Volume VII. Number 9.

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We as historians and history teachers have been toiling under the ancient regime of chronological history; time has been the tyrant who under one name or another has guided our every action. Time, in reality, to most of us, is but a term for the experience of duration or succession; our sense of time comes from our experience of change; time itself is an abstraction. Early chroniclers had a more real conception; theirs was a religious regard for, to them, a very real thing. Their modern successors should be the astrologers, or Henri Bergson, with his belief in the reality of the stream of time (Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience) rather than the historian. We might teach from The World Almanac," "Almanach Hachette," "The Annual Register,' Annuaire de la Revue des deux Mondes," The Britannica Year Book," "The New International Year Book," Statesman's Year Book," Jahrbücher der deutschen Geschichte," or Putnam's Tabular Views of Universal History," but we don't. We are no longer a priestly caste preserving the religious welfare of the State as were the original chroniclers. We have no particular reverence for exact dates. Modern successors have lost the charm of the Annals, Chronicles, or Histories of Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus, Eusebius, Orosius, Jerome, Froissart, Einhard, Villari, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or even Poor Richard's Almanac. We have lost a religious reverence for the phases of the moon; what real chronology we have, we have turned over to the trained specialist, the chronologist, a peculiar sort of antiquarian who spends time trying to reconcile the various systems of the ancient originals; Hindoo, Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Christian, Mohammedan, etc. What a mess they made of it! Compare the Egyptian chronology as given by James Breasted, Edward Meyer, Flinders Petrie, and Maspero; no two dates agree, except occasionally Breasted with Meyer-such is the American reverence for German scholarship. But what does that matter to us? We can teach or learn Egyptian history fully as well from the exaggerated dates of the Anglo-French alliance of Maspero-Petrie as from the GermanAmerican entente of Breasted-Meyer.

No one, now-a-days, grows enthusiastic over the relative merits of Catholic and Protestant claims to

1 Paper read before the Connecticut Association of Classical and High School Teachers, Hartford, February 12, 1916.

chronological superiority as exhibited in "Annales Ecclesiastici " of the Catholic Cardinal Baronius which oppose the Protestant " Magdeburg Centuries." We no longer believe in any mystic potent quality of the date; with us sequence and philosophy has usurped the place of chronology.

Too often, I fear, chronology has degenerated into mere sequence, and history has become an endless succession of wars, treaties, or doings of a mere handful of individual kings, presidents, or statesmen. Let me cite, as evidence, headings taken from a chapter of one of our latest high school texts in American History: Party nominations for the election of 1880; Republican success and the "Solid South; Factional quarrels within Republican ranks; the Assassination of Garfield; President Arthur; The struggle for civil service reform ends successfully; The nomination of Blaine in 1884; The "Mugwump' movement; The election of a Democratic President; President Cleveland's record; Railroad consolidation leads to the Interstate Commerce Act, 1887; The tariff as a political issue; The tariff commission of 1883; Cleveland's tariff message; The election of 1888; The reduction of the surplus; The McKinley tariff bill, 1890; Reciprocity treaties; Blaine's foreign policy; The Pan-American Congress; Industrial tendencies of this period; Reasons for concentration of industry; Methods of combination; The earliest trust; Antitrust legislation; Indian wars in the West; Attempts to civilize the Indian; A new land policy. Surely such a selection of topics follows the easy line of sequence. You must admit that it is monotonous-sequential and nothing more.

Ranke's "Zeitgeist" form of history was a splendid effort to relieve the monotony of sequence by evaluating the Spirit of the Ages. No writer has surpassed him in the clearness and brevity with which he could sum up the characteristics of an epoch in the history of the world. With what a relief from the pure sequence history of a Gardiner, for example, we welcomed this "Epochal Significance" sort of history. We at last were allowed to skip some dates, some events. Yet many of the results obtained were questionable.

How was Ranke to evaluate the ages? He asserted the very modest German objective of "simply finding out how the thing actually occurred" (wie es eigentlich gewesen). His history was to be written only from "the narratives of eye witnesses and the most

genuine immediate documents" preserved in the arpreserved in the archives. His was to be an account without hates or passions; as his disciple Von Sybel remarked sine ira et sine studio.

Ranke was not the first to have aspired to such omniscience. Thucydides would set down everything as it occurred, without extenuation or malice; similarly, Polybius whom Cicero condemned as non exornator rerum sed tantum narrator. With Cicero we too know that real live history has never been written sine ira et sine studio. All intellects believe and are finite and we have to allow in history for a Froude's disease, a Mommsen's disease, and a Beard's disease. Ever poor Ranke turns out to be pro-Ger

man.

