American Revolution. Look for its origin among the people. But many agitations go hither and thither until a leader arises, changes the character of the movement and carries it off another way. Such was the French Revolution. Its beginning gave no hint of its end; it gave no hint of any possible end, indeed. But a Corsican general, of ability unparalleled among military men and an ambition overflowing all bounds, arrested the mob in the streets of Paris and taught it to obey. From the moment that the young Bonaparte had cowed the mob the Revolution was not. Bonaparte dallied with its forms for a while: he would not check it too soon, but he steadily turned it in directions for his own glory. Its original ends were all lost sight of, and that most remarkable movement of modern times, that most aimless and senseless movement, shaking and overturning the thrones of Europe, went where it would without any regulating principle but the will-the capricious will-of a single man. Strangely enough, I may remark in passing, that agitation sowed broadcast over Europe certain actions that have proved and are yet proving fatal to despotism.

History must treat military affairs. War is essentially exciting. Bodies of men are seen in violent movement. Life and death hang upon a hair-trigger, they are in the quick decision and the prompt action. The world looks

on and applauds. It is a cock-fight. It is a bull-fight. It is the struggle of the gladiator. It is all of these raised to the hundredth power. But the scene has been so often repeated; the subject has become trite. Man is such a savage that until the lifetime of the present generation he has insisted on settling everything by the gage of battle. He has strewn the world with a thousand battle-fields. He has strewn these battle-fields with thousands of horses and men, with the hopes and fears of men and women and the fate of little children. What a brute is man! What a hero is man! But the brute age and the age of heroism in the contest with the brute must pass. We cannot always cover our pages with gore.. It is the object of history to cultivate this out of man, to teach him the wisdom of diplomacy, the wisdom of avoidance, in short, the fine wisdom of arbitration, that last fruit of human experience. But how can we treat war so as not to become on the

one hand sensational or on the other hand trite? Cannot some philosophy be got out of it? All human progress is interesting, even that of the art of destruction. In all the past the distribution of the arts of living has depended largely upon war. Sometimes there came in a lucky piece of bigotry, like the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, to scatter widely the arts. Oftener war, with its attendant displacements of population, has served this end.

day emigration and the diffusion of intelligence and a hundred other agencies do the work better, except among barbarians, where every war with a civilized nation brings the good and the evil of civilization to the conquered. Education and greater facilities for intemperance, for example.

The buyer of rare books, whether for historic purposes or other, once in a long time finds a treasure. Such was my lot a few years ago. From the Earl of Westmoreland's library I purchased among other books a little manuscript. It was a complete treatment of the private soldier's duty, written in what is called the secretary's hand. It is not legible except to those trained to read it, withal very beautiful. It was written by some one for Charles I when he was Prince of Wales to make him a competent officer. The date is fixed by an allusion to Charles' romantic trip to Spain. What this little book tells I cannot find anywhere else. Its information was drawn from the Dutch, who were the teachers of the English in so many ways. It is very minute and it almost always quotes Prince Maurice. An army was set forth in that day by solid squares of spearmen surrounded by a few scattering musketeers. The latter were obliged to set on the ground a little forked rest to sustain the weight of the musket-to fire they stooped down and took aim. The musketeers were, according to my manuscript, the poorest soldiers, the main dependence was upon the spearmen. Gunpowder was used thus awkwardly. But, says my writer, Prince Maurice told me that if he had another army to set forth he would reverse the order and put the best soldiers to the musket. It is precisely the point at which gunpowder became the main dependence. The ordinary spear was eighteen feet long, or three times. the height of the man, and from one inch to an inch and a

half in thickness. The iron jaws of the head were two feet and a half in length.

With such spears the Massachusetts militia was trained for more than forty years, or until the outbreak of Philip's war. I do not know how long they may have been used in Virginia. Poking Indians armed with muskets out of a swamp with a spear might do for imaginary warfare-for militia warfare-but when it came to real fighting it was very ugly business. The desperate character of the conflicts with Philip and the necessity for the exclusive use of gunpowder became apparent, and the edict went forth that the militia, who were trained to the use of the spear, should take up the musket. With this edict the spear disappeared in this country forever. It went out in England about the same time. Thus do we learn the progress of the human mind in arts of destruction.

