ily by which the human species is best propagated and without the institution of which it reverts to the level of the brute. Power has been exercised successively or intermittently by patriarchal, theocratic, military, or dynastic sanction until in these last days it is resident in the associated masses of men constituting what we call nations and is imperfectly, though imperiously, expressed by the behests of majorities. These we obey because of an instinctive conviction that with the advance of education and the spread of knowledge there has been a more or less perfect grasp of truth by an ever-increasing number of human beings, until now the majority is likely, in the long run, to decide upon any public question more correctly than the minority. The latter, when oppressed, have always by common consent the indefeasible right to turn themselves into a majority by the agitation of their principles.

Since, then, the individual and the nation interact more rapidly and completely one upon the other than ever before, the facts of their interaction become more numerous and its forms more complex, until contemporary history is apparently the most complex conceivable. If, as we generally admit, the more complex organism is the higher, and progress an advance from simplicity to complexity, this result is a very desirable one and deserves to be described with minuteness and eloquence. Mere political history, for example, will no longer suffice for a public hungering after information. The social, industrial, commercial, æsthetic, relig ious, and moral conditions of the common man are so determinative in our modern life that we now demand some account of them from the history of every period, in order that we may have clear notions of their genesis and development in the past for our guidance in the present. And inasmuch as they so sensibly affect our own politics, we expect the historian to explain how they affected past politics, being loath to believe that they were as unimportant as the tenor of histories written in the past would seem to indicate. This demand is not altogether intelligent, for the complexity may be only apparent. The continuity of racelife, the persistence of its characteristics, the vigor and vitality of the "stirp," to use Galton's phrase, have become increasingly evident. The stream, flowing beneath the surface like a sunken. rill, wells up from time to time, mingling in one place with mould and loam to moisten and invigorate a productive soil; in another, boiling between the fissures of the rock as a crystal spring to refresh the traveller; in another, losing itself amid shifting grains of obdurate minerals to create a dangerous quicksand, or, again,

soaking some bed of dying vegetation to breed miasms and engender the deceitful swamp lights. But the quality and substance of the undercurrent are identical in each case, the action of environment producing the widely different results. Of course every metaphor halts; for in the case of race-life, the same vital power or plasm is transferred, apparently without hurt, through the channel of generations temporarily dwarfed or crippled, to reappear with all its pristine strength and goodness in a later generation more favorably placed amid normal external influences. Not to make invidious mention of any single instance, every reader will recall certain well-known convict colonies established several generations ago in different parts of the world which are now thriving, wholesome societies. If this conception be true, history, as the record of a continuous race-life, not only may, but must, concern itself with enduring essentials rather than with temporary incidentals, in which case it will become with time. more and more simple, as well as more and more unitary.

Another proof of how dangerous is the effort to meet the general unintelligent expectation of complex detail in historical writing will be found in the analytical study of history as composed by the great masters of the past. We are often interested though not instructed by those who in our day seek to meet this expectation, as we observe their struggles to fit present terms to bygone conditions. Their predecessors took a course directly the opposite; for when they felt an incongruity between current language and old ideas, they sought for new forms of expression, or even omitted matters only partially relevant, rather than mention them under the load of reservation necessary to prevent misunderstanding. They knew that masses of verbiage give undue prominence to the underlying idea, however much the writer may disclaim his intention to do so. It is a very significant fact of the historical record that we can in many cases actually distinguish successive states of society one from the other by examining the historian's theme and his treatment of it, studying the characteristic terms he employs for his purposes. Thucydides almost created a new language, and he mentions the chryselephantine statue of Athene only to say that it contained gold which might be useful for the expenses of warfare in case of need, the Parthenon only as having absorbed sums which would otherwise have been available

for the same purpose. We are not to suppose that the historian was insensible to the beauty either of sculpture or of architecture, but we are to conclude that the wholesome and spontaneous æstheticism of Greek life was a very minor consideration when

the state was in danger, when the prestige of Athens was jeopardized, or when the historian had in mind to record a movement as far-reaching in its political influence as the Peloponnesian war. In other words we may thus estimate the proportionate value of politics and æsthetics in Athens at the time of Pericles, we may distinguish the greatness of the matter in the self-denial which kept Thucydides to a single theme, but we may not mark him down as a clod, unable to appreciate those objects of perfect beauty, the mere crumbling remnants of which move us to ecstasy. J. R. Green once said jokingly to Freeman: "You are neither religious, literary, nor social." In precisely the same way it could be said of Thucydides that he was neither religious, literary, social, nor æsthetic, if he be judged from the space given in his works to the descriptive treatment of those themes. But in no sense could it be said of him that he did not take into account their influence in political history.

