Etext of History as Literature 
Selected Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. VI
By Theodore  Roosevelt 
New York 
Charles Scribner's Sons 
1913 

CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER I.HISTORY AS LITERATURE
CHAPTER II. BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
CHAPTER III.THE WORLD MOVEMENT
CHAPTER IV.CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
CHAPTER V. THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
CHAPTER VI. PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
CHAPTER VII. DANTE AND THE BOWERY
CHAPTER VIII. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
CHAPTER IX. THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT
SPIRIT
CHAPTER X. THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
CHAPTER XI. AN ART EXHIBITION

HISTORY AS LITERATURE 

PREFACE 

IN this volume I have gathered certain addresses I made before the
American Historical Association, the University of Oxford, the
University of Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together with six
essays I wrote for The Outlook, and one that I wrote for The
Century.

In these addresses and essays I have discussed not merely literary
but also historical and scientific subjects, for my thesis is that the
domain of literature must be ever more widely extended over the
domains of history and science. There is nothing which in this
preface I can say to elaborate or emphasize what I have said on
this subject in the essays themselves.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, 
July 4, 1913.

CHAPTER  I  HISTORY AS LITERATURE 1 

THERE has been much discussion as to whether history should not
henceforth be treated as a branch of science rather than of
literature. As with most such discussions, much of the matter in
dispute has referred merely to terminology. Moreover, as regards
part of the discussion, the minds of the contestants have not met,
the propositions advanced by the two sides being neither mutually
incompatible nor mutually relevant. There is, however, a real basis
for conflict in so far as science claims exclusive possession of the
field.

There was a time we see it in the marvellous dawn of Hellenic life
when history was distinguished neither from poetry, from
mythology, nor from the first dim beginnings of science. There
was a more recent time, at the opening of Rome's brief period of
literary splendor, when poetry was accepted by a great scientific
philosopher as the appropriate vehicle for teaching the lessons of
science and philosophy. There was a more recent time still the
time of Holland's leadership in arms and arts when one of the two
or three greatest world painters put his genius at the service of
anatomists.

In each case the steady growth of specialization has rendered such
combination now impossible. Virgil left history to Livy; and when
Tacitus had become possible Lucan was a rather absurd
anachronism. The elder Darwin, when he endeavored to combine
the functions of scientist and poet, may have thought of Lucretius
as a model; but the great Darwin was incapable of such a mistake.
The surgeons of to-day would prefer the services of a good
photographer to those of Rembrandt even were those of
Rembrandt available. No one would now dream of combining the
history of the Trojan War with a poem on the wrath of Achilles.
Beowulf's feats against the witch who dwelt under the water would
not now be mentioned in the same matter-of-fact way that a Frisian
or Frankish raid is mentioned. We are long past the stage when we
would accept as parts of the same epic Siegfried's triumphs over
dwarf and dragon, and even a distorted memory of the historic
Hunnish king in whose feast-hall the Burgundian heroes held their
last revel and made their death fight. We read of the loves of the
Hound of Muirthemne and Emer the Fair without attributing to the
chariot-riding heroes who "fought" over the ears of their horses"
and to their fierce lady-loves more than a symbolic reality. The
Roland of the Norman trouvŠres, the Roland who blew the ivory
horn at Roncesvalles, is to our minds wholly distinct from the
actual Warden of the Marches who fell in a rear-guard skirmish
with the Pyrenean Basques.

As regards philosophy, as distinguished from material science and
from history, the specialization has been incomplete. Poetry is still
used as a vehicle for the teaching of philosophy. Goethe was as
profound a thinker as Kant. He has influenced the thought of
mankind far more deeply than Kant because he was also a great
poet. Robert Browning was a real philosopher, and his writings
have had a hundredfold the circulation and the effect of those of
any similar philosopher who wrote in prose, just because, and only
because, what he wrote was not merely philosophy but literature.
The form in which he wrote challenged attention and provoked
admiration. That part of his work which some of us which I
myself, for instance most care for is merely poetry. But in that part
of his work which has exercised most attraction and has given him
the widest reputation, the poetry, the form of expression, bears to
the thought expressed much the same relation that the expression
of Lucretius bears to the thought of Lucretius. As regards this, the
great mass of his product, he is primarily a philosopher, whose
writings surpass in value those of other similar philosophers
precisely because they are not only philosophy but literature. In
other words, Browning the philosopher is read by countless
thousands to whom otherwise philosophy would be a sealed book,
for exactly the same reason that Macaulay the historian is read by
countless thousands to whom otherwise history would be a sealed
book; because both Browning's works and Macaulay's works are
material additions to the great sum of English literature.
Philosophy is a science just as history is a science. There is need in
one case as in the other for vivid and powerful presentation of
scientific matter in literary form.

This does not mean that there is the like need in the two cases.
History can never be truthfully presented if the presentation is
purely emotional. It can never be truthfully or usefully presented
unless profound research, patient, laborious, painstaking, has
preceded the presentation. No amount of self-communion and of
pondering on the soul of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary
imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely extended
study. The vision of the great historian must be both wide and
lofty. But it must be sane, clear, and based on full knowledge of
the facts and of their interrelations. Otherwise we get merely a
splendid bit of serious romance-writing, like Carlyle's "French
Revolution." Many hard-working students, alive to the deficiencies
of this kind of romance-writing, have grown to distrust not only all
historical writing that is romantic, but all historical writing that is
vivid. They feel that complete truthfulness must never be
sacrificed to color. In this they are right. They also feel that
complete truthfulness is incompatible with color. In this they are
wrong. The immense importance of full knowledge of a mass of
dry facts and gray details has so impressed them as to make them
feel that the dryness and the grayness are in themselves
meritorious.

These students have rendered invaluable service to history. They
are right in many of their contentions. They see how literature and
science have specialized. They realize that scientific methods are
as necessary to the proper study of history as to the proper study of
astronomy or zoology. They know that in many, perhaps in most,
of its forms, literary ability is divorced from the restrained
devotion to the actual fact which is as essential to the historian as
to the scientist. They know that nowadays science ostentatiously
disclaims any connection with literature. They feel that if this is
essential for science, it is no less essential for history.

There is much truth in all these contentions. Nevertheless, taking
them all together, they do not indicate what these hard-working
students believed that they indicate. Because history, science, and
literature have all become specialized, the theory now is that
science is definitely severed from literature and that history must
follow suit. Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history,
but I do not even accept it as true for science.

Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest
because both of its substance and its form, aside from the mere
technical value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For
a great work of literature there is the same demand now that there
always has been; and in any great work of literature the first
element is great imaginative power. The imaginative power
demanded for a great historian is different from that demanded for
a great poet; but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in
no sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very
accurate, very real and vivid, presentation of the past can come
only from one in whom the imaginative gift is strong. The
industrious collector of dead facts bears to such a man precisely
the relation that a photographer bears to Rembrandt. There are
innumerable books, that is, innumerable volumes of printed matter
between covers, which are excellent for their own purposes, but in
which imagination would be as wholly out of place as in the blue
prints of a sewer system or in the photographs taken to illustrate a
work on comparative osteology. But the vitally necessary sewer
system does not take the place of the cathedral of Rheims or of the
Parthenon; no quantity of photographs will ever be equivalent to
one Rembrandt; and the greatest mass of data, although
indispensable to the work of a great historian, is in no shape or
way a substitute for that work.

History, taught for a directly and immediately useful purpose to
pupils and the teachers of pupils, is one of the necessary features
of a sound education in democratic citizenship. A book containing
such sound teaching, even if without any literary quality, may be
as useful to the student and as creditable to the writer as a similar
book on medicine. I am not slighting such a book when I say that,
once it has achieved its worthy purpose, it can be permitted to
lapse from human memory as a good book on medicine, which has
outlived its usefulness, lapses from memory. But the historical
work which does possess literary quality may be a permanent
contribution to the sum of man's wisdom, enjoyment, and
inspiration. The writer of such a book must add wisdom to
knowledge, and the gift of expression to the gift of imagination.

It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagination tends to
inaccuracy. Only a distorted imagination tends to inaccuracy. Vast
and fundamental truths can be discerned and interpreted only by
one whose imagination is as lofty as the soul of a Hebrew prophet.
When we say that the great historian must be a man of
imagination, we use the word as we use it when we say that the
great statesman must be a man of imagination. Moreover, together
with imagination must go the power of expression. The great
speeches of statesmen and the great writings of historians can live
only if they possess the deathless quality that inheres in all great
literature. The greatest literary historian must of necessity be a
master of the science of history, a man who has at his finger-tips
all the accumulated facts from the treasure-houses of the dead
past. But he must also possess the power to marshal what is dead
so that before our eyes it lives again.

Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness
in a book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few
learned people seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting
is proof that it is shallow. This is particularly apt to be the attitude
of scientific men. Very few great scientists have written
interestingly, and these few have usually felt apologetic about it.
Yet sooner or later the time will come when the mighty sweep of
modern scientific discovery will be placed, by scientific men with
the gift of expression, at the service of intelligent and cultivated
laymen. Such service will be inestimable. Another writer of
"Canterbury Tales," another singer of "Paradise Lost," could not
add more to the sum of literary achievement than the man who
may picture to us the phases of the age-long history of life on this
globe, or make vivid before our eyes the tremendous march of the
worlds through space.