Try to be impartial Ranke did. He confined himself to archives, and endeavored with the aid of such sciences as epigraphy, paleography, philology, diplomatics, sphragistics, numismatics, etc. to find out the thing as it actually happened. But how did he succeed? He is the " Dryasdust" historian referred to in Carlyle's "Frederick the Great." Heine exclaims, Poor Ranke! a pretty talent to paint little historical figures and to paste them together, a good soul, as good natured as mutton." Ranke never really got down to history; he dealt, by preference, with rulers and leading figures and stuck strictly to political history. He was not interested in the causes of things, how they came about (wie es eigentlich geworden). He was concerned merely with a sequence of a slightly different order, a sequence of persons and ages rather than one of days, or years. He skipped slightingly from age to age, from period to period, from ruler to

ruler.

Ranke's work started a movement for a more careful evaluation and classification of sources and a comparison of ages and periods. Professor Walsh, of Fordham, has concluded that the thirteenth is the greatest of the centuries; Mommsen chooses the Age of the Antonines; Breasted, the glorious thirtieth century B. C.; and not a few have preferred the eighteenth, nineteenth, or even twentieth centuries. But how is it possible to compare the thirtieth century B. C. with the thirteenth centry A. D.? Surely they cannot be evaluated in terms of each other. Another natural offspring of Ranke's Zeitgeist is the HerbartZiller-Rein Culture Epoch theory of history which is now so thoroughly dead that we no longer discuss it.

All age classifications are purely matters of convenience, arbitrary and but temporary; such classifications are bound to flash and disappear. The once pre-historic age has become more historic than many a later period2. Professor Burr of Cornell has reviewed the research on the subject of the period of the Middle Ages and concludes that (A. H. R. XVIII, 4 pp. 712-726) as a historical period this is a relatively recent borrowing from the philologist who used the term to describe a period of non-classical Latin. Professor Burr says that such a period, even if

2 Cf. Henry Fairfield Osborn, "Men of the Old Stone Age," 1915; and Sollar, "Ancient Hunters."

justified, can be so only for Christendom-only, perhaps, for Latin Christendom-and, even, for Latin Christendom, it is but a single phase (philologic) of the infinitely complex life of man. . . . (We might note here that the philologist has invented many myths for the historian; including the Aryan Race) in history our periods, if they are to be intelligible must overlap. All hail! to those who save our thought from petrifaction by coining us fresh nomenclature from ever varying points of view." It is indeed refreshing to find Russell, "Soul of England," 1915, admitting that "Modern history begins with the French Revolution."

So, too have periods changed in the past. Hesiod finds five: (1) gold, (2) silver, (3) bronze, (4) heroic and (5) iron. Lucretius makes three: (1) stone, (2) bronze and (3) iron. Varro gives three: (1) to the deluge, (2) a mythical age to the first olympiad and (3) finally, the historic age. Auguste Comte would have three: (1) the supernatural, (2) the metaphysical and (3) the positive (scientific).

What must we think of authors who like Symonds and Christopher Hale lay out an age as definitely as they do the Renaissance as a period from 1453 to 1527 or from 1470 to 1530 respectively?

It is well to examine carefully so as not to be led astray by such alluring phrases as the Augustan Age, Age of Pericles, Age of Elizabeth, Victorian Age, Dark Ages, Age of Steam, or Age of the Crusades. Why not take them as skeptically as we take G. B. Shaw's "Age of George Bernard Shaw."

How long have we possessed an Age of Pericles? Thucydides did not know of such. Research will not carry it very far back in history. Have you ever stopped to think how much harm that phrase is doing in our schools, how it perverts a correct perspective of that period? It concentrates attention on Athens, by no means the only and possibly not the greatest of the city-states of Greece. It does honor to the destroyer rather than a creator of Athenian greatness. It pictures a citified Greece for a country of bucolic farmers. It crowds out of sight the really great history of tolerant Persia, where feudalism and home rule for the satrapies was then being worked out. It glorifies militarism at the expense of peace. It obscures the contemporary works of Ezra and Nehemiah and the re-organization of Judaism under the tolerance of the Persians. So with all age classifications. If we use this method as a devise, at least let us know what we are doing and act with extreme caution.

Philosophic interpretations of history are but collosal exaggerations of the sequential form. Evolution deifies sequence; it is merely another name for sequence. Furthermore, inasmuch as whatever survives is necessarily fitter than what perishes, sequence becomes the greatest of philosophic tyrants. At last some are daring enough to question the philosophy of "Renaissance," in eleventh edition of En

3 Article on cyclopædia Britannica." 4"Life and Letters in the Italian Renaissance," 1915.

the survival of the fittest. Perhaps mutual aid and co-operation are as potent. It should be our business as historians to guard against all philosophies of his tory, or at least against any one particular hobby.

