments to en- 
 force their will, 326-328; illustration drawn from 
 the postal service, 328, 329. 
 
 176. Study of the two judiciaries, 329-332. 
 
 177. Professor Bryce quoted on study of civics, 332. 
 
 178. Comparative study of governments, 332, 333. 
 
 179. Study of practical politics, 333, 334. 
 
 180. Summary of chapter, 334, 335.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Adams, Mr., classifies Gallatin's 
 scheme of internal improvements 
 recommended to Congress, 284. 
 
 Administrations, presidential, use- 
 fulness of, in classifying historical 
 matter, 84. 
 
 Agricultural productions, influence 
 of, on history, 33. 
 
 Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 223. 
 
 Alaska, history of, as a territory, 273 ; 
 name of, proposed by Mr. Sumner, 
 274. 
 
 Alleghanies, the first road through 
 the, 279. 
 
 Alliance of France with the Amer- 
 ican colonies, 240. 
 
 America, how it was named, 178. 
 
 American ideas in New England, 231. 
 
 Americus Vespucius and the New 
 World, 177. 
 
 Analysis of matter in text-book, ad- 
 vantage of, 65. 
 
 Anaxagoras on the organization of 
 facts, 69. 
 
 Anecdotes, use of, in history, 48. 
 
 Anglia, the ancient name of Eng- 
 land, 165. 
 
 Antillia, or the Isle of Seven Cities, 
 an imaginary island, 179. 
 
 Antiquities as a source of informa- 
 tion, 35 ; knowledge of, indispensa- 
 ble to the teacher, 145. 
 
 Appalachian Mountains, highest 
 summits of, 195. 
 
 Apparatus, historical, 34. 
 
 Apperception, 11. 
 
 Aragon, permanent union of, with 
 Castile, 163. 
 
 Archaeology as a source of informa- 
 tion, 35. 
 
 Area of the United States, with dates 
 of acquisition, 276. 
 
 Aristotle on the contrast between 
 the repose of Asia and the energy 
 of Europe, 128. 
 
 Arnold, Dr., on the duty of study, 17 ; 
 defines history, 1 8. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, on culture, 13. 
 
 Asia as used in history, 154. 
 
 Asia Minor, first appearance of the 
 name, 155. 
 
 Association, the laws of, 69. 
 
 Assyria, civilization of, 25; archae- 
 ological researches in, 35. 
 
 Astoria, Ore., founding of, 271, 272. 
 
 Atlantic slope, average width of, 196. 
 
 Attila, destruction of towns by, 123. 
 
 Aulus Gellius on the humanities, 13, 
 
 Austria, a confusing name in history, 
 161. 
 
 Baccalaos, origin of the name, 180. 
 
 Bacon, Sir Francis, on time, the 
 greatest innovator, 107 ; on the 
 true office of history, 108. 
 
 Bain's The Art of Study, quotations 
 from, 61 ; three fundamental propo- 
 sitions laid down in, 63. 
 
 Baltimore, the battle of, 251. 
 
 Bancroft on the issue of 1754, 230. 
 
 Barbarians, renown of the wondrous 
 deeds of, 18. 
 
 Battle of Otterburn, ballad of, men- 
 tioned, 57. 
 
 Bering discovers the Strait of Be- 
 ring, 273. 
 
 Berkeley, Bishop, on the prospect of 
 planting arts and learning in 
 America, 269. 
 
 Berlin, elementary schools of, 58. 
 
 Bermudas, a part of Virginia, 188. 
 
 Bibliography, general, xvii. 
 
 Biographies of monarchs, light 
 thrown on society by, 49.
 
 350 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Biography, bearing of, on teaching 
 history, 30. 
 
 Bladensburg, battle of, 251. 
 
 Blockade or our water front by the 
 English, the, 250. 
 
 Bodin, on the historical influence of 
 physical causes, 111. 
 
 Bolingbroke quotes Dionysius, 6. 
 
 Bon Homine Eichard, the battle of,, 
 with the Serapis, 241. 
 
 Boundaries of the United States, the 
 first national, 255. 
 
 Brandy winej battle of the, 239. 
 
 Brazil, why it was so called, 179. 
 
 Britain and England, the distinction 
 between, 164. 
 
 British, retreat of, from Philadelphia, 
 241 ; capture of Savannah by, 241 ; 
 evacuation of New York, Savan- 
 nah, and Charleston by, 244. 
 
 Bryce, Professor, on the subject of 
 environment, 114; on man in his 
 relation to nature, 135; on Dr. 
 Freeman's books, 142. 
 
 Buckle and the naturalistic theory, 
 112; on the growth of civilization, 
 118. 
 
 Buena Vista, General Taylor at, 96. 
 
 Burgoyne, General, surrender of, 
 238. 
 
 Burke, Edmund, eulogium of, on the 
 maritime enterprise and prosperity 
 of the States, 241 ; on the discon- 
 tents of America in 1775, 293. 
 
 Cairnes, Professor, on the slave pow- 
 er, 299. 
 
 Caledonians, in northern Britain, the, 
 165. 
 
 Calhoun, Mr., on domestic manufac- 
 tures, 289. 
 
 California, campaign of 1846 in, 96 ; 
 the most romantic of American 
 names, 182 ; claimed by Spain, 270 ; 
 by Eussia, 270. 
 
 Calvinistic theology of Scotland, to 
 what attributed, 112. 
 
 Canada, origin of name, 183. 
 
 Canal, the first, connecting the West 
 and tide water, 201 ; Delaware and 
 Hudson, completed, 285 ; Erie, 285. 
 
 Capet. Hugh, skill and policy of, in 
 producing modern France, 163. 
 
 Capital, national, locating the, 295. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, quoted, 6, 24, 86, 
 108 ; on subjects for reading, 94. 
 
 Carthaginians, and Africa, the, 155. 
 
 Castile, permanent union of, with 
 Aragon, 163. 
 
 Cathedrals, mediaeval, what they ex- 
 emplify, 130. 
 
 Cause and effect, or the causal rela- 
 tion, 73. 
 
 Central Pacific Eailroad, the, high 
 elevation of, 194. 
 
 Central plain of North America, ex- 
 tent of, 196. 
 
 Champlain. the father of Canada, 99 ; 
 the "Father of New France," 208. 
 
 Charles I's war, 85. 
 
 Charles V,the last monarch crowned 
 Eoman emperor, 160. 
 
 Charleston, surrender of. 241 ; evacu- 
 ation of, by the British, 244. 
 
 Chart, value of, in teaching history, 
 78. 
 
 Chester, origin of the name, 171. 
 
 Chevy Chase, ballad of, mentioned, 
 57. 
 
 Chicago, the site of, 126. 
 
 China rich in history, 16. 
 
 Christianity, upon what based, 103. 
 
 Chronology, 75, 78, 79, 88. 
 
 Cicero defines history, 5. 
 
 Cincinnati, how it was named, 189. 
 
 Cities, location of, controlled by 
 " geographical selection," 120. 
 
 City of Mexico, Scott's campaign 
 against, 97. 
 
 Civics, a historical study, 315 ; why 
 taught, 317; how taught, 318; its 
 practical uses, 318 ; its difficulties, 
 318; mistakes made in teaching, 
 319; fundamental ideas of, 332; 
 the highest aims of, 335. 
 