Indeed, I believe that already science has owed more than it
suspects to the unconscious literary power of some of its
representatives. Scientific writers of note had grasped the fact of
evolution long before Darwin and Huxley; and the theories
advanced by these men to explain evolution were not much more
unsatisfactory, as full explanations, than the theory of natural
selection itself. Yet, where their predecessors had created hardly a
ripple, Darwin and Huxley succeeded in effecting a complete
revolution in the thought of the age, a revolution as great as that
caused by the discovery of the truth about the solar system. I
believe that the chief explanation of the difference was the very
simple one that what Darwin and Huxley wrote was interesting to
read. Every cultivated man soon had their volumes in his library,
and they still keep their places on our book-shelves. But Lamarck
and Cope are only to be found in the libraries of a few special
students. If they had possessed a gift of expression akin to
Darwin's, the doctrine of evolution would not in the popular mind
have been confounded with the doctrine of natural selection and a
juster estimate than at present would obtain as to the relative
merits of the explanations of evolution championed by the
different scientific schools.

Do not misunderstand me. In the field of historical research an
immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power
whatever. Moreover, the most painstaking and laborious research,
covering long periods of years, is necessary in order to accumulate
the material for any history worth writing at all. There are
important by-paths of history, moreover, which hardly admit of
treatment that would make them of interest to any but specialists.
All this I fully admit. In particular I pay high honor to the patient
and truthful investigator. He does an indispensable work. My
claim is merely that such work should not exclude the work of the
great master who can use the materials gathered, who has the gift
of vision, the quality of the seer, the power himself to see what has
happened and to make what he has seen clear to the vision of
others. My only protest is against those who believe that the
extension of the activities of the most competent mason and most
energetic contractor will supply the lack of great architects. If, as
in the Middle Ages, the journeymen builders are themselves
artists, why this is the best possible solution of the problem. But if
they are not artists, then their work, however much it represents of
praiseworthy industry, and of positive usefulness, does not take the
place of the work of a great artist.

Take a concrete example. It is only of recent years that the
importance of inscriptions has been realized. To the present-day
scholar they are invaluable. Even to the layman, some of them turn
the past into the present with startling clearness. The least
imaginative is moved by the simple inscription on the Etruscan
sarcophagus: "I, the great lady"; a lady so haughty that no other
human being was allowed to rest near her; and yet now nothing
remains but this proof of the pride of the nameless one. Or the
inscription in which Queen Hatshepsu recounts her feats and her
magnificence, and ends by adjuring the onlooker, when overcome
by the recital, not to say "how wonderful" but "how like her!"
could any picture of a living queen be more intimately vivid? With
such inscriptions before us the wonder is that it took us so long to
realize their worth. Not unnaturally this realization, when it did
come, was followed by the belief that inscriptions would enable us
to dispense with the great historians of antiquity. This error is
worse than the former. Where the inscriptions give us light on
what would otherwise be darkness, we must be profoundly
grateful; but we must not confound the lesser light with the
greater. We could better afford to lose every Greek inscription that
has ever been found than the chapter in which Thucydides tells of
the Athenian failure before Syracuse. Indeed, few inscriptions
teach us as much history as certain forms of literature that do not
consciously aim at teaching history at all. The inscriptions of
Hellenistic Greece in the third century before our era do not, all
told, give us so lifelike a view of the ordinary life of the ordinary
men and women who dwelt in the great Hellenistic cities of the
time, as does the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus.

This does not mean that good history can be unscientific. So far
from ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do
nothing unless he is steeped in science. He can never equal what
has been done by the great historians of the past unless he writes
not merely with full knowledge, but with an intensely vivid
consciousness, of all that of which they were necessarily ignorant.
He must accept what we now know to be man's place in nature. He
must realize that man has been on this earth for a period of such
incalculable length that, from the standpoint of the student of his
development through time, what our ancestors used to call
"antiquity" is almost indistinguishable from the present day. If our
conception of history takes in the beast-like man whose sole tool
and weapon was the stone fist-hatchet, and his advanced
successors, the man who etched on bone pictures of the mammoth,
the reindeer, and the wild horse, in what is now France, and the
man who painted pictures of bison in the burial caves of what is
now Spain; if we also conceive in their true position our
"contemporaneous ancestors," the savages who are now no more
advanced than the cave-dwellers of a hundred thousand or two
hundred thousand years back, then we shall accept Thothmes and
C‘sar, Alfred and Washington, Timoleon and Lincoln, Homer and
Shakespeare, Pythagoras and Emerson, as all nearly
contemporaneous in time and in culture.

The great historian of the future will have easy access to
innumerable facts patiently gathered by tens of thousands of
investigators, whereas the great historian of the past had very few
facts, and often had to gather most of these himself. The great
historian of the future can not be excused if he fails to draw on the
vast storehouses of knowledge that have been accumulated, if he
fails to profit by the wisdom and work of other men, which are
now the common property of all intelligent men. He must use the
instruments which the historians of the past did not have ready to
hand. Yet even with these instruments he can not do as good work
as the best of the elder historians unless he has vision and
imagination, the power to grasp what is essential and to reject the
infinitely more numerous non-essentials, the power to embody
ghosts, to put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men
living before our eyes. In short, he must have the power to take the
science of history and turn it into literature.

Those who wish history to be treated as a purely utilitarian science
often decry the recital of the mighty deeds of the past, the deeds
which always have aroused, and for a long period to come are
likely to arouse, most interest. These men say that we should study
not the unusual but the usual. They say that we profit most by
laborious research into the drab monotony of the ordinary, rather
than by fixing our eyes on the purple patches that break it. Beyond
all question the great historian of the future must keep ever in
mind the relative importance of the usual and the unusual. If he is
a really great historian, if he possesses the highest imaginative and
literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of the
general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting
peaks. It is even more essential to have such quality in writing of
the commonplace than in writing of the exceptional. Otherwise no
profit will come from study of the ordinary; for writings are
useless unless they are read, and they can not be read unless they
are readable. Furthermore, while doing full justice to the
importance of the usual, of the commonplace, the great historian
will not lose sight of the importance of the heroic.

It is hard to tell just what it is that is most important to know. The
wisdom of one generation may seem the folly of the next. This is
just as true of the wisdom of the dry-as-dusts as of the wisdom of
those who write interestingly. Moreover, while the value of the
by-products of knowledge does not readily yield itself to
quantitative expression, it is none the less real. A utilitarian
education should undoubtedly be the foundation of all education.
But it is far from advisable, it is far from wise, to have it the end of
all education. Technical training will more and more be accepted
as the prime factor in our educational system, a factor as essential
for the farmer, the blacksmith, the seamstress, and the cook, as for
the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer, and the stenographer. For
similar reasons the purely practical and technical lessons of
history, the lessons that help us to grapple with our immediate
social and industrial problems, will also receive greater emphasis
than ever before. But if we are wise we will no more permit this
practical training to exclude knowledge of that part of literature
which is history than of that part of literature which is poetry. Side
by side with the need for the perfection of the individual in the
technic of his special calling goes the need of broad human
sympathy, and the need of lofty and generous emotion in that
individual. Only thus can the citizenship of the modern state rise
level to the complex modern social needs.

No technical training, no narrowly utilitarian study of any kind
will meet this second class of needs. In part they can best be met
by a training that will fit men and women to appreciate, and
therefore to profit by, great poetry and those great expressions of
the historian and the statesman which rivet our interest and stir our
souls. Great thoughts match and inspire heroic deeds. The same
reasons that make the Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural
impress themselves on men's minds far more deeply than technical
treatises on the constitutional justification of slavery or of
secession, apply to fitting descriptions of the great battle and the
great contest which occasioned the two speeches. The tense epic of
the Gettysburg fight, the larger epic of the whole Civil War, when
truthfully and vividly portrayed, will always have, and ought
always to have, an attraction, an interest, that can not be roused by
the description of the same number of hours or years of ordinary
existence. There are supreme moments in which intensity and not
duration is the all-important element. History which is not
professedly utilitarian, history which is didactic only as great
poetry is unconsciously didactic, may yet possess that highest form
of usefulness, the power to thrill the souls of men with stories of
strength and craft and daring, and to lift them out of their common
selves to the heights of high endeavor.

The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof
of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness as on the same
level. But of course the obsession of purposeful moral teaching
may utterly defeat its own aim. Moreover, unfortunately, the
avowed teacher of morality, when he writes history, sometimes
goes very far wrong indeed. It often happens that the man who can
be of real help in inspiring others by his utterances on abstract
principles is wholly unable to apply his own principles to concrete
cases. Carlyle offers an instance in point. Very few men have ever
been a greater source of inspiration to other ardent souls than was
Carlyle when he confined himself to preaching morality in the
abstract. Moreover, his theory bade him treat history as offering
material to support that theory. But not only was he utterly unable
to distinguish either great virtues or great vices when he looked
abroad on contemporary life as witness his attitude toward our
own Civil War but he was utterly unable to apply his own
principles concretely in history. His "Frederick the Great" is
literature of a high order. It may, with reservations, even be
accepted as history. But the "morality" therein jubilantly upheld is
shocking to any man who takes seriously Carlyle's other writings
in which he lays down principles of conduct. In his "Frederick the
Great" he was not content to tell the facts. He was not content to
announce his admiration. He wished to square himself with his
theories, and to reconcile what he admired, both with the actual
fact and with his previously expressed convictions on morality. He
could only do so by refusing to face the facts and by using words
with meanings that shifted to meet his own mental emergencies.
He pretended to discern morality where no vestige of it existed. He
tortured the facts to support his views. The "morality" he praised
had no connection with morality as understood in the New
Testament. It was the kind of archaic morality observed by the
Danites in their dealings with the people of Laish. The sermon of
the Mormon bishop in Owen Wister's "Pilgrim on the Gila" sets
forth the only moral lessons which it was possible for Carlyle
truthfully to draw from the successes he described.