One of the worst of these is the economic interpretation of history. The philosophy of this was set forth by Karl Marx and Freidrick Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1847). Theirs was the theory rather than a historical work. Buckle, "History of Civilization in England," (1857), gave us our first really materialistic history. He worked out the influences of the material world upon the foundations of English society. His was the most ambitious attempt to appraise human doings yet undertaken. The Aryan Hindoo was intellectual because he ate rice. Der Mensch ist, was er isst; nurture not nature. It is absurd," Buckle asserted, "it would be a mockery of all sound reasoning to ascribe to legislation any share in the progress of civilization; or to expect any benefit from any future legislators except that sort of benefit which consists in undoing the work of their predecessors." For Buckle, Adam Smith by writing his Wealth of Nations made a greater contribution to the happiness of mankind (happiness from laissez-faire!) than has been effected by the united abilities of all the statesmen and legislators of whom history has preserved an authentic record. "For all the higher purposes of human thought, history is still miserably deficient, and presents that confused and anarchical appearance natural to a subject of which the laws are unknown and even the foundations unsettled." Buckle "hoped to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquirers for the different branches of natural science. In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained, and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability, and, above all, patient untiring thought, have studied natural events with the view of discovering their regularity; and if human events were subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results." Historians were from "natural incapacity" or "indolence of thought" prevented from giving more than an annalistic record of events.

How this want has been remedied since Buckle's day! Renan has found that the desert is monotheistic; Simkhovitch, that society is based on hay; Jones reinstates the mosquito in Greek and Roman history; Lamprecht (Kulturgeschichte) and Shotwell (A. H. R., vol. xviii, No. 4) claim that history follows certain socio-psychological laws, which the psychologist has yet to discover (or invent?). Turner proves that the frontier has determined American history so far. Gilbert Slater knows that English history is determined by the Land Question. Professor Giddings has taken the old wives' house proverb, 'Birds of a feather flock together," and made it into a universal explanation of society under a more euphonious title, "Consciousness of Kind."

It may be easy to follow the economic historian

when he tells us that past historians have ignored the great part played by economic forces, and that descriptions and explanations have been correspondingly superficial. When one reflects that the great problems of the present day are those attending economic reorganization, one might even take the doctrine as a half-hearted confession that historians are really engaged in constructing the past in terms of the problems and interests of an impending future. But no, our strictly economic interpreter (out-Marxing Marx) will have it that economic forces present an inevitable evolution, of which State and Church, art and literature, science and philosophy, are byproducts. It is useless to suggest that, while modern industry has given an immense stimulus to scientific inquiry, yet nevertheless the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century comes after the scientific revolution of the seventeenth. The dogma forbids any connection. Marx's materialistic interpretation of history is to march progressively to a cataclysm of the conflict of classes-another Hegelian philosophy of history of the progressive-sequential sort. One of the problems of the historian of to-day is to break down the internationalism (universality) which is so large a part of the teachings of Marx.

Equally misleading and probably more disastrous in its consequences is the pseudo-scientific race interpretation of history which has grown up within the last century. Following the philosophers Fichte and Hegel who gave a super-religious and scientific sanction to a thing of which they themselves were wholly ignorant, anthropologists and ethnologists have been trying to find some evidences on which to hang a race classification. The lack of such a scientific basis has not given pause to historians. They, indeed, have gone piling up universal divine mission for their respective races until the results would be ridiculous were they not so tragic. Mommsen, Bernhardi, and Chamberlain find in history a divine mission, universal in its scope, for the imposition of Teutonism. Chamberlain says: "Teutonic blood alone created a new civilization." 'The less Teutonic a land is, the more uncivilized it is." Teutons are characterized by a power of expansion possessed by no race before them." From the earliest times down to the present day we see the Teutons, to make room for themselves, slaughtering whole tribes and races, or slowly killing them by systematic demoralization one must ad

mit that in the very places where they were most cruel as for instance, the Anglo-Saxons in England, the German Order in Prussia, the French and English in North America-they laid by this very means the surest foundation of what is highest and most moral." Such arguments created a Pan-Geran movement. The goal of historical evolution is to be Germanic Institution!

Other peoples have followed the lead of Fichte and Hegel. There is a Pan-Anglism movement. Professor Cramb in his "Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain says: If I were asked how one could describe in a sentence the general aim of British imperialism I should answer to give all men