 Civil government, the teaching of, 
 in our schools, 315. 
 
 Civil War, factors affecting the, 311. 
 
 Civilizations of Egypt and Assyria 
 contrasted with those of Greece 
 and Borne, 25. 
 
 Claims, territorial, made by Congress 
 at the Eevolution, 253. 
 
 Clay, Henry, and the contest of 1812, 
 247. 
 
 Climate, the influence of, upon man, 
 116. 
 
 Climates, the doctrine of, 112. 
 
 Clinton, Sir Henry, succeeds Howe 
 in command, 240 ; meets Washing- 
 ton in battle at Monmouth Court 
 House, 240.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 351 
 
 "Codfish land," Newfoundland so- 
 called, 181. 
 
 Cologne, origin of the name, 171. 
 
 Colonial period, the, 83. 
 
 Colonies, French, of America, 26 ; 
 English, 26 ; the Thirteen, 189 ; the 
 French and English contrasted, 
 214; English, character of the 
 people, 217 ; American, alliance 
 of, with France, 240; American, 
 George III consents to the inde- 
 pendence of, 244 ; commodities of, 
 303. 
 
 Columbus, Christopher, expectations 
 of, on sailing from Palos, 175; 
 name of, in the New World, 178. 
 
 Commerce, influence of, on history, 
 33. 
 
 Commodities of the several colonies, 
 303. 
 
 Communication, establishment of 
 means of, between the several 
 parts of the country, 278 ; lines of, 
 to connect the Atlantic seaboard 
 and the interior of the continent, 
 280. 
 
 Compayre", on the universities of the 
 Middle Ages, 82. 
 
 Constitutional period, the, 83. 
 
 Continental army, the disbanding 
 of, 244. 
 
 Continents, distinctness and unity 
 of, 154. 
 
 Contradiction of terms in the treaty 
 of 1803 in relation to Louisiana, 264. 
 
 Cook, Captain, visits coast of Cali- 
 fornia, 270. 
 
 Cornwallis, Lord, at Wilmington, 
 242 ; takes possession of York- 
 town, 243 ; surrenders his army, 
 244. 
 
 Cosmographise Introductio, 178. 
 
 Cotton gin, historical effects of, 304. 
 
 Cotton plant, the, 303; culture of, 
 great impulse given to, by remark- 
 able inventions in latter part of 
 eighteenth century, 303. 
 
 Council for the Indies, the organiza- 
 tion of, 175. 
 
 Court, the business of a, 330 ; juris- 
 diction of, 330. 
 
 Courts, systems of, of nation and 
 states, 329; state, jurisdiction of, 
 330 
 
 Cylinder printing, introduction of, 
 for cotton fabrics, 304. 
 
 Dates, how shall they be taught ? 
 76 ; not the skeleton'of history, 88. 
 
 Declaration of Independence, what 
 it expressed, 234. 
 
 Deduction, 67. 
 
 Delaware and Hudson Canal, com- 
 pletion of, 285. 
 
 Delhi, a natural center of commerce, 
 121. 
 
 Democratic party takes up the line 
 of free trade, 290 ; reorganized by 
 General Jackson, 290. 
 
 Demosthenes and the plain of Mara- 
 thon, 14. 
 
 De Sotp, search of, for gold, 49. 
 
 D'Estaing, Count, arrival of, in 1778 
 with French forces, 240. 
 
 Detroit, evacuation of, by the Brit- 
 ish, 250. 
 
 Diodorus defines history, 5. 
 
 Dionysius quoted by BolSngbroke,6. 
 
 Discoveries and explorations of the 
 French, 211. 
 
 Discovery, the right of, becomes sole 
 ground of title, 205. 
 
 Discussions, critical, place of, 39. 
 
 Dissertations as sources of informa- 
 tion, 32. 
 
 Dixon, Mr., of Kentucky, on slavery, 
 298. 
 
 Documents, literary, as a source of 
 information, 35. 
 
 Drake, Sir Francis, 181, 270. 
 
 Draper, Dr. J. W., and the natural- 
 istic theory, 113 ; on the geography 
 of Europe, 114. 
 
 Drawing, an instrumental study, 2. 
 
 " Dutch," a derivative term, 159. 
 
 Dutch traders at New York, 49. 
 
 Duties, protective, after War of 1812, 
 288. 
 
 Earth's surface, influences that are 
 due to the configuration of, 114. 
 
 Economics, correlation of history 
 with, 46. 
 
 Education, relation of, to all the 
 powers of the mind, 15. 
 
 Egypt, civilization of, 25 ; archaeo- 
 logical researches in, 35. 
 
 Egyptians, division of time by, 21. 
 
 Electricity, the introduction of, 287. 
 
 Ellis, Dr. George E., on the name 
 " Indians," 176. 
 
 Emigration, early Western, 201; 
 New England, 279.
 
 352 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 England, and Britain, the distinction 
 between, 164; name of, why it 
 never took the place of Britain, 
 165 naval superiority of, 245 ; es- 
 tablishes a blockade along our 
 ocean Iront, 250. 
 
 English character, qualities of, 213. 
 
 English colonies of America_, 26. 
 
 English on the Atlantic Plain, 212. 
 
 Environment, its influence on his- 
 tory, 114 ; Professor Bryce on, 114 ; 
 stress placed on, by historians, 125; 
 acts upon man, 127 ; dependence 
 of man upon, 135 ; relation of, to 
 foreign invasion, 168. 
 
 Epochs of historical subjects, 32. 
 
 Erie Canal completed, 285. 
 
 Essays as sources of information, 32. 
 
 Ethnology as an aid to history, 36. 
 
 Euripides on the climate of Greece, 
 116. 
 
 Eutaw Springs, battle of, 242. 
 
 Explorations, 1 rench, 211 ; of Lewis 
 and Clarke, 272. 
 
 " Fact lore," remarks on, 4. 
 
 Facts, objective, 4 ; the choice of, 42 ; 
 organization of, 67 ; connection of, 
 68; historical, principles for or- 
 ganization of, 73. 
 
 Farm owner, the, his own director, 
 301. 
 
 Federal Convention, the, 45, 94. 
 
 Federal party, the, 291 ; causes of 
 downfall of, 292. 
 
 Federalism, what States constituted 
 the strength of, 292. 
 
 Flanders, anighway of war, 168. 
 
 Flint on the philosophy of history, 
 104. 
 
 Florida, why it was so named, 184 ; 
 ceded to England by Spain, 256 ; 
 history of, as a Territory, 262; 
 Spanish claims to, 260 ; sold to the 
 United States in 1819 by Spain, 
 265 ; causes that led to annexation, 
 266. 
 
 Fly shuttle, the invention of, 303. 
 
 Forefather's Day, 85. 
 
 Fox, Charles James, as an historian, 
 142. 
 
 France, modern, the evolution of, 
 163 ; alliance of the American col- 
 onies with, 240. 
 
 Francia, the division of, in the ninth 
 century, 162. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, a great char- 
 acter in history, 99. 
 
 Freeman, Dr. E. A., and his works, 
 xviii; quoted, 20; on historical 
 names, 34 ; sense of realitv pervau- 
 ing books of, 142 ; on failure of 
 German writers to understand the 
 ancient democracies, 143,- on the 
 distinction between geographical 
 and political names, 155. 
 