History must not be treated as something set off by itself. It should
not be treated as a branch of learning bound to the past by the
shackles of an iron conservatism. It is neither necessary rigidly to
mark the limits of the province of history, nor to treat of all that is
within that province, nor to exclude any subject within that
province from treatment, nor yet to treat different methods of
dealing with the same subject as mutually exclusive. Every writer
and every reader has his own needs, to meet himself or to be met
by others. Among a great multitude of thoughtful people there is
room for the widest possible variety of appeals. Let each man
fearlessly choose what is of real importance and interest to him
personally, reverencing authority, but not in a superstitious spirit,
because he must needs reverence liberty even more.

There is an infinite variety of subjects to treat, and no need to
estimate their relative importance. Because one man is interested
in the history of finance, it does not mean that another is wrong in
being interested in the history of war. One man's need is met by
exhaustive tables of statistics; another's by the study of the
influence exerted on national life by the great orators, the
Websters and Burkes, or by the poets, the Tyrt‘uses and K”rners,
who in crises utter what is in the nation's heart. There is need of
the study of the historical workings of representative government.
There is no less need of the study of the economic changes
produced by the factory system. Because we study with profit what
Thorold Rogers wrote of prices we are not debarred from also
profiting by Mahan's studies of naval strategy. One man finds what
is of most importance to his own mind and heart in tracing the
effect upon humanity of the spread of malaria along the shores of
the ’gean; or the effect of the Black Death on the labor-market of
medi‘val Europe; or the profound influence upon the
development of the African continent of the fatal diseases borne by
the bites of insects, which close some districts to human life and
others to the beasts without which humanity rests at the lowest
stage of savagery. One man sees the events from one view-point,
one from another. Yet another can combine both. We can be
stirred by Thayer's study of Cavour without abating our pleasure in
the younger Trevelyan's volumes on Garibaldi. Because we revel
in Froissart, or Joinville, or Villehardouin, there is no need that we
should lack interest in the books that attempt the more difficult
task of tracing the economic changes in the status of peasant,
mechanic, and burgher during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.

History must welcome the entrance upon its domain of every
science. As James Harvey Robinson in his "New History" has said:

"The bounds of all departments of human research and speculation
are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating; moreover,
the lines of demarcation are hopelessly interlaced, for real men
and the real universe in which they live are so intricate as to defy
all attempts even of the most patient and subtle German to
establish satisfactorily and permanently the Begriff und Wesen of
any artificially delimited set of natural phenomena, whether words,
thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, plants, or stars. Each so-called
science or discipline is ever and always dependent on other
sciences and disciplines. It draws its life from them, and to them it
owes, consciously or unconsciously, a great part of its chances of
progress."

Elsewhere this writer dwells on the need of understanding the
genetic side of history, if we are to grasp the real meaning of, and
grapple most effectively with, the phenomena of our present-day
lives; for that which is can be dealt with best if we realize at least
in part from what a tangled web of causation it has sprung.

The work of the arch‘ologist, the work of the anthropologist, the
work of the pal‘o-ethnologist out of all these a great literary
historian may gather material indispensable for his use. He, and
we, ought fully to acknowledge our debt to the collectors of these
indispensable facts. The investigator in any line may do work
which puts us all under lasting obligations to him, even though he
be totally deficient in the art of literary expression, that is, totally
deficient in the ability to convey vivid and lifelike pictures to
others of the past whose secrets he has laid bare. I would give no
scanty or grudging acknowledgment to the deeds of such a man.
He does a lasting service; whereas the man who tries to make
literary expression cover his ignorance or misreading of facts
renders less than no service. But the service done is immeasurably
increased in value when the man arises who from his study of a
myriad dead fragments is able to paint some living picture of the
past.

This is why the record as great writers preserve it has a value
immeasurably beyond what is merely lifeless. Such a record pulses
with immortal life. It may recount the deed or the thought of a hero
at some supreme moment. It may be merely the portrayal of
homely every-day life. This matters not, so long as in either event
the genius of the historian enables him to paint in colors that do
not fade. The cry of the Ten Thousand when they first saw the sea
still stirs the hearts of men. The ruthless death scene between Jehu
and Jezebel; wicked Ahab, smitten by the chance arrow, and
propped in his chariot until he died at sundown; Josiah, losing his
life because he would not heed the Pharaoh's solemn warning, and
mourned by all the singing men and all the singing women the
fates of these kings and of this king's daughter, are part of the
common stock of knowledge of mankind. They were petty rulers
of petty principalities; yet, compared with them, mighty
conquerors, who added empire to empire, Shalmaneser and
Sargon, Amenhotep and Rameses, are but shadows; for the deeds
and the deaths of the kings of Judah and Israel are written in words
that, once read, can not be forgotten. The Peloponnesian War
bulks of unreal size to-day because it once seemed thus to bulk to a
master mind. Only a great historian can fittingly deal with a very
great subject; yet because the qualities of chief interest in human
history can be shown on a small field no less than on a large one,
some of the greatest historians have treated subjects that only their
own genius rendered great.

So true is this that if great events lack a great historian, and a great
poet writes about them, it is the poet who fixes them in the mind
of mankind, so that in after-time importance the real has become
the shadow and the shadow the reality. Shakespeare has definitely
fixed the character of the Richard III of whom ordinary men think
and speak. Keats forgot even the right name of the man who first
saw the Pacific Ocean; yet it is his lines which leap to our minds
when we think of the "wild surmise" felt by the indomitable
explorer-conqueror from Spain when the vast new sea burst on his
vision.

When, however, the great historian has spoken, his work will
never be undone. No poet can ever supersede what Napier wrote of
the storming of Badajoz, of the British infantry at Albuera, and of
the light artillery at Fuentes d'O¤oro. After Parkman had written of
Montcalm and Wolfe there was left for other writers only what
Fitzgerald left for other translators of Omar Khayyam. Much new
light has been thrown on the history of the Byzantine Empire by
the many men who have studied it of recent years; we read each
new writer with pleasure and profit; and after reading each we take
down a volume of Gibbon, with renewed thankfulness that a great
writer was moved to do a great task.

The greatest of future arch‘ologists will be the great historian who
instead of being a mere antiquarian delver in dust-heaps has the
genius to reconstruct for us the immense panorama of the past. He
must possess knowledge. He must possess that without which
knowledge is of so little use, wisdom. What he brings from the
charnel-house he must use with such potent wizardry that we shall
see the life that was and not the death that is. For remember that
the past was life just as much as the present is life. Whether it be
Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or Scandinavia with which he deals, the
great historian, if the facts permit him, will put before us the men
and women as they actually lived so that we shall recognize them
for what they were, living beings. Men like Maspero, Breasted,
and Weigall have already begun this work for the countries of the
Nile and the Euphrates. For Scandinavia the groundwork was laid
long ago in the "Heimskringla" and in such sagas as those of Burnt
Njal and Gisli Soursop. Minute descriptions of mummies and of
the furniture of tombs help us as little to understand the Egypt of
the mighty days, as to sit inside the tomb of Mount Vernon would
help us to see Washington the soldier leading to battle his scarred
and tattered veterans, or Washington the statesman, by his serene
strength of character, rendering it possible for his countrymen to
establish themselves as one great nation.

The great historian must be able to paint for us the life of the plain
people, the ordinary men and women, of the time of which he
writes. He can do this only if he possesses the highest kind of
imagination. Collections of figures no more give us a picture of the
past than the reading of a tariff report on hides or woollens gives
us an idea of the actual lives of the men and women who live on
ranches or work in factories. The great historian will in as full
measure as possible present to us the every-day life of the men and
women of the age which he describes. Nothing that tells of this life
will come amiss to him. The instruments of their labor and the
weapons of their warfare, the wills that they wrote, the bargains
that they made, and the songs that they sang when they feasted and
made love: he must use them all. He must tell us of the toil of the
ordinary man in ordinary times, and of the play by which that
ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget that no event stands
out entirely isolated. He must trace from its obscure and humble
beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of triumph has
shaken the world.

Yet he must not forget that the times that are extraordinary need
especial portrayal. In the revolt against the old tendency of
historians to deal exclusively with the spectacular and the
exceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and government,
many modern writers have gone to the opposite extreme. They fail
to realize that in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there are
hours so fraught with weighty achievement, with triumph or
defeat, with joy or sorrow, that each such hour may determine all
the years that are to come thereafter, or may outweigh all the years
that have gone before. In the writings of our historians, as in the
lives of our ordinary citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it
is the ordinary every-day life which counts most; nor yet that
seasons come when ordinary qualities count for but little in the
face of great contending forces of good and of evil, the outcome of
whose strife determines whether the nation shall walk in the glory
of the morning or in the gloom of spiritual death.

The historian must deal with the days of common things, and deal
with them so that they shall interest us in reading of them as our
own common things interest us as we live among them. He must
trace the changes that come almost unseen, the slow and gradual
growth that transforms for good or for evil the children and
grandchildren so that they stand high above or far below the level
on which their forefathers stood. He must also trace the great
cataclysms that interrupt and divert this gradual development. He
can no more afford to be blind to one class of phenomena than to
the other. He must ever remember that while the worst offence of
which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that
unless he writes vividly he can not write truthfully; for no amount
of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as the whole truth unless the
genius is there to paint the truth.

