ical force, has accounted for their being able to adjust themselves to their environment. Now, when we discover that at a certain point in mankind's evolution moral considerations come in, we see that as the race develops morals play a more and more important part in determining fitness to survive. The higher races, like the higher individual types, cease to regard the possession of power-brute power, enabling them to kill or enslave their neighbors as their final aim. In a family the brothers who are physically stronger do not beat their weaker sisters; in society, we do not allow the brawny man of six feet two, merely because he is big, to persecute or destroy the little man of five feet. Civilization lives by ideals, by standards with which the girth of a man's chest or the thrust of his thighs has nothing to do.

The Germans, however, in their obsession, left all this out. If Hindenburg, colossal in form and brutish in nature, could knock down, trample, and destroy Goethe, shall we say that he thereby could prove that he was fitter than Goethe to survive? At any rate, in the imaginary conflict, he survived, and Goethe didn't.

This obsession it is which underlies the German ambition to rule the world. Being a very conceited and a very envious people, the Germans were easily led by their masters into believing that they were the fittest of all peoples to survive. Their men of science assured them that biology established that, and they were too devout materialists to question a supposed biological law, especially one which so flattered themselves. To convert them through education and military training into a warlike people, to persuade them that war is the highest duty, the noblest pursuit of man, to poison their conscience by teaching them that in war neither morals nor humanity have any place, these were easy tasks for the ambitious Prussian war-lords and their docile servants. Thus, we see the damnation into which those are led who misinterpret a phrase, or a law, if you will, and would make history and biology their accomplices in the most frightful crimes ever committed against laws human and divine.

Let us rather strive to redeem history from the bonds of scientific formulas, and of scientific purposes. Let us strive to humanize it. In so doing, the historian will abdicate no high and hard-won office; on the contrary, he will rise to the full glory of his mission. If he must have some watchword to guide him, let that watchword be Man the Measure"-man, not the laws which apply to the animal kingdom, or to unthinking and soulless matter. Human nature is the substance in which the historian must work. He must try to discover how the human will-that force more mysterious

than electricity-shapes and directs the deeds of men. These deeds it is which make up the web of history. In this web, one deed leads to and determines the next, one event succeeds another in what seems to be a fated chain of cause and effect.

May we not say that there are three classes of historians? First, those who fix their attention on externals, that is, on deeds and events which are visible to everyone; next, those who search for the inner motive, the operation of the will behind the outward acts; and finally, those who, through their description of the outer, interpret the inner causes. I do not mean to imply that an historian deliberately, or even consciously, enrolls himself in one or another of these classes. His case is like that of a painter who expresses his temperament through color or through line according to his native talent. Of course, I would not imply that the division between one class of historian and another is always rigid; on the contrary, the classes often overlap.

As every historical student who has done more than scrape the surface of his subject knows, he encounters his chief difficulty when he deals with motives. It is easy enough to epitomize or paraphrase a file of consecutive documents; the real task is to search out the motives which gave rise to them. These are often unrecorded, or elusive, needing to be deduced or divined by some special instinct in the historian. This power of divination distinguishes the physician who is a master in diagnosis from his fellows who may be even more learned than he, but who lack it; this truth applies to historians also.

Those who regard history as the manifestation of will reap the richest compensation in its study. The very uncertainty of its operations, the gaps in the evidence, the impasses, the contradictions which need to be adjusted, keep the mind continually on the alert, and tease the wits to discover a solution. When we deal with history in the mass, over long periods of time, we are less likely to discern manifestations of will. Multitudes seem to move by a collective momentum, as a flood does, without foresight or choice, at the mercy of brute, material laws. Only when we come to that stage in human development where individuals emerge from the vast indistinct masses and lead them, or at least visibly influence them, does will confront us. This is what makes the history of Athens so much more significant and interesting than that of ancient Assyria or of Egypt; this is what gives modern and contemporary history, abounding in many well-defined individuals, its absorbing attraction for us; this is what makes biography the crowning flower of history, as portraiture is of painting.

