either laid out on a scale proportionate to the German mind and no other, or else, like Hegel's, they exhibit nature as having been solely concerned throughout the ages with a plan to bring forth in the fulness of time the Prussian monarchy and the German Empire. But the task of generalization has been done, and that successfully, both in England and in the United States; and, with some brilliancy, even in France, where a concept of that great nation as being, after all, but a single factor in the advance of civilization has finally been accepted. Doubtless the patriotism of any general historian will cause him vigorously to emphasize the importance of his own land in the comprehensive scheme, but to accept the doctrine of the unity of history is already to admit that no country is more than one wheel in the series which moves the hands on the dial-plate of human progress. The croakers have been saying that indulgence in generalizations must necessarily destroy thoroughness in detail; and the effort is constantly making to discredit the new turn of historical studies by the prophecy that it must result in superficiality. Thus far, at least, the facts all point the other way. Thoroughness has increased in direct ratio with the expansion of the historical horizon. All the sciences of man, whether physical or ethical, have been advanced with a passionate zeal, equal to, if not greater than, that of investigators in the material world, and by the same methods as theirs. Anthropology, mythology, archæology, physical geography, philology, psychology, and all their sisters, each in its own subdivisions, have been attacking and pursuing their various problems by the inductive and comparative method, and with vastly inferior money resources have outstripped in the importance of their results the richly and even lavishly endowed natural sciences. If we remember that our grandfathers had no other general history than that of Rollin, written before the middle of the eighteenth century, and consequently knew the whole field of secular history as divided into Ancient or Græco-Roman, Medieval, and Modern, each period separated from the other by a great chasm, we shall at once recollect that, thanks to the spade and the science of comparative philology, we have now in Prehistoric Archæology and in Ancient Oriental History two entirely new epochs in the story of man from which the most precious information as to his origin and early advances has been derived. At the same time we have laid the contemporary savage under contribution, and from him we have wrenched details for comparison with early institutions in regard to custom, myth, and social organization which seem likely to be of the first importance. The notion of chasms has disappeared, and the continuity of history has been established. But this is not all. Within the strictly limited field of history proper we have revolutionized the whole method of investigation in that we no longer study nations, but epochs. Middle-aged and older men will remember with some amusement the amazing historical charts which used to adorn the walls of schoolrooms, and resembled nothing so much as rainbow-colored rivers vaguely rising at the top, and wandering in viscid streams more or less vertically, according to the law of gravitation or the resistance of the medium, until absorbed one by the other, or lost in the ferule at the bottom. We rule our charts differently now; by straight horizontal lines, nearer or farther apart according to the period of general history with which we are concerned. The great stream is monotone, though not monotonous; and if it be but a single year that we study, we investigate it clear across, from where it scours the channel toward both shores, including even the annals of semi-civilized and barbarous peoples, so far as they seem to affect the current or the eddies. We have found the movement of the race more majestic than that of nations or individuals, the interest in man more intense than that in men or persons, and the development of civilization more instructive than the achievements of heroes. This is true, of course, not so much for the general reader as for students of history. The latter, speaking from their personal experiences, will probably agree that the tremendous revival of interest in history is not so much a revival of interest in historical narrative as in historical study. No university class-rooms are more thronged than those where instruction in history is given; and this is equally as true of those which are concerned with the minute, painstaking study of details in a short epoch as it is of those which seek to impart philosophical or general ideas of method, and stimulate to investigation by laying down broad principles of procedure. Confessedly, the greatest master of history, equally great as investigator, critic, and writer, was Thucydides. And yet it has frequently and justly been remarked that his narrative has steadily lost in general importance and interest until now he is comprehensible and entertaining only for the scholar. This means that to be appreciated he must be read and considered from his own standpoint and in regard to his own times. None but the scholar can transfer himself to an epoch so remote. It would be an insoluble puzzle to the most intelligent modern reader to find in the pages of so renowned an historical work no mention of the great con temporary poets, architects, sculptors, or philosophers, but to have the entire artistic, philosophical, and literary movement of the time -a movement unique in the history of the world-summed up in the passing phrase that the works of men's hands seen by the Athenian were such that "the daily delight of them banishes gloom." It would be equally surprising to the same reader to learn that the speeches which constitute between a fifth part and a quarter of the whole text were never spoken by their reputed authors, but were the composition of the historian himself. These paradoxes the classical scholar can perfectly explain, but the historical scholar, and still more the reader of history, must recognize in them the immense change which has come over the character of history. The student of Thucydides as a craftsman will, however, find in him the whole of modern historical science. The idea of the permanency of his results contained in his famous phrase тnμa és ȧel is carefully founded on four claims: the strict. truth of his facts as determined either by personal observation or by the searching criticism of statements made by eye-witnesses; his theme as sufficiently important to affect all nations whether city states or barbaric empires; the fact that his book was composed and not compiled; the persistent identity of human nature in all ages. Put in another way, these ideas are: scrupulous attention to truth; in an epoch of general history; with a unity of spirit and purpose; and with regard to the human spirit as being always the same, or substantially so. -- If, then, every one of our vaunted positions was forestalled twenty-three centuries ago, what is new in the modern science of history? The answer is plain, - the application of them to new knowledge under changed conditions. History will not stay written. Every age demands a history written from its own standpoint, with reference to its own social condition, its thought, its beliefs, and its acquisitions, and therefore comprehensible to the men who live in it. Truth, justice, honor, the great principles of human association, have not changed, but man's apprehension of them has steadily grown clearer as his determination to live up to them has grown stronger, and as the individual has become ever more conscious of his powers, both physical and intellectual. For this reason, the seat of sovereign power is never the same in two successive states of society. At the dawn of history, man was the bond-slave of a vague but extensive kinship, -the gens or clan or tribe or city-community; his story has been one of slow and steady approach to an emancipation from the despotism of all kinship except that of the normal monogamous fam 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 |