There can be no better illustration of what I mean than is afforded
by the history of Russia during the last thousand years. The
historian must trace the growth of the earliest Slav communities of
the forest and the steppe, the infiltration of Scandinavian invaders
who gave them their first power of mass action, and the slow,
chaotic development of the little communes into barbarous cities
and savage princedoms. In later Russian history he must show us
priest and noble, merchant and serf, changing slowly from the days
when Ivan the Terrible warred against B tory, the Magyar king of
Poland, until the present moment, when with half-suspicious eyes
the people of the Czar watch their remote Bulgarian kinsmen
standing before the last European stronghold of the Turk. During
all these centuries there were multitudes of wars, foreign and
domestic, any or all of which were of little moment compared to
the slow working of the various forces that wrought in the times of
peace. But there was one period of storm and overthrow so terrible
that it affected profoundly for all time the whole growth of the
Russian people, in inmost character no less than in external
dominion. Early in the thirteenth century the genius of Jenghiz
Khan stirred the Mongol horsemen of the mid-Asian pastures to a
movement as terrible to civilization as the lava flow of a volcano
to the lands around the volcano's foot. When that century opened,
the Mongols were of no more weight in the world than the
Touaregs of the Sahara are to-day. Long before the century had
closed they had ridden from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the
Persian Gulf. They had crushed Christian and Moslem and
Buddhist alike beneath the iron cruelty of their sway. They had
conquered China as their successors conquered India. They sacked
Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In mid-Europe their presence for a
moment caused the same horror to fall on the warring adherents of
the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they were a scourge so
frightful, so irresistible, that the people cowered before them as if
they had been demons. No European army of that day, of any
nation, was able to look them in the face on a stricken field.
Bestial in their lives, irresistible in battle, merciless in victory, they
trampled the lands over which they rode into bloody mire beneath
the hoofs of their horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny
horse-bowmen drew a red furrow across Hungary, devastated
Poland, and in Silesia overthrew the banded chivalry of Germany.
But it was in Russia that they did their worst. They not merely
conquered Russia, but held the Russians as cowering and abject
serfs for two centuries. Every feeble effort at resistance was visited
with such bloodthirsty vengeance that finally no Russian ventured
ever to oppose them at all. But the princes of the cities soon found
that the beast-like fury of the conquerors when their own desires
were thwarted, was only equalled by their beast-like indifference
to all that was done among the conquered people themselves, and
that they were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid each
Russian against his brother. Under this r‚gime the Russian who
rose was the Russian who with cringing servility to his Tartar
overlords combined ferocious and conscienceless greed in the
treatment of his fellow Russians. Moscow came to the front by
using the Tartar to help conquer the other Russian cities, paying as
a price abject obedience to all Tartar demands. In the long run the
fierce and pliant cunning of the conquered people proved too
much for the short-sighted and arrogant brutality of the
conquerors. The Tartar power, the Mongolian power, waned.
Russia became united, threw off the yoke, and herself began a
career of aggression at the expense of her former conquerors. But
the reconquest of racial independence, vitally necessary though it
was to Russia, had been paid for by the establishment of a
despotism Asiatic rather than European in its spirit and working.

The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were
the present. He will make us see as living men the hard-faced
archers of Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who followed
Alexander down beyond the rim of the known world. We shall
hear grate on the coast of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch
sea-thieves whose children's children were to inherit unknown
continents. We shall thrill to the triumphs of Hannibal. Gorgeous
in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities, and the might of
the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled to dust ages
ago. Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste spaces,
the caravans shall move; and the admirals of uncharted seas shall
furrow the oceans with their lonely prows. Beyond the dim
centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We
shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed
the course of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of forgotten
seers. Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly,
who saw in their vision peaks so lofty that never yet have they
been reached by the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall
sing to us the deeds of men of might and the love and the beauty of
women. We shall see the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of
the flowers in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon will be heavy to
our senses. We shall sit at feast with the kings of Nineveh when
they drink from ivory and gold. With Queen Maeve in her
sun-parlor we shall watch the nearing chariots of the champions.
For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and
the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The frowning
strongholds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and the white
palace-castles from whose windows Syrian princes once looked
across the blue ’gean. We shall know the valor of the
two-sworded Samurai. Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and the
strange, crooked folly of the immemorial civilizations which
tottered to a living death in India and in China. We shall see the
terrible horsemen of Timur the Lame ride over the roof of the
world; we shall hear the drums beat as the armies of Gustavus and
Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to victory. Ours shall be the
woe of burgher and peasant, and ours the stern joy when freemen
triumph and justice comes to her own. The agony of the
galley-slaves shall be ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked are
brought low and the men of evil days have their reward. We shall
see the glory of triumphant violence, and the revel of those who do
wrong in high places; and the broken-hearted despair that lies
beneath the glory and the revel. We shall also see the supreme
righteousness of the wars for freedom and justice, and know that
the men who fell in these wars made all mankind their debtors.

Some day the historians will tell us of these things. Some day, too,
they will tell our children of the age and the land in which we now
live. They will portray the conquest of the continent. They will
show the slow beginnings of settlement, the growth of the fishing
and trading towns on the seacoast, the hesitating early ventures
into the Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show the
backwoodsmen, with their long rifles and their light axes, making
their way with labor and peril through the wooded wilderness to
the Mississippi; and then the endless march of the white-topped
wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the coast of the greatest
of the five great oceans. They will show how the land which the
pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in two
generations by the overflow from the countries of western and
central Europe. The portentous growth of the cities will be shown,
and the change from a nation of farmers to a nation of business
men and artisans, and all the far-reaching consequences of the rise
of the new industrialism. The formation of a new ethnic type in
this melting-pot of the nations will be told. The hard materialism
of our age will appear, and also the strange capacity for lofty
idealism which must be reckoned with by all who would
understand the American character. A people whose heroes are
Washington and Lincoln, a peaceful people who fought to a finish
one of the bloodiest of wars, waged solely for the sake of a great
principle and a noble idea, surely possess an emergency-standard
far above mere money-getting.

Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of
to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much that is
unpleasant. This is but saying that they will describe the
arch-typical civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is
finally told, I believe that it will show that the forces working for
good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and
that, with many blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and
turning aside from the path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith
by our works, and show in our lives our belief that righteousness
exalteth a nation.

Note 1 
Annual address of the president of the American Historical
Association delivered at Boston, December 27, 1912.

CHAPTER II  BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY 1 

AN American who, in response to such an invitation as I have
received, speaks in this university of ancient renown, can not but
feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his
surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations.
Your great universities, and all the memories that make them
great, are living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of
men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in
other lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the
men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have
been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like
the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the
Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who
came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of
our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to
become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like
myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I
think that, as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and
sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and
not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman
or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in "the spacious days of
great Elizabeth," would have felt far more alien than I, their
descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of the spirit
makes a closer bond than common heirship in the things of the
body.

More than ever before in the world's history we of to-day seek to
penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only
mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search,
we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear
vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous
procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in "cramp
elf and saurian forms" the creative forces "swathed their too-much
power," down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant
only, when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in
the history of life on this planet; and studying we see strange
analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and
change, between those physical groups of animal life which we
designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and
composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of
nations and civilizations.

It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence.
In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the
history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in
scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by
the men of science with reference to those engaged in other
pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science,
for instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the
earth and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air;
of the science that finds its expression in such extraordinary
achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences
which have so accelerated the velocity of movement in social and
industrial conditions for the changes in the mechanical appliances
of ordinary life during the last three generations have been greater
than in all the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak
of the science which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of
our every-day life than literature or music, painting or sculpture,
poetry or history. A hundred years ago the ordinary man of
cultivation had to know something of these last subjects; but the
probabilities were rather against his having any but the most
superficial scientific knowledge. At present all this has changed,
thanks to the interest taken in scientific discoveries, the large
circulation of scientific books, and the rapidity with which ideas
originating among students of the most advanced and abstruse
sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in the popular mind.

Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of
science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased
respect naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a
certain tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields.
This is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only
have scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the
history of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with
what biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there
has arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science.
Both positions are in their essence right; but as regards each
position, the more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm
of knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to
assent. As regards the latter of the two positions, that which would
treat history henceforth merely as one branch of scientific study,
we must of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording facts
and appreciation of their relative worth and interrelationship are
just as necessary in historical study as in any other kind of study.
The fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course
removes it at once from the category of history, however much it
may still deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group of
volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. But the converse
also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon
what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which is
written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth
seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous
scientific historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a
historical book is directly in proportion to the impossibility of
reading it, save as a painful duty. Now I am willing that history
shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it
also remains a branch of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that
as the field of science encroaches on the field of literature there
should be a corresponding encroachment of literature upon
science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be
met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include
literature as well as science, is the need of books for scientific
laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be readable.
So far from doing away with the school of great historians, the
school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need
merely that the future writers of history, without losing the
qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the
new facts and new methods which science has put at their
disposal. Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No
"scientific" treatise about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the
very reason that Joinville's place is in both history and literature;
no minute study of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than
Marbot and Marbot is as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover,
certain at least of the branches of science should likewise be
treated by masters in the art of presentment, so that the layman
interested in science, no less than the layman interested in history,
shall have on his shelves classics which can be read. Whether this
wish be or be not capable of realization, it assuredly remains true
that the great historian of the future must essentially represent the
ideal striven after by the great historians of the past. The
industrious collector of facts occupies an honorable, but not an
exalted, position, and the scientific historian who produces books
which are not literature must rest content with the honor,
substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who
gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to
use.

Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of
literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in
the scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He
who would fully treat of man must know at least something of
biology, of the science that treats of living, breathing things; and
especially of that science of evolution which is inseparably
connected with the great name of Darwin. Of course, there is no
exact parallelism between the birth, growth, and death of species
in the animal world, and the birth, growth, and death of societies in
the world of man. Yet there is a certain parallelism. There are
strange analogies; it may be that there are homologies.

How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are
more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the
interpretation of human history, we can not at present say. The
historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific
man is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit
ignorance is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of
knowledge. Wisdom is advanced by research which enables us to
add to knowledge; and, moreover, the way for wisdom is made
ready when men who record facts of vast but unknown import, if
asked to explain their full significance, are willing frankly to
answer that they do not know. The research which enables us to
add to the sum of complete knowledge stands first; but second
only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly to pose
the problem, also requires us to say that with our present
knowledge we can offer no complete solution.

Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one
of the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of
the higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.

Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time
necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many
hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have
passed by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary
period, we find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly
developed mammalian life on the land masses out of which have
grown the continents as we see them to-day. The ages swept by,
until, with the advent of man substantially in the physical shape in
which we now know him, we also find a mammalian fauna not
essentially different in kind, though widely differing in
distribution, from that of the present day. Throughout this
immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in
obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of
development and death, which we as yet understand only in the
most imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is
often turned into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of
evolution which seemed clearly explicable to the learned master of
science who founded these lectures, to us nowadays seem far less
satisfactorily explained. The scientific men of most note now
differ widely in their estimates of the relative parts played in
evolution by natural selection, by mutation, by the inheritance of
acquired characteristics; and we study their writings with a
growing impression that there are forces at work which our
blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case
the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such
partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that
we have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the
development of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals,
there are some facts which are clearly established, some great and
sweeping changes for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons.
There are other facts as to which we grope in the dark, and vast
changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give no adequate
explanation.

Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of
terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of
species we must remember that such expressions as "a new
species," or as "a species becoming extinct," are each commonly
and indiscriminately used to express totally different and opposite
meanings. Of course the "new" species is not new in the sense that
its ancestors appeared later on the globe's surface than those of any
old species tottering to extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal
now living must necessarily trace its ancestral descent back
through countless generations, through eons of time, to the early
stages of the appearance of life on the globe. All that we mean by a
"new" species is that from some cause, or set of causes, one of
these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops into a form
unlike any that has preceded it; so that, while in one form of life
the ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species
continues to exist, in another form of life there is a deviation from
the ancestral type and a new species appears.

Similarly, "extinction of species" is a term which has two entirely
different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and
leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the
generations go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form
is produced. Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In
the other case it changes into something different. The huge
titanothere, and the small three-toed horse, both existed at what
may roughly be called the same period of the world's history, back
in the middle of the mammalian age. Both are extinct in the sense
that each has completely disappeared and that nothing like either is
to be found in the world to-day. But whereas all the individual
titanotheres finally died out, leaving no descendants, a number of
the three-toed horses did leave descendants, and these descendants,
constantly changing as the ages went by, finally developed into the
highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and zebras of to-day.

The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in
the development of human societies is striking. A further analogy
is supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of
intense and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes
highly specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization,
triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great
development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so
extreme that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we
merely guess, it disappears. The new species which mark a new
era commonly come from the less specialized types, the less
distinctive, dominant, and striking types, of the preceding era.

When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which
divide one period of paleontological history from another, we can
sometimes assign causes, and again we can not even guess at them.
In the case of single species, or of faunas of very restricted
localities, the explanation is often self-evident. A comparatively
slight change in the amount of moisture in the climate, with the
attendant change in vegetation, might readily mean the destruction
of a group of huge herbivores with a bodily size such that they
needed a vast quantity of food, and with teeth so weak or so
peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants could furnish this food.
Again, we now know that the most deadly foes of the higher forms
of life are various lower forms of life, such as insects, or
microscopic creatures conveyed into the blood by insects. There
are districts in South America where many large animals, wild and
domestic, can not live because of the presence either of certain
ticks or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there is a terrible genus of
poison fly, each species acting as the host of microscopic creatures
which are deadly to certain of the higher vertebrates. One of these
species, though harmless to man, is fatal to all domestic animals,
and this although harmless to the closely related wild kinsfolk of
these animals. Another is fatal to man himself, being the cause of
the "sleeping-sickness" which in many large districts has killed out
the entire population. Of course the development or the extension
of the range of any such insects, and any one of many other causes
which we see actually at work around us, would readily account
for the destruction of some given species or even for the
destruction of several species in a limited area of country.

When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is
different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with
the knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctog‘al continent,
for instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the
glacial period made a complete, but of course explicable, change
in the faunal life of the region. At one time the continent held a
rich and varied fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and
a different fauna succeeded the first. The explanation of the
change is obvious.

But in many other cases we can not so much as hazard a guess at
why a given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of
these inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South
America toward the close of the tertiary period. For ages South
America had been an island by itself, cut off from North America
at the very time that the latter was at least occasionally in land
communication with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna
grew up in South America, some of the types resembling nothing
now existing, while others are recognizable as ancestral forms of
the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar
and diversified mammalian fauna, of, on the whole, rather small
species, and without any representatives of the animals with which
man has been most familiar during his career on this earth.

Toward the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of
land between this old South American island and North America,
near what is now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge
across which the teeming animal life of the northern continent had
access to this queer southern continent. There followed an inrush
of huge, or swift, or formidable creatures which had attained their
development in the fierce competition of the arctog‘al realm.
Elephants, camels, horses, tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big
cats, wolves, bears, deer, crowded into South America, warring
each against the other incomers and against the old long-existing
forms. A riot of life followed. Not only was the character of the
South American fauna totally changed by the invasion of these
creatures from the north, which soon swarmed over the continent,
but it was also changed through the development wrought in the
old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they were
exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types died out.
Others developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection,
and thereby saved themselves from the new beasts. In
consequence, South America soon became populated with various
new species of mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses,
deer, cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange shapes, and some of
them of giant size, all of these being descended from the
immigrant types; and side by side with them there grew up large
autochthonus ungulates, giant ground-sloths well-nigh as large as
elephants, and armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally
of the armadillo or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only
held their own, but actually in their turn wandered north over the
isthmus and invaded North America. A fauna as varied as that of
Africa to-day, as abundant in species and individuals, even more
noteworthy, because of its huge size or odd type, and because of
the terrific prowess of the more formidable flesh-eaters, was thus
developed in South America, and flourished for a period which
human history would call very long indeed, but which geologically
was short.

Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this
fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate
befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous
fauna and the descendants of the migrants that had come down
from the north. Ground-sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and
mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size vanished,
and South America, though still retaining its connection with
North America, once again became a land with a mammalian life
small and weak compared to that of North America and the Old
World. Its fauna is now marked, for instance, by the presence of
medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like
creatures, as well as by the presence of small armadillos, sloths,
and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes diminutive
representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both of the giants
among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants among the
new and intrusive kinds. The change was wide-spread and
extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is
wholly inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to
imagine any cause which would account for the extinction of so
many species of huge or moderate size, while smaller
representatives, and here and there medium-sized representatives,
of many of them were left.

Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there
are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history of
human societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, of the
development and change, of the temporary dominance, and death
or transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form races
or nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind that
we use each of the words "birth" and "death," "youth" and "age,"
often very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two
totally different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no
such thing as an "old" or a "young" nation, any more than there is
an "old" or "young" family. Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral
descent must be of exactly the same length for every existing
individual, and for every group of individuals, whether forming a
family or a nation. All that can properly be meant by the terms
"new" and "young" is that in a given line of descent there has
suddenly come a period of rapid change. This change may arise
either from a new development or transformation of the old
elements, or else from a new grouping of these elements with
other and varied elements; so that the words "new" nation or
"young" nation may have a real difference of significance in one
case from what they have in another.

As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the
specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly
changing, generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance,
occurs when a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly
develops a more complex cultivation and civilization. This is what
occurred, for instance, in western Europe during the centuries of
the Teutonic and, later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from
the north. All the modern countries of western Europe are
descended from the states created by these northern invaders.
When first created they would be called "new" or "young" states in
the sense that part or all of the people composing them were
descended from races that hitherto had not been civilized, and that
therefore, for the first time, entered on the career of civilized
communities. In the southern part of western Europe the new
states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants already in
the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the new
kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence
then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders
had come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of
communities with essentially the same civilization as their
southern neighbors; though in those communities, unlike the
southern communities, there was no infusion of new blood, so that
the new civilized nations which gradually developed were
composed entirely of members of the same races which in the
same regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly changing
barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the Slavonized
Finns of eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian
leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine culture
from the south, joined to produce the changes which have
gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the
steppe, formed the mighty Russian Empire of to-day.

Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a
long-established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this
case the nation is usually spoken of as a "young," and is correctly
spoken of as a "new," nation; but the term should always be used
with a clear sense of the difference between what is described in
such case, and what is described by the same term in speaking of a
civilized nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage and
Syracuse were new cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the
Greek or Phoe<! oelig>nician race was in every sense of the word
as old in the new city as in the old city. So, nowadays, Victoria or
Manitoba is a new community compared with England or
Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and culture is as old
in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean for a moment
that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that the old
civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has
again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work
finished many centuries before in the original home of the race; I
merely mean that the ancestral history is the same in each case.
We can rightly use the phrase "a new people," in speaking of
Canadians or Australians, Americans or Africanders. But we use it
in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when
speaking of such communities as those founded by the Northmen
and their descendants during that period of astonishing growth
which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves conquer and
transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use it in
an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when
speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief,
Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the
marshy forests struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to
become builders of cities and to form stable governments. The
kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred were "new," compared to
the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also in every way
different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing in common
with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the C‘sars of
Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history were
totally different. This is not true of those "new" nations which
spring direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United
States, are all "new" nations, compared with the nations of Europe;
but, with whatever changes in detail, their civilization is
nevertheless of the general European type, as shown in Portugal,
Spain, and England. The differences between these "new"
American and these "old" European nations are not as great as
those which separate the "new" nations one from another, and the
"old" nations one from another. There are in each case very real
differences between the new and the old nation; differences both
for good and for evil; but in each case there is the same ancestral
history to reckon with, the same type of civilization, with its
attendant benefits and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer stages
are passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of superficial
differences, are in their essence the same; they are those that
confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront only peoples
struggling from barbarism into civilization.

So, when we speak of the "death" of a tribe, a nation, or a
civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally
different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological
history being complete. Certain tribes of savages the Tasmanians,
for instance, and various little clans of American Indians have
within the last century or two completely died out; all of the
individuals have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood
has disappeared. Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes
disappeared or are now disappearing; but their blood remains,
being absorbed into the veins of the white intruders, or of the black
men introduced by those white intruders; so that in reality they are
merely being transformed into something absolutely different from
what they were. In the United States, in the new State of
Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Delawares, and
other tribes are in process of absorption into the mass of the white
population; when the State was admitted a couple of years ago,
one of the two senators, and three of the five representatives in
Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a few years these
Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as those that
have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by absorption
and transformation into the mass of the American population.

A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that a
civilization has "died out." The nationality and culture of the
wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have
completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences
dating therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and
hidden form as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the
Roman Empire was of no such character. There was complete
change, far-reaching transformation, and at one period a violent
dislocation; but it would not be correct to speak either of the blood
or the culture of Old Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position
to dogmatize as to the permanence or evanescence of the various
strains of blood that go to make up every civilized nationality; but
it is reasonably certain that the blood of the old Roman still flows
through the veins of the modern Italian; and though there has been
much intermixture, from many different foreign sources from
foreign conquerors and from foreign slaves yet it is probable that
the Italian type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the
ancient Latin. As for the culture, the civilization of Rome, this is
even more true. It has suffered a complete transformation, partly
by natural growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements,
such as a Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and
social customs; but the process was not one of extinction, but one
of growth and transformation, both from within and by the
accretion of outside elements. In France and Spain the inheritance
of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture which was forced
on those countries has been tenaciously retained by them,
throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes, as
the basis on which their civilizations have been built. Moreover,
the permanent spreading of Roman influence was not limited to
Europe. It has extended to and over half of that New World which
was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant life
between the birth and the death of pagan Rome. This New World
was discovered by one Italian, and its mainland first reached and
named by another; and in it, over a territory many times the size of
Trajan's empire, the Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers
founded, beside the Saint Lawrence and the Amazon, along the
flanks of the Andes, and in the shadow of the snow-capped
volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Straits of
Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing apace,
which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in their
blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization. When
we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient
Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same
terms to describe totally different phenomena.

The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more
clearly than their predecessors of a couple of generations back,
how artificial most great nationalities are, and how loose is the
terminology usually employed to describe them. There is an
element of unconscious and rather pathetic humor in the simplicity
of half a century ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton
with reverential admiration, as if the words denoted, not merely
something definite, but something ethnologically sacred; the
writers having much the same pride and faith in their own and
their fellow countrymen's purity of descent from these imaginary
Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a few generations earlier
by the various noble families who traced their lineage direct to
Odin, ’neas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course, all students recognize
that there may not be, and often is not, the slightest connection
between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue. In America we
find three races, white, red, and black, and three tongues, English,
French, and Spanish, mingled in such a way that the lines of
cleavage of race continually run at right angles to the lines of
cleavage of speech; there being communities practically of pure
blood of each race found speaking each language. Aryan and
Teutonic are terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; but
whether they have any such ethnical meanings as were formerly
attributed to them is so doubtful, that we can not even be sure
whether the ancestors of most of those we call Teutons originally
spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The term Celtic, again, is perfectly
clear when used linguistically; but when used to describe a race it
means almost nothing until we find out which one of several
totally different terminologies the writer or speaker is adopting. If,
for instance, the term is used to designate the short-headed,
medium-sized type common throughout middle Europe, from east
to west, it denotes something entirely different from what is meant
when the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents of
the Romans and the later Greeks; while, if used to designate any
modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as
the term Anglo-Saxon itself.

Most of the great societies which have developed a high
civilization and have played a dominant part in the world have
been and are artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the
sense of including totally different race types. A great nation rarely
belongs to any one race, though its citizens generally have one
essentially national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these
great artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the
parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go
forward or go back, all together, in response to some stir or
throbbing, very powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our
senses. National unity is far more apt than race unity to be a fact to
reckon with; until indeed we come to race differences as
fundamental as those which divide from one another the
half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when they become
so important that differences of nationality, speech, and creed sink
into littleness.

An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided
according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as
stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance
whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities,
of Europe; while, on the contrary, a linguistic map would show a
general correspondence between speech and nationality. The
northern Frenchman is in blood and physical type more nearly
allied to his German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of
the Mediterranean seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to
the Catalan than to the man who dwells beside the Channel or
along the tributaries of the Rhine. But in essential characteristics,
in the qualities that tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these
kinds of Frenchmen feel keenly that they are one, and are different
from all outsiders, their differences dwindling into insignificance
compared with the extraordinary, artificially produced
resemblances which bring them together and wall them off from
the outside world. The same is true when we compare the German
who dwells where the Alpine springs of the Danube and the Rhine
interlace, with the physically different German of the Baltic lands.
The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and Yorkshireman
in England.

In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and
primitive relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized,
civilized, or semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution
in drawing analogies with what has occurred in the development of
the animal world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how
some of the phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these
complex, artificial groups of human beings resemble what has
happened in myriads of instances in the history of life on this
planet.

Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are knit by a bond
of speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood, show
periods of extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering
decay? In some cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases
we can not as yet even guess what the proper answer should be. If
in any such case the centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal,
the nation will of course fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure
to become a dominant force is patent to every one. The minute that
the spirit which finds its healthy development in local
self-government, and is the antidote to the dangers of an extreme
centralization, develops into mere particularism, into inability to
combine effectively for achievement of a common end, then it is
hopeless to expect great results. Poland and certain republics of
the Western Hemisphere are the standard examples of failure of
this kind; and the United States would have ranked with them, and
her name would have become a byword of derision, if the forces of
union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of soft
luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a national
danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the vision of a seer
to foretell what must happen in any community if the average
woman ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy
children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work
up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely
commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in
graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the
nation has lost what no material prosperity can offset.

But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially
inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when
great slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a
countryside of peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and
sensuality ate like acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while
the mass of the citizens grew to depend not upon their own
exertions, but upon the state, for their pleasures and their very
livelihood. But this does not explain why the forward movement
stopped at different times, so far as different matters were
concerned; at one time as regards literature, at another time as
regards architecture, at another time as regards city-building.
There is nothing mysterious about Rome's dissolution at the time
of the barbarian invasions; apart from the impoverishment and
depopulation of the empire, its fall would be quite sufficiently
explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had lost the
fighting edge an essential even under a despotism, and therefore
far more essential in free, self-governing communities, such as
those of the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is
rather that out of the chaos and corruption of Roman society
during the last days of the oligarchic republic, there should have
sprung an empire able to hold things with reasonable steadiness for
three or four centuries. But why, for instance, should the higher
kinds of literary productiveness have ceased about the beginning
of the second century, whereas the following centuries witnessed a
great outbreak of energy in the shape of city-building in the
provinces, not only in western Europe, but in Africa? We can not
even guess why the springs of one kind of energy dried up, while
there was yet no cessation of another kind.

Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period
covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like
some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the
dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her
superior in territory and population as to make it inevitable that
sooner or later she must fall from the glorious and perilous
eminence to which she had been raised by her own indomitable
soul. Her fall came; it could not have been indefinitely postponed;
but it came far quicker than it needed to come, because of
shortcomings on her part to which both Great Britain and the
United States would be wise to pay heed. Her government was
singularly ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to
permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to rob
the central authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But
the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving
societies, where men hate to think of war as possible, and try to
justify their own reluctance to face it either by high-sounding
moral platitudes, or else by a philosophy of short-sighted
materialism. The Dutch were very wealthy. They grew to believe
that they could hire others to do their fighting for them on land;
and on sea, where they did their own fighting, and fought very
well, they refused in time of peace to make ready fleets so efficient
as either to insure them against the peace being broken or else to
give them the victory when war came. To be opulent and unarmed
is to secure ease in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster
in the future.

It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her
position among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain
why at the same time there should have come at least a partial loss
of position in the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire
burnt itself out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen,
of great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of
the great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the
schools followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council
chamber.

In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it
was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and
Italy teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in
the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a
sense no decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what
has befallen so many countries: no lowering of the general
standard of well-being, no general loss of vitality, no depopulation.
What happened was, first a flowering time, in which the country's
men of action and men of thought gave it a commanding position
among the nations of the day; then this period of command passed,
and the state revolved in an eddy, aside from the sweep of the
mighty current of world life; and yet the people themselves in their
internal relations remained substantially unchanged, and in many
fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves and play again
a leading part.