 Free trade, 288 ; the Democratic 
 party takes up the line of, 290. 
 
 French and Indian War, 86 ; 224. 
 
 French, colonies of, in America, 20 ; 
 in the Lake and St. Lawrence 
 Basin, 208 ; the hostility of the 
 Iroquois toward, 209 ; discoveries 
 and explorations of the, 211 ; mis- 
 sions, 211. 
 
 Froissart distinguishes history from 
 chronicle, 103. 
 
 Frontenac, Fort, when built, 222. 
 
 " Gadsden Purchase," the, 268. 
 
 Ganges Valley, fertility of the, 121. 
 
 Garneld, President, on state govern- 
 ment, 320. 
 
 Gates, General, the victor of Sara- 
 toga, 242. 
 
 Gaul, use of the name, 158. 
 
 Generalization, the place of, 73. 
 
 Genius, individual, an historical 
 cause, 130 ; of the age, the, 129. 
 
 Geography, historical, 35 ; physical, 
 as an aid to study, 36 ; in its bear- 
 ings on history, 153. 
 
 Geological maps, 117. 
 
 Geology as an aid to history, 36. 
 
 George III consents to the inde- 
 pendence of the American colonies, 
 244. 
 
 German Confederation, the, 160. 
 
 German Empire, the, 161. 
 
 German Kingdom, the, 159. 
 
 Germany, teaching history in, 54; 
 the principal political phases of, 
 159; Caroiingian, 159; of Csesar 
 and Tacitus, 159. 
 
 Gettysburg as a field of battle, 93. 
 
 Ghent, the Treaty of, 252. 
 
 Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire, 8. 
 
 Gladstone describes our territory, 276. 
 
 Goodwin, Professor, on the study of 
 Greece alone as a preparation for 
 Greek study, 145.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 353 
 
 Government, study of, 320 ; state 
 and national, 321 ; American com- 
 pared with English, 320 ; national, 
 its powers, 322: judiciary branch 
 of, difficulties of teaching, 329. 
 
 Grffici and the Romans, 157. 
 
 Gray's discovery of the Columbia 
 River, 272. 
 
 Great Lakes, the, 199. 
 
 Greece and the effect of environment 
 on historical development, 119 ; a 
 curious and instructive name. 156. 
 
 Green, John Richard, earlv life of, 
 at Magdalen Grammar School, 146 ; 
 first historical efforts, etc., 147 ; as 
 an historian, 139 ; quotea, 23 ; on 
 the Duke of Maryborough, 108. 
 
 Greene, General, succeeds General 
 Gates in command of the Ameri- 
 can forces, 242. 
 
 Grimm's tales, 57. 
 
 Guerrilla warfare, 115. 
 
 Guizot on the value of history, 6 ; 
 quoted, 73, 107. 
 
 Gulf of Mexico, the, 198. 
 
 Hamilton, Alexander, propositions of, 
 concerning state debts, 293. 
 
 Hamilton, Sir William, quoted on 
 organization of facts, 68 ; quoted, 
 73. 
 
 Harris, Dr. W. T., on the elementary 
 school, 71. 
 
 Harrison, General, occupies Maiden, 
 250. 
 
 Harrison, Governor, the famous 
 letter written to, by Washington, 
 282. 
 
 Hawthorne on the fortifications of the 
 Potomac, 150. 
 
 Hellas, the ancient name of Greece, 
 156. 
 
 Hellenes, the ancient name of the 
 Greeks, 156. 
 
 Henderson quoted, 40. 
 
 Herbart-Ziller school of pedagogists, 
 57. 
 
 Herder, the founder of the philoso - 
 phy of history, 104. 
 
 Herodotus of Halicarnassus, re- 
 searches of, 18, 19 ; quoted, 119 ; on 
 the distinctness and unity of con- 
 tinents, 154. 
 
 Hildreth, Mr., on the Republican 
 and Democratic parties, 291. 
 
 Historian, main function of the, 109. 
 
 Historical geography, 153, 174. 
 
 Historical sense, development of, 58. 
 
 History, educational value of, 1 ; 
 sources of information, 1 ; great 
 guidance value of, 5 ; defined by 
 Cicero, 5 ; practical value of, 6 ; 
 trains the memory, 7 ; valuable 
 discipline of the thinking facul- 
 ties, 8 ; valuable discipline of the 
 imagination, 8 ; object of teach- 
 ing, 11 ; Muse of, 13 ; furnishes 
 motive power, 14 ; field of, 18 ; 
 two grand departments of, 18 ; the 
 story of man, 18; military, 19; 
 ecclesiastical, 19 ; constitutional, 
 19; text-books of, 28; bearing of 
 biography on teaching, 30; treatises 
 on, 32; regimental, 34; pictorial and 
 poetical elements of, 44 ; philosophy 
 of, 47 ; a moral knowledge, 47 ; 
 romance in, 48 ; poetry in, 48 ; 
 anecdote in, 48 ; stories in, 48 ; 
 what the teaching of it involves, 
 70 ; logical element in, 73 ; dy- 
 namic, not static, 75 ; the time re- 
 lation in, 75 ; an evolution, 82 ; 
 cause and effect in, 101 ; the true 
 office of, 108 ; physical causes that 
 act in, 110 ; spiritual elements of, 
 112 ; numan causes that act in, 
 127 ; not an exact science, 311. 
 
 History of England from the Acces- 
 sion of James II, Macaulay's, re- 
 ferred to, 22. 
 
 Holy Places, the, 94. 
 
 Holy Roman Empire, importance 
 ot a thorough knowledge of the, 
 160. 
 
 Howe, General, defeats Washington 
 at Brandywine, 239. 
 
 Hudson River, discovery of, 48. 
 
 Hull, invasion of Canada by, 249. 
 
 Human causes that act in history, 
 127. 
 
 Humanities, the, 13. 
 
 Hungary, what it consists of, 161. 
 
 Iceland, Professor Bryce on, 117. 
 
 Illustration, materials for, 151. 
 
 Imagination, faculty of, 45. 
 
 Improvements, internal, interest in, 
 283 ; scheme of, recommended to 
 Congress by Gallatin, 284 ; become 
 a political question, 287. 
 
 Independence of text-books, teach- 
 er's, 65.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Indian names, 186. 
 
 Indians, how they came to be so 
 called, 175 ; ignorance of the, con- 
 cerning Nature, 102. 
 
 Induction, 68. 
 
 Industrial systems, 50. 
 
 Inhabitants of mountainous regions 
 and those of plains and valleys 
 contrasted, 166. 
 
 Inscriptions as a source of informa- 
 tion, 35. 
 
 Instruction, elementary, 48 ; in his- 
 tory, principles that should under- 
 lie it, 56. 
 
 Iroquois, the, hostility of, toward the 
 French, 209 ; the, in early Amer- 
 ican history, 227. 
 
 Italy, extent of, in time of Julius 
 Caesar, 157. 
 
 Jackson, General, victory of, at New 
 Orleans, 252 ; reorganizes the 
 Democratic party, 290. 
 
 James, Professor, on physiological 
 retentiveness, 71, note. 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, on the site of New 
 Orleans, 259 ; on slavery, 298. 
 
 Jews, the patriotism of, 15. 
 
 JoneSj John Paul, voyage of, 241. 
 