In this little book one may learn something of the action of the "forlorn hope." Etymologists have thought that they have tracked this term to the Dutch "verloonen. hoop"-lost troop. My little manuscript gives no direct evidence of this, and yet it confirms the theory. For everywhere in it the forlorn hope is called the "perdu "the lost.

A great deal has been said of late about the use of history in secondary education. A hundred times more history, and what passes for history, is learned in the secondary schools than anywhere else. The celebrated report of the Committee of Ten, a few years ago, was particularly judicious. The errors of the old school-books are repeated from one to another, but they are not usually capital. The great mistake is the misapprehension of the purpose of history. The object of teaching history is narrowly said to be to make good citizens-intelligent voters. In this calculation the girls are left out. The main object of teaching history is to make good men and women, cultivated and broad men and women. A great cry is made by the school-book agents on the importance of having the Constitution in the back of the text-book. Few children of fourteen can understand this legal document. I wonder how many of their elders have ever read the Constitution through attentively. The State of Tennessee will not allow the use of any history that does not

include the Constitution. Triumphant politics! The Constitution is there. A schoolboy in Brooklyn was asked: "What is the Constitution of the United States?" He replied: "It is that part in small print in the back of the book that nobody reads."

Some years ago, having an invalid to amuse, I picked up at random a great folio, one of twenty-six that profess to give the history of the world. The volume was a history of Portugal. It was written in an animated style and served my purpose very well. There were weddings, battles, embassies, peace and war, all springing out of the ground with marvelous spontaneity. It reminded me of a fairy story of the olden time in which everything took place without any adequate cause. I read it day after day and forgot it almost as fast as I read it. There was not a word about the people, their manners or customs. Even the manners and customs of the court of Portugal were entirely ignored. It was history hung in the air. It was, indeed, history written after the manner of the early Eighteenth century.

According to John Stuart Mill, we owe it to Sir Walter Scott that change in history-writing took place. Scott first related that there were Saxons and Normans living alongside of one another in England-neighbors but most unneighborly-for generations after the Conquest. Why did not the historians tell us so much? Certain French historians-Augustin Thierry and his group-first took the hint from Scott, and in the "Conquest of England" and the "Third Estate" of Thierry and in other writings of the time told the history of the people. Michelet, who labored almost to our time, was one of these. They wrote and men read with delight. The Germans took it up in their heavy way, generally writing one theil on politics and one theil on cultur-geschichte. Perhaps of all the peoples those who speak English have been the slowest to introduce the New History.

A few years after the French, and with a French impulse no doubt, Macaulay began to write. His style was brilliant, balanced, antithetical. Shall we say it was too antithetical? Let us remember that he wrote in the first half of the Nineteenth century. Macaulay's famous third chapter came to interrupt the course of the history. It

had all been brilliant, but if it needed anything to make its fortune Chapter III did it. It begins with taxes and revenues; the customs and revenue lists of the princes are much elaborated and are not very interesting. But by degrees he draws near to manners and he draws near to London. The picture of old London, turned over and over in his mind in those long walks Macaulay is said to have made through every street of the metropolis, is a wonderful piece of history. It is worth the whole history beside. And nobody ever dreamed before that such a subject was in the province of history. I have lately read it over and it excites my wonder again. It is so particular, so minute, so extraordinary. Occasionally he stops to remark on the shortcomings of other histories: "Readers who take an interest in the progress of civiliza、 tion and of the useful arts will be grateful to the humble topographer who has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and political intrigues for the purpose of letting us know how the parlors and bed-chambers of our ancestors looked." It would be better if he had not done this. But it shows how conscious he was that he was attempting the new. It is the fashion to discredit Macaulay's history -every history goes through a period when its disadvantages of time have come to be appreciated, when it is antiquated without being ancient. But for the faithful use of authority, for the brilliant putting in of particulars, Macaulay remains what a German critic recently called him, the greatest historical writer of the Nineteenth century. Time will come when we shall date from Macaulay: English history will never be written just as it was before. He was partisan. It is an unforgivable offense in our time. Macaulay's Puritans, "lank-haired" men who discussed election and reprobation through "their noses," are mere creatures of prejudice and burlesque figures, not, to our generation, funny. But it can be forgiven to one who says so many good things.

Green is not to be omitted. He is not an authority on facts. No man can treat history for a long period, as Green did, without depending on the authority of others. Green put himself into his history. The narrow critic