This illustration is perhaps somewhat overweighted, but it will serve to accentuate a truth, that in the state whose free elements formed a society the most elaborately democratic so far known, it did not appear essential to the greatest historical critic who has ever lived that even the most striking unpolitical features of public and private life should be interwoven with his narrative. A similar conclusion might be drawn from the pages of Tacitus, or even of Gibbon and Montesquieu. The lesson of all this for us is that we must not go too far in yielding to a popular clamor, nor admit that the weight of the individual in modern life entitles his occupations and beliefs to more than a certain moderate share in the story of the organism to which he belongs. We are too apt to regard the study of institutions, of religion, of economics, and of art as being history itself, instead of taking their results as the material of history. This distinction is a very nice one, and difficult to draw in practice. But surely it can be done by those who are equipped for the task of writing real history. Such authors will keep the emphasis on the state and on the organs by which it nourishes and prolongs its life; on its instruments of self-protection and the use made of them; on the features of its identity and the inter-relation of its personality with individual men and with other states; on its conduct in peace and war and the principles which guide it; or in more technical phrase on government and administration, on diplomacy and international relations. In biography we are, as is entirely right, chiefly concerned with the personality of the man and his relations with other men; we are but incidentally concerned with his daily food,

his seasonable clothing, his medicines, his bodily characteristics, or the habits which build up his frame; we are somewhat more concerned with his beliefs, his education, his instincts, but of these we judge by his conduct more than by his opportunities or by his statements. While all analogy between the organic life of the state and the organic life of man is highly dangerous, yet in this one respect we may note that, as in the case of the man behavior is the essential thing, so the conduct of the state, which expresses the resultant life of those who compose it, is the essential matter of history.

This brings us to a thought which must be emphasized in the interest of historical studies in America, the conviction that the use of complex materials in history as now written and the consequent discursiveness of its style, both resulting so often in length, dulness, and obscurity, are in no sense due to the prevalence of democracy as the governmental form of civilized nations. This opinion has been so often reiterated that it has come to be extensively admitted as a fact. It is said that literature has been sacrificed on the altar of science, that the imagination has been eclipsed by facts, and that interest has been immolated before the Moloch of details. Instances like that of the poet Heine have been potent in the support of this conclusion. Beginning as the fierce protagonist of freedom in religion and politics, he continued long in the career of a radical agitator. But he came to believe at last that democracy must necessarily abandon beauty for utility, the poetry of life for material comfort, and must quench all artistic aspiration in the interest of equality and fraternity. In the end, therefore, he apostatized, burned his polemic verses, tore down the shrines he had erected to his revolutionary divinities, parted from Pantheism and his Pagan gods alike, and then in the interest of personality, without which there can be no human will and consequently no poetry, made his peace with the Almighty, resigned himself, and died.

But we venture to think that Heine's temporary malady was essentially European, and not cosmopolitan. The thought of his time, as of the present day among the scholars of the continent, displays an intense weariness of the past, a yearning to be rid of the old failures and to try new experiments. Quite the contrary is characteristic of America, which, though neither optimistic nor pessimistic, is essentially conservative and melioristic. The democracy of Europe is young, radical, and fierce, that of English America, though determined, has the modesty of long experience. The two are antipodal, and the evidence of this is conclusive

wherever they are brought into juxtaposition, as they are so constantly on our own shores. Radical democracy in any degree will of course level down and not up, and so destroy all greatness both in the making and in the writing of history. No tranquillity can be found by those who possess power either in its abandonment as an act of self-abnegation or in its compulsory surrender to sheer numbers. The experiment has often been tried and found a failure. Judging human nature from what it has always been, such a dead level of mediocrity as the radical democrat yearns for will be just as impossible in the future as would be, let us say, that abolition of all authority, concerning which anarchists vapor and dream. There will always be rulers and ruled at least, and that relation in itself promises a sufficient inequality for the literary element in true history. Even if eminence go no further than the temporary tossings of the sea waves, which fall back to their level when the storm is over and gone, may we not remember that nothing has more constantly or permanently aroused the human imagination than the great plain of the ocean? Viewed from the standpoint either of the individual atoms or of the great mass itself, an orderly modern democracy can now, as it has done before, furnish abundant room for the play of talent, if it exists, either in the practical statesmanship of its own age, or in the investigation of the states and statesmen of other ages.

It must be confessed that on the whole the imaginative literature of the United States, like its creative art, has not been either very abundant or strikingly original. But the American people have been otherwise engaged than in enjoying lettered ease. They have been prolific in discoveries by natural science and in inventions, successful in the management of their external and internal affairs, and at the same time have worked out reforms of the first magnitude in evils which were their birth portion. When the ability which has hitherto been concerned with material things, in making homes, establishing fortunes, securing educational facilities and creating a well-ordered society, when this power and zeal are turned toward the things of the spirit, as with the advance of time they must be, then if we fail we may lament our barrenness; but until then we have faith in Providence and dare to be hopeful. In one department of literature, moreover, and that the highest form of prose composition, we have already been eminently successful: to wit, in the writing of history. This was because there were appreciative readers; a fact due to what would a priori be least expected from a democracy, the sentimental fondness of the masses for great