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How can the history of the race and the complex relationships of individuals in human society be presented to adolescent boys and girls in such a manner as to foster certain desirable social attitudes? This subject requires wise selection and vivid presentation if it is not to become so much dead and useless educational material. The traditional way of teaching history, civics, economics, and geography leads one to wonder how the teacher two thousand years hence will manage to get it all in, so dominated has our instruction been by our zeal for a complete narrative and encyclopædic information. It is the rare teacher who can give his pupils a feeling for the sweep of great historical movements, at the same time ensuring their mastery of such facts as are essential to sound judgments and vivid appreciations.

The essays which follow do not deal with the problem of organizing a programme of studies, but with the values of particular subjects in school and college. They are stimulating especially for their emphasis on the need of imagination and sympathy in realizing subject-values.

rect a sequence as the telegraph poles which carry the wires over the eight hundred and fifty miles of the Desert of Gobi. The paramount interest in this case is not the number of poles, but the purport of the telegrams flashed along the wires.

That may symbolize the difference between the historian of Information and the historian of Interpretation. Not for a moment, of course, does anyone deny the usefulness of the former. But we shall not be able to penetrate far into man's historic past by the method of counting telegraph poles or of measuring the distance between them. The message borne by the telegram, the meaning of the sequent or scattered events in any historic movement, be it of long duration or merely a fleeting episode - that alone can have significance for us.

Viewed thus, history is a resurrection. The dead actors in remote dramas come to life; the plot, the meaning, emerge, as when an electric current is turned on and lights up the pieces of fireworks set in many patterns. In one sense history resembles an autopsy, for it usually deals with cadavers; but whereas the physician makes his postmortem to see what the patient died of, the historian examines, or should examine, to discover how his subjects lived. Life, evermore life, is the imperial theme for those who live; life, in which death is the inevitable incident, often tragic, sometimes pathetic, but never so significant as life. The maladies of nations and of institutions, and even the diseases of which they died, form much of the material of history; but you cannot isolate them from the large living organism in which they appeared. Gibbon followed through thirteen hundred years the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; and yet each symptom of imperial decay which he described coincided with signs of the growth of new forces, new states, new ideals; so that you may read his monumental and matchless work either

fifths, of the history written up to the present time has been dead.

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Still, may there not possibly be need, opening, for a minimum of live history? May we not, by accepting too narrow a definition, shut out one branch of history that not only has a right to exist but does exist, and may bear under favorable conditions the finest fruit on the tree? The penalty of exclusiveness is deprivation. We ought to recognize that the writing of history embraces work of many kinds, some higher, some lower, all honorable, all necessary. But this recognition must not blind us to the fact that there is a distinction between the lower and the higher. The architect who designs a cathedral is held, deservedly, in far different esteem from the masons who lay the physical foundations, or the hod-men who carry the mortar to bind stone on stone.

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Speaking broadly, historical workers may be divided into two great classes first, the men whose interest lies chiefly in facts; and next, the men who, having ascertained the facts, cannot rest until they have attempted to interpret them. These two aims — information and interpretation should not be regarded as mutually hostile, but as mutually complementary.

The worship of Fact, which must not be confounded with Truth, does not lead us far. To know that Columbus discovered America on October 12, 1492, or that the Declaration of Independence was made on July 4, 1776, or that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, is interesting; but unless these statements are reënforced by much matter of a different kind, they are hardly more important for us than it would be to know the number of leaves on a tree. And this is true though the facts be indefinitely multiplied. I have read, for instance, an account of the American Revolution in which the uncontroverted facts followed each other in as impeccably cor

rect a sequence as the telegraph poles which carry the wires over the eight hundred and fifty miles of the Desert of Gobi. The paramount interest in this case is not the number of poles, but the purport of the telegrams flashed along the wires.

That may symbolize the difference between the historian of Information and the historian of Interpretation. Not for a moment, of course, does anyone deny the usefulness of the former. But we shall not be able to penetrate far into man's historic past by the method of counting telegraph poles or of measuring the distance between them. The message borne by the telegram, the meaning of the sequent or scattered events in any historic movement, be it of long duration or merely a fleeting episode — that alone can have significance for us.

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Viewed thus, history is a resurrection. The dead actors in remote dramas come to life; the plot, the meaning, emerge, as when an electric current is turned on and lights up the pieces of fireworks set in many patterns. In one sense history resembles an autopsy, for it usually deals with cadavers; but whereas the physician makes his postmortem to see what the patient died of, the historian examines, or should examine, to discover how his subjects. lived. Life, evermore life, is the imperial theme for those who live; life, in which death is the inevitable incident, often tragic, sometimes pathetic, but never so significant as life. The maladies of nations and of institutions, and even the diseases of which they died, form much of the material of history; but you cannot isolate them from the large living organism in which they appeared. Gibbon followed through thirteen hundred years the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; and yet each symptom of imperial decay which he described coincided with signs of the growth of new forces, new states, new ideals; so that you may read his monumental and matchless work either

as a funeral oration over the grandeur that was Rome, or as a chronicle of the springing into life of the world of Christendom which replaced Rome.

Without a sense for transformation we shall not come far, either as students or as critics of history. Gibbon possessed that sense in a superlative degree, although he emphasized the negative transformation of dissolution, instead of its positive counterpart, which traces all the stages from birth to prime. There will be no more Gibbons, because the accumulation of material would crush any daring persons who should attempt to survey history by the millennium, as he did; but no one deserves to be called an historian who lacks this sense.

In the world of nature outside us, vast processes are continuously going on an endless dance of atoms; a passing out of one thing into another, and from that to a third; a hide-and-seek of phenomena; night chasing day; the fruit replacing the flower; the stalk, yellow with fulleared corn one week, stubble the next; fruition only another name for beginning, for a new seed-time; and so on forever with this cosmic transformation, in which the sun also and the stars take their turn, on a scale beyond our human comprehension. And in this protean masquerade forces do not act singly, but several may work through the same body simultaneously, each toward a different end.

Until you perceive that mankind, like inanimate matter, is the medium through which a similar array of intellectual and moral forces shuttles perpetually, you will get nothing from history except the foam and bubbles that float on its surface. It is because these forces, which are often mutually repellent or seem to neutralize each other, pursuing their way at different rates of speed and apparently capable of unnumbered transformations, never stop, that life, manifold and complex life, is the substance of human history: and the representation which the historian makes of any

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