Even if we were able to search the hearts of men to the bottom, and to know all their motives, there would still remain what we call chance, or fortune, to disconcert and puzzle us. Sometimes we can see plainly enough from what quarter the stroke of chance comes, but we never can foresee it, and it is this inability of the historian to foresee which differentiates him from the students of exact science. The Athenian general, Nicias, refused to withdraw his army from Syracuse at a time when it might have been saved. His reason was that an eclipse occurred, and he regarded this as a bad omen. If the Greeks had known more astronomy, they could have predicted the eclipse; further, the Athenians might well have known how Nicias. was influenced by such portents, so that there was really no chance in the affair; but at the time it seemed as if the Athenians were the sport of unpredictable fortune. If President Wilson, or Mr. Lloyd George, were to die to-night, the course of world events would inevitably be deflected, but in what direction, or how far, we cannot foresee. Thus, the caprices of fortune, added to the difficulty of fathoming human motives, increase the labors and pique the zest of the historian.

It may be that Sesostris was as great an individual as Napoleon, and that his conquests and government were as significant as Napoleon's; but we shall never believe it because we shall never know about Rameses the Second a thousandth part of what we know about Napoleon. I am aware that among some historical students today who regard history as the interaction of impersonal, abstract laws, Napoleon is looked upon as a "negligible quantity", but I am unskilled in using either the telescope or the microscope when it comes to examining human deeds and motives. A man's eyes are the only proper instrument for scrutinizing men. Not merely Napoleon, but mankind, and our earth itself, must seem negligible, if their existence is known at all to the other denizens of the sidereal wilderness; but the historian has no more to do with the limitless perspectives of astronomy than with the elusive intricacies of thermodynamics.

Let me repeat that "Man the Measure" should be the guiding motto for those who would write history in human terms.

We historians have the noblest of callings. Unlike the dramatist or the epic poet, we do not invent our plot nor create the characters in the play. The Creator of all things supplies these. It is for us to discern them accurately, to describe them with all the truth there is in us, and to make them live again; for life is the one indispensable God-given essence, and it must throb through our copies as it did through their models. Years ago, Bonnat, the French painter,

was making a portrait of an American, and he came so unpleasantly close and looked so hard and intently that the American drew back and asked what it meant. "Good heavens!" replied Bonnat, “I am competing with God, and I must see everything which He has put into your face."

We historians also compete with God, and we must leave nothing undone to make our poor transcripts of His masterpieces true to the divine originals.

WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER.

THE WAR-SCARE OF 1875

IN the Gedanken und Erinnerungen of Prince Bismarck there is no chapter more interesting than the one which bears the title, "Intrigen", and none which better displays the great chancellor's disregard for so small a matter as the truth. In that chapter, sandwiched between the affairs of Arnim and Eulenburg, the better to enhance its insignificance and dishonorable connections, is to be found Bismarck's brief and contemptuous account of the crisis of 1875. It is a bold statement, though not an exaggeration, to say that hardly a sentence of that forceful and convincing narrative can escape being branded, when the evidence is weighed, as a more or less deliberate falsehood. The incidents with which it deals are certainly very perplexed and obscure at the best; but they would probably be much less so to-day, if this central character had never made public his statement of the case.

The material actually available on the subject is indeed very slight, but it is constantly being added to from various sources. One of the chief of these, the diplomatic correspondence of Gontaut-Biron, the French ambassador at Berlin, has been drawn upon by Hanotaux, and also by André Dreux in his account of the last years of that diplomat's mission. From time to time other contributions are made, as in the recently published biographies of Sir Robert Morier, of Lord Lyons, and of Count Andrássy, and in the memoirs of Prince Hohenlohe.1 The general trend of recent accounts has been on the whole toward exonerating Bismarck from the charge first brought against him of having deliberately plotted the destruction of France; but at the same time the effect of the new evidence is to discredit more and more the German chancellor's own account, which is that he was himself the victim of a vast conspiracy intended to blacken his reputation and to undermine his policies.

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About the only general introductory observation that can be made as to the incident of 1875 is that there was a scare"-which has been singled out as "the scare" from a whole series of similar alarms extending over a considerable period of years. How frightened the various parties really were, how much foundation existed

1 Professor Serge Goriainov had ready for the press a year ago a documentary study of the affair which would clear up many points upon which little more than conjecture can now be made. It is only the uncertain fate of his manuscript which may make this present study worth while.