 Judiciary branch of our govern- 
 ment, difficulties of teaching, 329. 
 
 Kearney, General S. W., subjugation 
 of New Mexico by, 97. 
 
 King George's War, 86. 
 
 King William's War, 85, 221. 
 
 Klemm, Dr. L. R.. on excellence of 
 historical instruction in a school 
 in Rhenish Prussia, 55. 
 
 Knowledge, varieties of, 17 ; princi- 
 pal sources of, 27 ; organization of, 
 73. 
 
 " Laboratory method," 39. 
 
 Lafayette on the Revolution, 231 ; 
 participates in the siege of York- 
 town, 243. 
 
 Lake Champlain, discovery of, 99; 
 "Lake Champlain in History," 
 100; called "the Gate of the 
 Country," 200. 
 
 Lake Erie, victory of Perry on, 249. 
 
 La Salle takes possession of Louisi- 
 ana, 262. 
 
 Lavisse on the influence of nature 
 on history, 136. 
 
 Law, constitutional, correlation of 
 history with, 46. 
 
 Lecky on moral forces, 106 ; on the 
 usefulness of history, 107 ; on mili- 
 tary or industrial nabits, 131 ; on 
 men of genius, 132. 
 
 Lectures, courses of, as a means of 
 instruction, 61. 
 
 Leuctra, influence of the name, 15. 
 
 Lewis and Clarke, explorations of, 
 272. 
 
 Lexington, battle of, 88, 232. 
 
 Lieber, Dr., defines guerrilla, 115. 
 
 Lincoln on the immortality of the 
 name of Gettsyburg, 14 ; stories 
 told by, 48. 
 
 Literature, general value of, to the 
 teacherj 151. 
 
 Livy's History of Rome, division of, 
 into decades, 80. 
 
 Locke on the value of history, 6. 
 
 London, Mackinder on the greatness 
 of, 123. 
 
 " Lone Star " republic, 267. 
 
 Louisiana purchase, the, 185 ; the 
 territory of, 258 ; retroceded to 
 France by Spain, 261 ; purchased 
 by the United States, 262 ; La 
 Salle takes possession of, 262 ; the 
 first boundaries of, 263; the sec- 
 ond, 264 ; ceded to Spain by 
 France, 264 ; annexation of, 266. 
 
 Lowell on New England history, 
 214. 
 
 Macaulay on the value of history, 7 ; 
 on the use of traveling, 13; quoted, 
 16 ; on detail in history, 20 ; quoted. 
 21 ; as an historian, 22 ; a master 
 of historical narrative, 140 ; on 
 Charles James Fox as a historian, 
 142; on Sir James Macintosh as 
 an historian, 142. 
 
 Mackinder, quoted, 115; on material 
 civilization, 135. 
 
 Mackintosh, Sir James, as a histo- 
 rian, 142. 
 
 Magdeburg centuriste, the division 
 of history by, 80. 
 
 Manufactures, influence of, on his- 
 tory, 33 ; domestic, Mr. Calhoun 
 on, 289. 
 
 Maps, historical, 34 ; geological, 
 117. 
 
 Marathon, influence of the name, 14, 
 15.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 355 
 
 Marlborough, Duke of, diplomacy 
 of, 108. 
 
 Marsh, George P., on physical causes 
 that act in history, 113. 
 
 Mason, George, on slavery, 298. 
 
 Materials, historical, selection of, 42. 
 
 Mathematical data, 10, 67. 
 
 McMaster, J. B., defines his plan of 
 writing history, 23. 
 
 Memoirs, personal, value of, 30. 
 
 Memory, faculty of, 45; operations 
 of, 69. 
 
 Mental qualities required to teach 
 history, 141. 
 
 Meteorology, the influences of, 116. 
 
 Method, topical, 28 ; internal, 81. 
 
 Mexican annexation, first, 267 ; sec- 
 ond, 268. 
 
 Mexican War, the, 95. 
 
 Mexico, origin of the name, 183. 
 
 Mexico, establishment of tne repub- 
 lic df, 267. 
 
 Middle Ages, the, 103. 
 
 Milan, the ancient capital of Italy, 
 123, 157. 
 
 Miller,Hugh,ongeologicalhistory,36. 
 
 Milton on the educational value of 
 history, 6. 
 
 Mind, activities of the, 17. 
 
 Missions, French, 211. 
 
 Mississippi first called the river of 
 the Holy Spirit, 186. 
 
 Missouri Compromise, the, 306. 
 
 Monarchs, biographies of, 49. 
 
 Monographs as sources of informa- 
 tion, 32. 
 
 Monroe doctrine, 269, 272. 
 
 Monterey, victory of General Taylor 
 at, 96. 
 
 Montesquieu, his Spirit of Laws, 103, 
 112; on human causes that act in 
 history, 129. 
 
 Montreal, when founded, 209. 
 
 Monuments as a source of informa- 
 tion, 35 ; historical, scarcity of, in 
 our country, 37. 
 
 Morley, John, on the educational 
 value of history, 7 ; some remarks 
 of, to teachers of history, 143 ; on 
 the value to historians of a practi- 
 cal knowledge of affairs, 315. 
 
 Mosheim, method of, 80. 
 
 Mound builders, the works of. 37. 
 
 Mountains, inhabitants of, and those 
 of plains and valleys contrasted, 
 166. 
 
 Names, geographical and political, 
 difference oetween, 155 ; the mean- 
 ing of, 157 : geographical, the ori- 
 gin and meaning of, 168 ; local, 
 records of the past, 169 ; origin and 
 meaning of, 172 ; Indian, 186 ; and 
 nationalities, relations existing be- 
 tween, 190; geographical, influence 
 of religious creeds upon, 180; Old 
 World; 191. 
 
 National capital, locating the, 295. 
 
 Naturalistic theory of history, 112. 
 
 Navigation, inland, facilities of the 
 United States for, 278. 
 
 New England, named by Captain 
 John Smith, 188; history, character 
 of, 214; emigration, 279. 
 
 New France founded by commercial 
 companies, 215. 
 
 New Mexico, subjugation of, by Gen- 
 eral Kearney, 97. 
 
 New Orleans, victory of General 
 Jackson at, 252 ; the site of, 259 ; 
 acquisition of, 264. 
 
 New York, superiority of, as a trade 
 mart, 124; Dutch traders at, 49; 
 evacuation of, by the British, 
 244. 
 
 Nile Valley, fertility of the, 119. 
 
 North America, form of, 193 ; western 
 side of, 195; eastern side of, 195; 
 central plain of, 196; great water 
 ways of^ 197 ; colonization of, 204; 
 the struggle between France and 
 England in, 219. 
 
 Northern Pacific Railroad, elevation 
 of. 194. 
 
 Nullification, the question of, 289. 
 
 Old Testament, the, book of history, 
 58. 
 
 Old World names, 191. 
 
 Olympiads, the, 21. 
 
 Ontario, Lake, discovery of, 209. 
 
 Oral teaching, advantages and dis- 
 advantages of, 59. 
 
 Oregon, history of, as a Territory, 
 269; origin 'of the name, 270; 
 boundaries of, fixed by treaties 
 with Spain and Russia, 271 ; not 
 a part of the Louisiana purchase, 
 272. 
 
