Studies in General History

sculpture still remaining, and thus discover what had been the state of material civilization at this or that time, and what progress had been made as centuries passed. These old structures would tell him what the English knew of building and engineering, of working in stone and wood and metal, how much wealth they had and how they spent it; these old bits of architecture, painting, and sculpture would tell him what they admired and loved as beautiful.

Not even this would finish his work; it would be his business to read the English poetry and the English stories, the sermons of famous preachers and the speeches of great orators, for "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." In this way he would best learn the English character and temper; he would know what they liked and disliked, how they thought and felt about all that went on around them.

Meanwhile, throughout his studies of chronicles, of laws, of buildings and writings, he would note what men were oftenest mentioned and most highly honored, and thus discover the ideal of the English folk, that is, what sort of men they tried to be themselves and wanted their children to become.

After all these inquiries and labors, our historian would at last be ready to sit down peacefully and write a history of England; that is, he would embody in a continuous narrative all that he knew of the growth, development, and character of the English people; if his judgment were perfect, if he were a man without prejudice and with a perfect sense of the relative value of facts, if he knew how to tell what he knew so that all men could read and understand, and if, at last, he lived to complete his work, no one would care to write a second serious history of England. Such a work would be unnecessary; it would be easier far for a man to read this history, even if it

were rather dry, than to go searching through yellow, dusty, and badly written manuscripts, through the heavy statute-books, and through volumes of half-forgotten literature, to say nothing of traveling over England, exploring all the old remains and monuments. But since men's judgments widely vary, and since the observation of any single mind is imperfect, the work must be done again and again, and that, too, from the original sources, by different men with all their different points of view and different bents of genius. By reading and comparing these various histories, which would still be easier far than to make one for one's self, we should get a just idea of the history of England.

We Americans are situated something like the man who has a history to write from original sources. We are called upon every day to judge of laws, of men, of events, of poems and stories, to decide between them, to see what they mean and where they are leading us; and since we are citizens of a republic, we must not only see what they mean and where they are leading us, but decide whether these laws shall become the laws of the land, whether these poems and stories shall become popular among us and so come to mark our character, whether we shall make this man or that great and powerful among us. In short, we Americans are all making history - an American history, of a sort that no man has ever made before us, and which lies entirely in our own hands to shape according to our best judgment of all that goes on about us from year to year.

Now this book is not a history, but a collection of historical materials; it contains just the sort of things that historians must deal with when they want to describe or judge any period of history, and just the kind of things, moreover, which we Americans must constantly attend to and think about. In

Greek history, it gives bare chronicles of deeds, pictures of buildings and statues, extracts from speeches, laws, poems; from these materials you must form your own judgment of the Greeks, discover their style of thinking, acting, living, feeling; you must, in short, imagine that you yourself are to write a Greek history, or that you are a Greek citizen, called upon to judge of the life about you. To help you in this, I have inserted in the midst of the material such questions and problems as the historian or citizen must always be asking himself, or rather must always be putting to the laws, events, poetry, and ruins which he studies, whether they belong to times and peoples far away or near at hand. In this way, you can learn how to judge and interpret what you see before you in your own country, and help to make of America that which she may become, the strongest, noblest, finest nation in all the world.

Hoping that you will take kindly to this new way of studying history, I am

Very cordially and sincerely your friend,

MARY D. SHELDON.