EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

IN beginning his illuminating treatment of the Holy Roman Empire, Lord Bryce wrote: "In history there is nothing isolated, and just as to explain a modern act of Parliament, or a modern conveyance of lands, we must go back to the feudal customs of the thirteenth century, so among the institutions of the Middle Ages there is scarcely one which can be understood until it is traced up either to classical or to primitive Teutonic antiquity."

This is the first principle for the teacher of history to enforce, as it is the first lesson for the student of history to learn. History offers a third dimension to the superficial area of knowledge that each individual acquires through his own experience. When one boasts that he is not bound by any trammels of the past, he proclaims his own folly, and would, if he could, reduce himself to the intellectual level of the lower animals. He can only mean by such a phrase that he proposes to set out to discover and to explain the world of nature and of man as if nothing had been done before, and as if he were certainly competent for his mighty and

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self-imposed task. The wise man, on the contrary, will search the records of the past for their lessons, in order that he may be spared from trying to do again what has been once proved useless, wasteful, or wrong. He will watch the rise and fall of peoples; the struggle of human ambition, greed and thirst for power; the loves and hates of men and women as these have affected the march of events; the migration of peoples; the birth, development, and application of ideas; the records of human achievement in letters, in the arts, and in science; the speculations and the beliefs of men as to what lies beyond the horizon of sense, with a view to seeking a firm foundation for the fabric of his own knowledge and of his own belief.

One of the wisest and most successful teachers of history that ever lived in America, Professor Francis Lieber of Columbia College, used a method peculiarly his own, and achieved exceptional results by so doing. In his college classes he assigned as the task for each exercise a definite number of pages in a popular manual of the history of Europe that was translated from the German. This manual was nothing more than a compact and desiccated collection of facts, including dates, names, and important events. Each pupil was required to master the contents of the assigned number of pages. When the class met, the teacher required a selected pupil, in the presence of his classmates, to

write upon the blackboard a summary of the events that happened in Great Britain, for example, during the period under examination. By a system of crossquestioning the aid of the entire class was had in securing the correctness of this summary. Then another pupil would be summoned to do the same thing for France, another for Germany, another for Italy, and so on until all the material included in the assigned portion of the textbook had been covered. Then the teacher, turning with a triumphant look to his class, was in the habit of saying: "Now you know what was happening in each of the great countries of Europe at a specified time. But why were those things happening? You do not know. You will not find out from your textbook, but I will tell you." Then the eloquent and learned scholar poured forth a wealth of illuminating philosophical explanation that made the carefully memorized facts forever real in the minds of his fortunate pupils. There is no better way to study or to teach history than that. The fundamental data, the dates, the names, the bare events, must be learned by the pupil, and having been learned they must be interpreted. Interpretation is the task of the teacher.

For more than a generation past there has been a strong and steadily growing tendency to interpret the facts of history as the successive sequences in a chain of economic causation. It has been stoutly held and

taught that the actions of men and of nations are to be explained as the effects of purely economic causes. To accept this, however, as occupying anything more than a subordinate and a secondary place in the study of history, is to close one's eyes to the most obvious facts of human experience. No small part of the life of individuals and of nations is devoted to courses of action and to policies which are in direct conflict with men's obvious economic interests, but which are pursued because of belief in some principle, because of adherence to some ideal, because of faith in something unseen and eternal. The scholarly and the true interpretation of history is to view it as the record of the social, the moral, and the intellectual education of man, with economic forces and laws playing a constant but a secondary part.

It has become fashionable to decry chronology and to treat as unimportant a knowledge of the dates at which large events took place. But this tendency is one to be vigorously resisted. Chronology lies at the basis of history and furnishes it with a framework. Not to know the significance of dates such as 490 B.C., 732 A.D., 1066, 1453, 1492, 1649, 1789, 1815, and 1914, is to miss the clue to the power to group events in their natural order and in their causal sequence.

He will be a fortunate student, too, who is guided by a study of history through the gates that lead to litera