 Organization essential to real knowl- 
 edge, 69. 
 
 " Original materials," 36. 
 
 Outlines, importance of, 63.
 
 356 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Pacific Highlands, great elevation 
 of, 193. 
 
 Palestine, a highway of war, 168. 
 
 Palo Alto, battle of, 96. 
 
 Papacy and the empire, struggles 
 between, 40. 
 
 Paris, Treaty of, 244, 255 ; negotia- 
 tions of the United States at, 253. 
 
 Parkman on the ignorance of the 
 Indians concerning Nature, 102. 
 
 Parnassus in Greek history, 119. 
 
 Partisan warfare rages in Georgia, 
 242. 
 
 Party system, the practical advan- 
 tage of, 333. 
 
 Pascal, on the analogy of the race to 
 the individual, 103; quoted, 108. 
 
 Patriotism, 14, 15. 
 
 Paul Kevere's Kide, ballad of, men- 
 tioned, 57. 
 
 Pedagogiste, Herbart-Ziller school 
 of, 57. 
 
 Penn, William, treaty of, with the 
 Indians, 99. 
 
 Perception, the faculties of, 45. 
 
 Period, the historical, 82. 
 
 Perry, Commodore, on Lake Erie, 
 249. 
 
 Personality an element of great in- 
 terest, 44. 
 
 Philadelphia, retreat of the British 
 from, 241. 
 
 Philosophy, political correlation of 
 history with, 46. 
 
 Pictures for an historical work, xxii. 
 
 Pilgrim Fathers, 44, 4. 
 
 Pilgrims, landing of, 85. 
 
 Pitt, William, and the proposed con- 
 quest of Canada, 228. 
 
 Pittsburg, the first inland manufac- 
 turing center, 279. 
 
 Place, or the geographical relation, 
 73. 
 
 Plataea, influence of the name, 15. 
 
 Plutarch's Parallel Lives, 9. 
 
 Plymouth Company, the, 188. 
 
 Poetry in history ? 48. 
 
 Political parties in 1856, 808; action 
 of, 312; inconsistencies of, 312. 
 
 Political science, a knowledge of, 
 necessary to pursuit of history, 
 315 ; powers, distribution of, in our 
 own country, 318. 
 
 Politics, a great educative power, 12; 
 internal improvements become a 
 question of, 287. 
 
 Polybius and the conception of uni- 
 versal history, 102. 
 
 Ponce de Leon, search of, for the 
 fountain of youth, 49 ; and the dis- 
 covery of Florida, 184. 
 
 Postal system, the, 328. 
 
 Potomac, the fortifications of, 150. 
 
 Principles for organization of his- 
 torical facts statedj 73. 
 
 Printing cylinder, introduction of, 
 for cotton fabrics, 304. 
 
 Protective duties after the War of 
 1812, 288. 
 
 Protection, the Whig party takes up 
 the line of, 290 ; commerce the first 
 great interest to oppose, 290 ; farm- 
 ing the last, 290. 
 
 Prussia, the original, 162. 
 
 Puritans and the shores of Massa- 
 chusetts Bay, 93. 
 
 Quebec, when founded, 208. 
 Queen Anne's War, 86. 
 Questions, special, condemned, 64. 
 Quiz, the teacher's use of, 65. 
 
 Kailroad, Northern Pacific, Union 
 Pacific, Central Pacific, 194 ; first, 
 connecting the West and tide 
 water, 20. 
 
 Kansome quoted, 51. 
 
 Reading an art of acquirement, 2. 
 
 Re"clus referred to, 15 (note). 
 
 References, 1, 18, 27, 35, 42, 53, 67, 75, 
 92, 101, 110, 127, 138, 153, 174, 192, 
 204, 219, 231, 245, 253, 277,297,314. 
 
 Reformation, Protestant, 81. 
 
 Religious creeds, influence of, on 
 geographical names, 180. 
 
 Republicanism, what states consti- 
 tuted the strength of, 292. 
 
 Resaca de la Palma, battle of, 96. 
 
 Revenue tariff, 288. 
 
 Revolution, the, what it did, 319. 
 
 Revolutionary period, the, 83. 
 
 Rio Grande frontier, 96. 
 
 River names, memorials of the earli- 
 est races, 171. 
 
 Road, the first, through the Allegha- 
 nies, 279. 
 
 Rocky Mountains, discovery of, 211. 
 
 Rogers, Professor, on the influence 
 of commerce, manufactures, etc., 
 33; on history of domestic poli- 
 tics, 38.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 357 
 
 Romance in history, 48. 
 
 Koman Empire, the, a great political 
 structure, 158. 
 
 Romans, the original, 158. 
 
 Rome, described by Livy, 121 ; 
 founded by shepherds, 121 ; the 
 site of, Professor Goldwin Smith 
 on, 122. 
 
 Roosevelt on the War of 1812, 248. 
 
 Roumania, how it came to be so 
 called, 158. 
 
 Russia asserted a claim to California, 
 270. 
 
 Russian America, the idea of the ac- 
 cession of, broached, 273 ; treaty of 
 cession of, 273. 
 
 Russian treaty of 1824, the, 272. 
 
 San Francisco, 124; tine harbor of, 
 194 ; Bay of, 96. 
 
 San Lorenzo, the treaty of, 261. 
 
 Santa Fe, when founded, 207. 
 
 Savages, the superstition of, 102. 
 
 Savannah, capture of, by the British, 
 241 ; evacuation of, by the British, 
 244. 
 
 Schaff, Dr., quoted, 5. 
 
 Schools of Berlin, history in, 58. 
 
 Schurman, Dr. J. G., on organism, 
 104, note. 
 
 Science, biological, 11; natural, as 
 an aid to study, 36. 
 
 Scotland, causes of Calvinistic the- 
 ology of, according to Buckle, 112. 
 
 Scott, General, campaign of, in Mexi- 
 co, 97. 
 
 Secession, causes which led to, 309. 
 
 Seeley, Professor, on history, 7, 4fl. 
 
 Seminar, invention of, by the Ger- 
 mans, 65. 
 
 Seminary, historical, 39 ; proper func- 
 tion of, 65. 
 
 Sensations, bodily, time measures, 76. 
 
 Sentiments and ideas, time measures, 
 133. 
 
 Serapis, battle of the, with the Bon 
 Homme Richard, 241. 
 
 Seven Years' War, 8. 
 
 Shaler, Professor, on the depend- 
 ence of man upon environment, 
 135; on the contrast between the 
 French and English colonies, 215 ; 
 on the people of the English colo- 
 nies, 217; on contest in North 
 America between the French and 
 English, 229. 
 
 Slavery, introduction of, 297 ; at the 
 close of the Revolution, 297 ; the 
 economic advantages of, 299 ; 
 economical defects of, 299 ; west- 
 ward extension of, 305; political 
 status of, 305; opinions concern- 
 ing, 307 ; political opposition to, 
 307 ; conditions affecting slave cul- 
 tivation ? 309; tends to discredit 
 productive labor, 310. 
 
 Smith, Captain John, story of, of in- 
 terest to children, 49. 
 
 Smith, Professor Goldwin, on the 
 site of Rome, 122. 
 
 Sociology, descriptive, 50. 
 
 Socrates, 25. 
 
 South Carolina nullifies laws pre- 
 viously supported by her, 289. 
 