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course
of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really
Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries
when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and
frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of
enervating self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness
which we regard as most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had
been at work throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost
all patriotism. It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had
ceased to bring forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of
the Italian people cowered in helpless misery among the
horse-hoofs of the barbarians, as the wild northern bands rode in to
take the land for a prey and the cities for a spoil. It was one of the
great cataclysms of history; but in the end it was seen that what
came had been in part change and growth. It was not all mere
destruction. Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of language,
culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but the people of Italy
kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins. In a few
centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy. Then for four or
five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states
which, in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce,
fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and
in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among
themselves or to repel outside invasion, can not unfairly be
compared with classic Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was
ruled by Spaniard or Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the
nineteenth century, there came for the third time a wonderful new
birth.

Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in
certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance
in certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one
time seemed as firmly established as in Italy certainly as in Spain
or Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and
disappearance of a national type can be found than in the case of
the Gr‘co-Roman dominion in Western Asia and North Africa.
All told it extended over nearly a thousand years, from the days of
Alexander till after the time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands
there yet remain the ruins of innumerable cities which tell how
firmly rooted that dominion must once have been. The
overshadowing and far-reaching importance of what occurred is
sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New Testament was
written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North Africa
seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the valley of the Po. The
intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a
period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the
voyage of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have
begun; and then they withered like dry grass before the flame of
the Arab invasion, and their place knew them no more. They
overshadowed the ground; they vanished; and the old types
reappeared in their old homes, with beside them a new type, the
Arab.

Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main
facts. We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the
greatness of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood
remains in Italy, whether to a greater or less extent; and that the
Latin culture has died out in the African realm it once won, while
it has lasted in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to
continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the causes of the
facts, save partially; but the facts themselves we do know. But
there are other cases in which we are at present ignorant even of
the facts; we do not know what the changes really were, still less
the hidden causes and meaning of these changes. Much remains to
be found out before we can speak with any certainty as to whether
some changes mean the actual dying out or the mere
transformation of types. It is, for instance, astonishing how little
permanent change in the physical make-up of the people seems to
have been worked in Europe by the migrations of the races in
historic times. A tall, fair-haired, long-skulled race penetrates to
some southern country and establishes a commonwealth. The
generations pass. There is no violent revolution, no break in
continuity of history, nothing in the written records to indicate an
epoch-making change at any given moment; and yet after a time
we find that the old type has reappeared and that the people of the
locality do not substantially differ in physical form from the
people of other localities that did not suffer such an invasion. Does
this mean that gradually the children of the invaders have
dwindled and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient
blood, has there been a change, part reversion and part
assimilation, to the ancient type in its old surroundings? Do tint of
skin, eyes and hair, shape of skull, and stature change in the new
environment, so as to be like those of the older people who dwelt
in this environment? Do the intrusive races, without change of
blood, tend under the pressure of their new surroundings to change
in type so as to resemble the ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the
strains mingled, has the new strain dwindled and vanished, from
causes as yet obscure? Has the blood of the Lombard practically
disappeared from Italy, and of the Visigoth from Spain, or does it
still flow in large populations where the old physical type has once
more become dominant? Here in England, the long-skulled men of
the long barrows, the short-skulled men of the round barrows have
they blended, or has one or the other type actually died out; or are
they merged in some older race which they seemingly supplanted,
or have they adopted the tongue and civilization of some later race
which seemingly destroyed them? We can not say. We do not
know which of the widely different stocks now speaking Aryan
tongues represents in physical characteristics the ancient Aryan
type, nor where the type originated, nor how or why it imposed its
language on other types, nor how much or how little mixture of
blood accompanied the change of tongue.

The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of those which
can and those which can not be explained, have been peculiarly in
evidence during the four centuries that have gone by since the
discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope.
These have been the four centuries of by far the most intense and
constantly accelerating rapidity of movement and development
that the world has yet seen. The movement has covered all the
fields of human activity. It has witnessed an altogether
unexampled spread of civilized mankind over the world, as well as
an altogether unexampled advance in man's dominion over nature;
and this together with a literary and artistic activity to be matched
in but one previous epoch. This period of extension and
development has been that of one race, the so-called white race,
or, to speak more accurately, the group of peoples living in
Europe, who undoubtedly have a certain kinship of blood, who
profess the Christian religion, and trace back their culture to
Greece and Rome.

The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief
is this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white
race. It is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years
which went before the opening of this era of European supremacy,
the attitude of Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and
Tartar, Arab and Moor, had on the whole been that of successful
aggression against Europe. More than a century went by after the
voyages of Columbus before the mastery in war began to pass
from the Asiatic to the European. During that time Europe
produced no generals or conquerors able to stand comparison with
Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European advance
gathered momentum; until at the present time peoples of European
blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and the
islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia.
Much of this world conquest is merely political, and such a
conquest is always likely in the long run to vanish. But very much
of it represents not a merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the
intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the
conquered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its tongue,
law, culture, and religion, together with a strain of its blood.
During this period substantially all of the world achievements
worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European
descent. The first exception of any consequence is the wonderful
rise of Japan within the last generation a phenomenon unexampled
in history; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese line of
ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours; and yet Japan,
while hitherto keeping most of what was strongest in her ancient
character and traditions, has assimilated with curious
completeness most of the characteristics that have given power
and leadership to the West.

During this period of intense and feverish activity among the
peoples of European stock, first one and then another has taken the
lead. The movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their
flowering-time was as brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous
pages of their annals are illumined by the figures of warriors,
explorers, statesmen, poets, and painters. Then their days of
greatness ceased. Many partial explanations can be given, but
something remains behind, some hidden force for evil, some
hidden source of weakness upon which we can not lay our hands.
Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after centuries of
arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese stock are
entering upon another era of development, and there are other
signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.

About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of the
Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of Europe,
in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav
turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp
leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation of
Europe has at one time or another sought a place in the movement
of expansion; but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon
of mankind has been the growth of the English-speaking peoples
and their spread over the world's waste spaces.

Comparison is often made between the empire of Britain and the
empire of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all
modern civilization, the empire of Rome is of course the more
important, simply because all the nations of Europe and their
offshoots in other continents trace back their culture either to the
earlier Rome by the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus.
The empire of Rome is the most stupendous fact in lay history; no
empire later in time can be compared with it. But this is merely
another way of saying that the nearer the source the more
important becomes any deflection of the stream's current.
Absolutely, comparing the two empires one with the other in point
of actual achievement, and disregarding the immensely increased
effect on other civilizations which inhered in the older empire
because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand years,
there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and
abounding interest and importance of their careers.

In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its
predecessor had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed
large over the horizon of history, there were left for her to contend
with only decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she
conquered Pyrrhus, she strove against the strength of but one of the
many fragments into which Alexander's kingdom had fallen. When
she conquered Carthage, she overthrew a foe against whom for
two centuries the single Greek city of Syracuse had contended on
equal terms; it was not the Sepoy armies of the Carthaginian
plutocracy, but the towering genius of the House of Barca, which
rendered the struggle forever memorable. It was the distance and
the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen, that set bounds
to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was curbed by
the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the tall
barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her
greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the
Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German
threatened her but to die.

On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the
great empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that
have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the
continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping
the empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of
Trajan, had at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of
Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the
kingdoms of Persia and Macedon in the red flush of their
warrior-dawn. The empire of Britain is vaster in space, in
population, in wealth, in wide variety of possession, in a history of
multiplied and manifold achievement of every kind, than even the
glorious empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome, Britain has won
dominion in every clime, has carried her flag by conquest and
settlement to the uttermost ends of the earth, at the very time that
haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding youth or strong
maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness, and to tear
from her what she had won afar. England has peopled continents
with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads of
alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all
comers the right to the world's waste spaces, while at home she has
held her own before nations, each of military power comparable to
Rome's at her zenith.

Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her
own borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country,
my hearers, is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against
foes from without, yet we need never really fear them so long as
we safeguard ourselves against the enemies within our own
households; and these enemies are our own passions and follies.
Free peoples can escape being mastered by others only by being
able to master themselves. We Americans and you people of the
British Isles alike need ever to keep in mind that, among the many
qualities indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and
second only to a high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation,
are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my hosts, and I may not
agree in all our views; some of you would think me a very radical
democrat as, for the matter of that, I am and my theory of
imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as little as it
would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist. But there
are some points on which we must all agree if we think soundly.
The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is the
instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have a
good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool. No
implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that
wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman;
but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the
all-important factor in national greatness is national character.

There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are
ever tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to
an end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that
great law of death which is itself but part of the great law of life?
None can tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are
hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all
around us, both for good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love
of ease, in taste for vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident
and unhealthy. The most ominous sign is the diminution in the
birth-rate, in the rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser
degree shared by most of the civilized nations of central and
western Europe, of America and Australia a diminution so great
that, if it continues for the next century at the rate which has
obtained for the last twenty-five years, all the more highly civilized
peoples will be stationary or else have begun to go backward in
population, while many of them will have already gone very far
backward.