 Southwestern accession of territory, 
 96. 
 
 Spain, a country of strongly marked 
 character, 163; failure of, to plant 
 her civilization in the West, 207 ; 
 cedes Florida to England, 256 ; 
 claimed the coast of California, 
 270. 
 
 Spaniards, the, in early American 
 history, 207 ; in the Gulf of Mex- 
 icOj 206. 
 
 Spanish Peninsula, the, 115. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, criticises history 
 as taught in the schools of Eng- 
 land, 20; quoted, 49; method of, 
 50,70. 
 
 Spinning jenny, invention of the, 
 304. 
 
 Stars and Stripes, the, 14. 
 
 State, powers and duties of the, 
 327. 
 
 States rights, fondness of Southern 
 slaveholders for, 294. 
 
 St. Augustine, when founded, 207. 
 
 Steam, utilizing the power of, 286. 
 
 Steamboat, the first, to descend the 
 Mississippi, 280 ; the first, to ascend 
 Lake Erie, 280. 
 
 Stony Point, storming of, 240 t 
 
 Story, the, in history, 48. 
 
 Stubbs, Bishop, quoted, 9, 13. 
 
 Studies in general, uses and values 
 of, 2 ; instrumental, 2 ; guidance or 
 information, 2 ; disciplinary, 3 ; 
 culture, 3 ; mathematical, 9. 
 
 Succession, the relation of, 76. 
 
 Surnner, Mr., on the growth of our 
 national dominion, 266.
 
 358 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Simmer, Professor, on the tariff act 
 
 of 1828, 290. 
 Systems, industrial, 50. 
 
 Taine, M., on physical causes that 
 
 act in history, 113. 
 Tariif, revenue, 288; legislation, 
 
 288. 
 Taxation, national, provisions of the 
 
 Constitution in respect to, 324; 
 
 powers of States relative to, 325. 
 Taxes, kinds of, 324. 
 Taylor, General, in the Mexican War, 
 
 96. 
 Teacher, function of the, 17, 109 ; 
 
 qualifications of the, 138. 
 Teachers of history, mental qualities 
 
 required by, 141. 
 Teaching, methods of, 53. 
 Territorial growth of the United 
 
 States, the, 253. 
 Texas, annexation of, 96 ; history of, 
 
 as a Territory, 267. 
 Text-books, independence of, 65 ; of 
 
 history, 28 ; analysis of matter in, 
 
 65. 
 
 Thirteen Colonies, the, 189, 233. 
 Thirty Years' War, 19. 
 Ticonderoga, construction of, 228. 
 Time, or the chronological rela- 
 tion, 7. 
 
 Time relations, 89. 
 Topical method of study, 60. 
 Topics, value of, 64. 
 Tordesillas, the treaty of, 205. 
 Toryism, effect of Lancashire mines 
 
 on, 118. 
 Treaties made by the United States 
 
 with other powers, 253. 
 Treatises on history, 32. 
 Treaty of Paris, 86, 244; of Ghent, 
 
 252; of San Lorenzo, 261 ; of 1803, 
 
 264, 266 ; of 1818, 271. 
 Turgot quoted, 104. 
 
 Union Jack, the, 14. 
 
 Union Pacific Eailroad, 194. 
 
 United States of America, proposed 
 names for, 189 ; comparative sizes 
 of its physical divisions, 197 ; ter- 
 ritorial expansion of, 202 ; treaties 
 made by, with other powers, 253 ; 
 
 negotiations of, at Paris, 253 ; ex- 
 tent of, in 1783, 254; the original, 
 255 ; first national boundaries of, 
 255 ; title of, to territory west or 
 the Eockies, 272; area of, with 
 dates of acquisition, 276; indus- 
 trial and political development, 
 277 ; facilities of, for inland navi- 
 gation, 278 ; the judicial power of, 
 330. 
 
 Upper California brought under 
 American control, 96. 
 
 Valley Forge, Washington at, 239. 
 
 Venice, the beginning of, 123. 
 
 Vespucian voyages, account of, writ- 
 ten by Vespucius to Lorenzo de 
 Medici, 177. 
 
 Virginia, original territory of, 187. 
 
 Von Moltke quoted, 134. 
 
 War, Seven Years', 8 ; of Independ- 
 ence, 86 ; King William's, 85, ?21 ; 
 Queen Anne's, 222 ; King George's, 
 223; French and Indian, 224; of 
 1812, the, 245. 
 
 Warfare, partisan, raging of, in 
 Georgia, 242. 
 
 Washington, George, mentioned, 45 ; 
 efforts of, to defend New York, 
 235 ; crosses the Delaware, 236 ; 
 at Valley Forge, 239 ; disbands the 
 Continental army, 244 ; the famous 
 letter of, to Governor Harrison, 
 282 ; on slavery, 298. 
 
 Wayne, General Anthony, storms 
 Stony Point, 240. 
 
 Webster, Daniel, on government, 
 319. 
 
 Weeden, W. B., on town economy, 
 33. 
 
 Wells, J., on teaching history, 15. 
 
 Welsh, the origin of the name, 168. 
 
 West, early population of the. 279. 
 
 Whig party, the, takes up the line 
 of protection, 290. 
 
 Whitney, Eli, inventor of the cotton 
 gin, 304. 
 
 Yorktown, Cornwallis takes posses- 
 sion of, 243 ; siege of, 243 ; surren- 
 der of, 86, 244.
 
 BIBLIOGEAPHICAL INDEX. 
 
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 360 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX. 
 
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 Crehore, C. F. Education, Vol. VH., 
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 Dabney, R. H. Papers of the Ameri- 
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 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX. 
 
 361 
 
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 Fiske, John. The Atlantic Monthly, 
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 pean History ; The Growth of the 
 English Constitution ; Essays, First 
 Series (The Relations between the 
 crowns of England and Scotland, 
 
 25 
 
 The Franks and the Gauls, The Con- 
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 Roman Empire) ; Third Series (Race 
 and Language, The Byzantine Em- 
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 of Commonwealths, The Constitu- 
 tion of the German Empire, The 
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 Froude, J. A. Short Studies of Great 
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 332 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX. 
 
 Hart, A. B. Epoch Maps illustrative 
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 Influence of the Spirit of Rational- 
 ism in Europe (Introduction) ; His- 
 tory of England in the Eighteenth 
 Century, Vol. IV., Chap. XV. 
 
 Lieber, Francis. Miscellaneous Writ- 
 ings, Vol. H., pp. 26, 28. 
 
 Locke, John. Thoughts on Education. 
 
 Lodge, H. C. A Short History of the 
 English Colonies. 
 
 Lowrey, C. E. Education, Vol. VHL, 
 p. 447 (The Philosophy of State and 
 of History). 
 
 Lyman, Theodore. The Diplomacy of 
 the United States, 2 vols. 
 
 Macaulay, Lord. Critical and Miscel- 
 laneous Essays (History, Hallam's 
 Constitutional History of Europe, 
 Mackintosh's History of the Revolu- 
 tion in England, 1688, Mitford's His- 
 tory of Greece). 
 
 MacCoun, Townsend. A Historical 
 Geography of the United States ; 
 Historical Charts of the United 
 States. 
 
 MacDonald, J. W. The Academy, VoL 
 V., p. 373 (Teaching Civics).
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX. 
 
 363 
 
 Mace, W. H. Papers of the American 
 Historical Association, Vol. V., Nos. 
 I., II. (The Organization of Histori- 
 cal Material). 
 
 Mackinder, H. I. Proceedings of the 
 Royal Geographical Society, New 
 Series, Vol. IX.. p. 141 (On the Scope 
 and Methods of Geography). 
 
 Macy. Jesse. Our Government, How 
 it grew, what it does, and how it 
 does it. 
 
 Mahan, A. T. The Influence of Sea 
 Power upon History, 1660-1783 ; The 
 Influence of Sea Power upon the 
 French Revolution and Empire, 1793- 
 1812. 
 
 Marsh, G. P. The Earth as Modified 
 by Human Action (particularly the 
 Introduction). 
 
 McMaster, J. B. A History of the 
 People of the United States, Vol. I. 
 (Introduction), Vol. H. (Chap. XHI., 
 and Map showing Land acquired by 
 the United States from 1783 to 1885). 
 
 Mill, H. R. The Realm of Nature, An 
 Outline of Physiography, XVH. (Man 
 in Nature). 
 
 Milton, John. Tractate on Education. 
 
 Montesquieu, Baron. The Spirit of 
 Laws (particularly Books XIV.- 
 XVIH.). 
 
 Montgomery, D. H. History of the 
 United States. 
 
 Morison, J. C. Macaulay (English 
 Men of Letters). 
 
 Morley, John. Critical Miscellanies, 
 Second Series (Popular Culture ; 
 France in the Eighteenth Century). 
 
 Morse, J. T. John Quincy Adams 
 (American Statesmen Series). 
 
 Mowry, W. H. Elements of Civil Gov- 
 ernment, Local, State, and National ; 
 Education, Vol. IX., p. 134 (The 
 Teacher's Independent Study of His- 
 tory). 
 
 Mullinger, J. Bass. See Gardiner, S. R. 
 
 Munro, J. E. C. The Constitution of 
 Canada. 
 
 Neill, C. A. The American Electoral 
 
 System. 
 Nordhoff , Charles. Politics for Young 
 
 Americans. 
 
 Old South Leaflets, Magna Charta, 
 and Federal Constitution of the 
 Swiss Confederation. 
 
 Palfrey, J. G. History of New Eng- 
 land, 4 vole. 
 
 Paris, Count of. History of the Civil 
 War in America, Vol. HI., Chap. I. 
 (Rivers and Railways). 
 
 Parkman, Francis. The Pioneers of 
 France in the New World ; The 
 
 Jesuits in North America ; La Salle 
 and the Discovery of the Great West ; 
 The Old Regime in Canada ; Count 
 Frontenac and France under Louis 
 XIV. ; A Half Century of Conflict ; 
 Montcalm and Wolfe ; The Con- 
 spiracy of Pontiac ; The Oregon 
 Trail. 
 
 Perkins, J. H. See Albach, Annals of 
 the West. 
 
 Phillimore, Robert. International 
 Law, Part HI., Chap. XH. 
 
 Ploetz, C. Epitome of Ancient, Me- 
 diaeval, and Modern History. 
 
 Poore, B. P. The Federal and State 
 Constitutions, Colonial Charters, 
 etc., 2 vols. 
 
 Porter, J. H. Education, Vol. HI., p. 
 136 (The Study of History). 
 
 Preston, H. W. Documents Illustra- 
 tive of American History, 1606-1868, 
 with introduction and references. 
 
 Prince, J. T. Methods of Instruction 
 and of Organization in the Schools 
 of Germany. 
 
 Putzger, F. W. Historischer Schul- 
 atlas zur Alten, Mittleren und Neuer 
 Geschichte. 
 
 Ransome, Cyril. A Short History of 
 England from the Earliest Times to 
 the Present Day. 
 
 Reclus, E. The Earth and its Inhab- 
 itants. 
 
 Redway, J. W. Manual of Geography. 
 
 Report of the Committee of Ten, The. 
 The Report of the Conference oc 
 History, Civil Government, and Po- 
 litical Economy. 
 
 Roberts, E. H New York, 2 vols. 
 
 Robinson, R. B. Vermont. 
 
 Rogers, J. E. T. Economical Inter- 
 pretation of History. 
 
 Rollins, G. W. The Academy, Vol. I., 
 p. 133 (American History in Prepar- 
 atory Schools). 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore. Winning the 
 West (particularly Chaps. H., HI., 
 IX.) ; T. H. Benton. 
 
 Salmon, Lucy M. The Academy, Vol. 
 V., p. 283 ; Vol. VI., p. 238 (The 
 Teaching of History in Academies 
 and Colleges). 
 
 Scaife, W. B. America, its Geograph- 
 ical History ; Annual Report of the 
 American Historical Association for 
 the Year 1891, p. 103 (The Develop- 
 ment of International Law as to 
 Newly Discovered Territory). 
 
 Schaff , Philip. History of the Chris- 
 tian Church (General Introduction) ; 
 History of the Apostolic Church 
 (General Introduction to Church 
 History).
 
 364: 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX. 
 
 Schouler, James. History of the 
 United States, 5 vols. ; Papers of 
 the American Historical Association, 
 Vol. IV., No. IH. (The Spirit of His- 
 torical Research) ; Magazine of 
 American History, Vol. XVIII., p. 
 326 (Historical Grouping). 
 
 Schurz, Carl. Henry Clay. 
 
 Secret Journals of the Acts and Pro- 
 ceedings of Congress from the First 
 Meeting thereof to the Dissolution of 
 the Confederation by the adoption 
 of the Constitution of the United 
 States, 4 vols. 
 
 Seebohm, F. The Protestant Revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 Seeley, J. R. Macmillan's Magazine, 
 Vol. XLV., p. 43 (A Historical So- 
 ciety) ; id. Vol. XLVIL, p. 76 (On 
 History again) ; The Expansion of 
 England, Second Series ; History 
 and Politics. 
 
 Series. English Men of Action ; Eng- 
 lish Men of Letters ; Twelve Eng- 
 lish Statesmen ; Rulers of India ; 
 The Queen's Prime Ministers; Amer- 
 ican Statesmen ; American Men of 
 Letters; American Commonwealths; 
 American Religious Leaders ; Great 
 American Commanders ; Questions 
 of the Day ; Epochs of English His- 
 tory ; Epochs of Modern History ; 
 Epochs of Church History ; Epochs 
 of American History ; American 
 History Series; The English Citi- 
 zen. 
 
 Shaler, N. S. Nature and Man in 
 America ; Introduction to Narrative 
 and Critical History of America, 
 Vol. IV. (Physiography of North 
 America). 
 
 Short, J. W. The North Americans of 
 Antiquity. 
 
 Smith, Goldwln. Lectures on the 
 Study of History, I., II., IH., IV., V. 
 (An Inaugural Lecture, On the Study 
 of History, On some Proposed Con- 
 sequences of the Doctrine of His- 
 torical Progress, The Moral Free- 
 dom of Man) ; Lectures and Essays 
 (The Greatness of the Romans, The 
 Greatness of England) ; The United 
 States, An Outline of Political His- 
 tory, 1493-1871. 
 