There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there
is much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be
mistaken than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in
1830 Niebuhr hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to
go down with a crash, that we were all about to share the fall of
third- and fourth-century Rome a respectable, but painfully
overworked, comparison. The fears once expressed by the
followers of Malthus as to the future of the world have proved
groundless as regards the civilized portion of the world; it is
strange indeed to look back at Carlyle's prophecies of some
seventy years ago, and then think of the teeming life of
achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and of noble effort
crowned by success, which has been ours for the two generations
since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been
told and all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth
doing had been done. I believe with all my heart that a great future
remains for us; but whether it does or does not, our duty is not
altered. However the battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name
will with utmost vigor do his allotted task, and bear himself as
valiantly in defeat as in victory. Come what will, we belong to
peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being great. In
the ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations that have
expanded and that have played a mighty part in the world, have in
the end grown old and weakened and vanished; but so have the
nations whose only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who
would risk nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end,
the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one
type perishes with it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the
history of all the future of mankind.

A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though
in the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history
of heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly
influence the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what
it has done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same
time to see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to
take up the task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the
earth. But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours
to remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our
fathers were before us. The torch has been handed on from nation
to nation, from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded
time, from the dim years before history dawned down to the
blazing splendor of this teeming century of ours. It dropped from
the hands of the coward and the sluggard, of the man wrapped in
luxury or love of ease, the man whose soul was eaten away by
self-indulgence; it has been kept alight only by those who were
mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they worked at,
provided it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than how
they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the realm of the
body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was of
substance, then high success was really theirs.

In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between
what has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession
of the ages on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring
to the great artificial civilizations which have gradually spread
over the world's surface during the thousands of years that have
elapsed since cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the
Nile and the Euphrates, and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled
with the masts of the ’gean craft. But of course the parallel is true
only in the roughest and most general way. Moreover, even
between the civilizations of to-day and the civilizations of ancient
times there are differences so profound that we must be cautious in
drawing any conclusions for the present based on what has
happened in the past. While freely admitting all of our follies and
weaknesses of to-day, it is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize
the incredible advance that has been made in ethical standards. I
do not believe that there is the slightest necessary connection
between any weakening of virile force and this advance in the
moral standard, this growth of the sense of obligation to one's
neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor wrong. We need
have scant patience with that silly cynicism which insists that
kindliness of character only accompanies weakness of character.
On the contrary, just as in private life many of the men of strongest
character are the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so
I believe that in national life, as the ages go by, we shall find that
the permanent national types will more and more tend to become
those in which, though intellect stands high, character stands
higher; in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity to
resist wrongful aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a
lofty scorn of doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon,
of Hampden, of Washington, and Lincoln. These were as good
men, as disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a state; and
they were also as strong men as ever founded or saved a state.
Surely such examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our
effort to combine justice and strength in the same nation. The
really high civilizations must themselves supply the antidote to the
self-indulgence and love of ease which they tend to produce.

Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to
solve within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from
juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the
self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must
deal with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in
which the problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the
same. It must be a spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness,
of acceptance of responsibility, one for each and each for all, and
at the same time a spirit as remote as the poles from every form of
weakness and sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to
do cruel wrong to the brave man whose life his cowardice
jeopardizes, so in civil affairs it is revolting to every principle of
justice to give to the lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or
dull-witted a reward which is really the robbery of what braver,
wiser, abler men have earned. The only effective way to help any
man is to help him to help himself; and the worst lesson to teach
him is that he can be permanently helped at the expense of some
one else. True liberty shows itself to best advantage in protecting
the rights of others, and especially of minorities. Privilege should
not be tolerated because it is to the advantage of a minority; nor
yet because it is to the advantage of a majority. No doctrinaire
theories of vested rights or freedom of contract can stand in the
way of our cutting out abuses from the body politic. Just as little
can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible and
incidentally of a highly undesirable social revolution which, in
destroying individual rights including property rights and the
family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of
mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the
preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a dreadful
thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to
do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions. But it
is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by
means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to
better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate
relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use,
with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember
that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil
than softness of head.

But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important
of all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern
nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have
expanded, that are now in complicated relations with one another
and with alien races, have special problems and special duties of
our own. You belong to a nation which possesses the greatest
empire upon which the sun has ever shone. I belong to a nation
which is trying, on a scale hitherto unexampled, to work out the
problems of government for, of, and by the people, while at the
same time doing the international duty of a great Power. But there
are certain problems which both of us have to solve, and as to
which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the man
of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and the
American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with
utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than
our own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the
barbarism which our people left behind ages ago. The problems
that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They can not
be solved by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people,
with little patent recipes and those cut-and-dried theories of the
political nursery which have such limited applicability amid the
crash of elemental forces. Neither can they be solved by the raw
brutality of the men who, whether at home or on the rough frontier
of civilization, adopt might as the only standard of right in dealing
with other men, and treat alien races only as subjects for
exploitation.

No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races,
because they differ from one another far more widely than some of
them differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not
be forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for one
race managing or controlling another unless the management and
control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other
race. This is what our peoples have in the main done, and must
continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt,
and the Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race,
everywhere, at home or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from
the great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his
worth as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he
belongs to a given race; he must not be given immunity in
wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, or given other
privileges which would be denied to the vicious and unfit among
ourselves. On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would
entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of our own stock,
he is just as entitled to that respect and reward if he comes of
another stock, even though that other stock produces a much
smaller proportion of men of his type than does our own. This has
nothing to do with social intermingling, with what is called social
equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing to each
man and each woman that elementary justice which will permit
him or her to gain from life the reward which should always
accompany thrift, sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights of
others, and hard and intelligent work to a given end. To more than
such just treatment no man is entitled, and less than such just
treatment no man should receive.

The other type of duty is the international duty, the duty owed by
one nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which
should govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are
just as binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the
other. The application of the moral law must be different in the
two cases, because in one case it has, and in the other it has not,
the sanction of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can
depend for his rights upon the courts, which themselves derive
their force from the police power of the state. The nation can
depend upon nothing of the kind; and therefore, as things are now,
it is the highest duty of the most advanced and freest peoples to
keep themselves in such a state of readiness as to forbid to any
barbarism or despotism the hope of arresting the progress of the
world by striking down the nations that lead in that progress. It
would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the unwise persons who
desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples who, of all
others, should not be left helpless before any possible foe. But we
must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and the peoples
who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and iniquity by
the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate
lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong;
and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous
fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country
should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for
insistence upon one's own rights and of respect for the rights of
others, that marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when
dealing with his fellows. Permit me to support this statement out
of my own experience. For nearly eight years I was the head of a
great nation, and charged especially with the conduct of its foreign
policy; and during those years I took no action with reference to
any other people on the face of the earth that I would not have felt
justified in taking as an individual in dealing with other
individuals.

I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a
right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several
countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of
doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily
for success, even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer
souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. Let
us hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our
children and children's children to endless generations shall arise
to take our places and play a mighty and dominant part in the
world. But whether this be denied or granted by the years we shall
not see, let at least the satisfaction be ours that we have carried
onward the lighted torch in our own day and generation. If we do
this, then, as our eyes close, and we go out into the darkness, and
others' hands grasp the torch, at least we can say that our part has
been borne well and valiantly.

Note 1 
Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910. This was the Romanes Lecture
for 1910, and has been published by the Oxford University Press,
with whose permission it is included in this volume.

CHAPTER III  THE WORLD MOVEMENT 1 

I VERY highly appreciate the chance to address the University of
Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is
difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings
of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a country
with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case
when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with
proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the
abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany.
More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire
of the West became in fact a German empire. Throughout
medi‘val times the Empire and the Papacy were the two central
features in the history of the Occident. With the Ottos and the
Henrys began the slow rise of that Western life which has shaped
modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the whole modern world.
Their task was to organize society and to keep it from crumbling to
pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers; they
battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them;
and at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then
slowly wrested from it its possessions.

After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the
Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were
working for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was
round the Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor,
Karl the Great, the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the
Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the
Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into
Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes,
who had long held tented dominion in middle Europe, were utterly
destroyed. With the break-up of the Karling empire came chaos
once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen
north, and new hordes of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the
early emperors of Germany proper who quelled these barbarians;
in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became Christians,
and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began to take
on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the centuries
have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now well-nigh
barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and in
government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted
hither and thither within German lands; the great house of
Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany
spring into a commanding position in the very forefront among the
nations of mankind.

To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to
this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a
young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from,
each of the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has
inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and
developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new
and strange. The German strain in our blood is large, for almost
from the beginning there has been a large German element among
the successive waves of newcomers whose children's children have
been and are being fused into the American nation; and I myself
trace my origin to that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised
Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we have taken from you,
not only much of the blood that runs through our veins, but much
of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations American
scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the wise
foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the intimate
and friendly connection between the two countries is now in every
way closer than it has ever been before.

Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement
of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The
life of this university covers the period during which that
movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent,
while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face
of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It
is therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.

When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on
this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first
slight. Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by
infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of
savagery; for the general law is that life which is advanced and
complex, whatever its nature, changes more quickly than simpler
and less advanced forms. The life of savages changes and
advances with extreme slowness, and groups of savages influence
one another but little. The first rudimentary beginnings of that
complex life of communities which we call civilization marked a
period when man had already long been by far the most important
creature on the planet. The history of the living world had become,
in fact, the history of man, and therefore something totally
different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before.
There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the
development of life generally and what has gone on in the
development of human society. [These I have discussed in the
preceding chapter.] But the differences are profound, and go to the
root of things.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization for,
properly speaking, there was no one movement were very slow,
were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each
developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that
covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years
that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and
the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local
were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger
savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely
remote past, who know none of them except fire and the discovery
and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization,
but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.

Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high
position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to
violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in
prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in
given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that
was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if
any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have
developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly how
much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many