 Smith, Dr. W. A History of Greece, 
 Introduction Dictionaries of Greek 
 and Roman Geography and of the 
 Bible. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert. Education, I. (What 
 Knowledge is of most Worth ?). 
 
 Stanley, A. P. Historical Memorials 
 of Canterbury. 
 
 Story, Joseph. Commentaries on the 
 Constitution of the United States 
 (fourth edition, edited by Cooley). 
 
 Stubbs, W. The Study of Mediaeval 
 and Modern History. Seventeen 
 Lectures delivered in the University 
 of Oxford. 
 
 Sumner, Charles. Works of, Vol. XI., 
 p. 181 (The Cession of Russian Amer- 
 ica to the United States). 
 
 Sumner, W. G. Andrew Jackson ; Lec- 
 tures on the History of Protection in 
 the United States. 
 
 Taine, H. History of English Litera- 
 ture (Introduction) ; Art in Greece. 
 
 Taussig, F. W. Tariff History of the 
 United States. 
 
 Taylor, Isaac. Names and Places. 
 
 Thirlwall, Connop. History of Greece, 
 Vol. I., Chap. I. (Geographical Out- 
 lines of Greece). 
 
 Thorpe, F. N. Education, Vol. VII., 
 p. 686 (Teaching American History) ; 
 id., Vol. VHL, p. 351 (History and 
 Economics in Manual Training 
 Schools). 
 
 Thwaites, R. G. The Colonies, 1492- 
 1750 (In Epochs of American His- 
 tory). 
 
 Trainer, John. United States History 
 by the Brace System. 
 
 Treaties and Conventions between the 
 United States and Other Powers. 
 
 Trevelyan, G. O. Life and Letters of 
 Lord Macaulay, Chaps. VII., XI. 
 
 Turner, Samuel Eppes. A Sketch of 
 the German Empire from Early 
 Times to the Dissolution of the Em- 
 pire. 
 
 Vincent, J. M. State and Federal 
 Government in Switzerland. 
 
 Von Hoist, H. Constitutional and Po- 
 litical History of the United States 
 1850-1828; id., 1828-'46; id., 1846-W 
 id., 1850-'54; John C. Calhoun. 
 
 Vose, J. E. Education, Vol. VII., pp, 
 531, 617 (Methods of Instruction ifi 
 Civics). 
 
 Walker, F. A. Statistical Atlas of the 
 United States, Ninth Census. 
 
 Wallace, William. Education, Vol. 
 IX., p. 346 (The Study of History 
 through Biography). 
 
 Washington, George. Writings of, 
 edited by Sparks, Vol. VIH., p. 488 ; 
 Vol. IX., pp. 31, 58, 117 (Letters to 
 Chastellux, Jefferson, Harrison, and 
 Lee). 
 
 Weeden, W. B. Economical and So- 
 cial History of New England, 1620, 
 1789, 2 vols. 
 
 Wells, J. The Teaching of History in 
 the Schools, An Oxford Extension 
 Lecture.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX. 
 
 365 
 
 Wharton, Francis. International Law 
 of the United States, Vol. III. Ap- 
 pendix (Peace Negotiations of 1782- 
 *83 with Great Britain). 
 
 White, A. D. Papers of the American 
 Historical Association, Vol. I., No. 
 II. (On Studies in General History 
 and the History of Civilization ; 
 Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical 
 and Political Science. Fifth Series, 
 XII. (History and Politics). 
 
 Whitney, J. D. The United States. 
 Facts and Figures illustrating the 
 Physical Geography of the Country 
 and its Material Resources (Appen- 
 dix A and B). 
 
 Wilson, Henry. History of the Rise 
 and Fall of the Slave Power in Amer- 
 ica, ? vols. 
 
 Wilson, Woodrow. Division and Re- 
 union, 1829-'89 ; Congressional Gov- 
 ernment ; The State, Elements of 
 Historical and Practical Politics. 
 
 Winsor, Justin. Narrative and Critical 
 History of America, 8 vols. ; Chris- 
 topher Columbus, Appendix ; Cartier 
 to Frontenac, A Study of Geograph- 
 ical Discovery in the Interior of 
 North America and its Historical 
 Relations, 1534-1700. 
 
 Winsor, Justin, and Channing, Ed- 
 ward. Narrative and Critical His- 
 tory of America, Vol. VII., Chap. 
 VII. Appendix (Territorial Acquisi- 
 tions and Divisions). 
 
 Winterburn, Rose B. The Academy, 
 Vol. VI., p. 510 (History Work in 
 High Schools). 
 
 Wright, G. F. The Ice Age in North 
 America in its Bearings upon the 
 Antiquity of Man ; Man and the Gla- 
 cial Period. 
 
 Yoakum, H. History of Texas, 2 
 vols. 
 
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 THE VOLUMES BOUND SEPARATELY. 
 A History of the Middle Ages. 
 
 By DANA CARLETON MUNRO, Professor of European 
 History, University of Wisconsin, i amo. Cloth, 90 cents. 
 
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 Next to the history of his own country the pupil in the 
 American school is interested in that of England, and also of 
 Scotland and Ireland, for there the beginnings of American 
 political, social, and intellectual life must be studied. 
 
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 growth of the political institutions of England. What is 
 most remarkable in English history is the steady, resistless 
 development from the rule, in the earlier periods, of the 
 King, assisted by a few nobles, to the supremacy in the 
 present day of the House of Commons, representing the 
 masses of the nation. The Kings, however, were real rulers 
 in the earlier centuries, and it is fitting that special attention 
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 In the last two centuries it is ministers like Walpole, the two 
 Pitts, Peel, and Gladstone who figure most conspicuously. 
 
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 SCIENCE; RELIGION, EDUCATION. 
 
 Adolescence : Its Psychology and Its Relations 
 to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, 
 Crime, Religion, and Education. 
 
 By G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D. Two vols., royal 
 8vo, gilt top. Cloth, $7.50 net. 
 
 This work is the result of many years of study and teaching. It is 
 the first attempt in any language to bring together all the best that has 
 been ascertained about the critical period of life which begins with 
 puberty in the early teens and ends with maturity in the middle twenties, 
 and it is made by the one man whose experience and ability pre-emi- 
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 upon some of the most important themes in Philosophy, Psychology, 
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 The nature of the adolescent period is the best guide to education 
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 and college. Throughout, the statement of scientific facts is followed 
 systematically by a consideration of their application to education, pe- 
 nology, and other phases of life. 
 
 Juvenile diseases and crime have each special chapters. The changes 
 of each sense during this period are taken up. The study of normal 
 psychic life is introduced by a chapter describing both typical and excep- 
 tional adolescents, drawn from biography, literature, lives of the saints, 
 and other sources. 
 
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 part are found in separate chapters on the education of girls, coeduca- 
 tion and its relations to marriage, fecundity, and family life, as seen by 
 statistics in American colleges, with a sketch of an ideal education for 
 girls. 
 
 Another rhapter treats with some detail and criticism the various 
 kinds and types of organization for adolescents from plays and games to 
 the Y. M. C. A., Epworth League, and other associations devised for 
 the young. 
 
 The problem of the High School, its chief topics and methods, is 
 considered from the standpoint of adolescence, and some very important 
 modifications are urged. It closes with the general consideration of tke 
 relations of a higher to a lower civilization from this standpoint 
 
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