The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 | Page 2

if he does not know through what tribulations that country
has passed. He cannot be a good citizen, he cannot even vote honestly,
much less intelligently, unless he has read history. Fortunately the point
needs little urging. It is almost an impertinence to refer to it. We are all

anxious, more than anxious to learn--if only the path of study be made
easy.
Can this be accomplished? Can the vanishing pictures of the past be
made as simply obvious as mathematics, as fascinating as a breezy
novel of adventure? Genius has already answered, yes. Hand to a mere
boy Macaulay's sketch of Warren Hastings in India, and the lad will see
as easily as if laid out upon a map the host of interwoven and elaborate
problems that perplexed the great administrator. Offer to the youngest
lass the tale told by Guizot of King Robert of France and his struggle to
retain his beloved wife Bertha. Its vivid reality will draw from the girl's
heart far deeper and truer tears than the most pathetic romance.
We begin to realize that in very truth History has been one vast
stupendous drama, world-embracing in its splendor, majestic, awful,
irresistible in the insistence of its pointing finger of fate. It has indeed
its comic interludes, a Prussian king befuddling ambassadors in his
"Tobacco Parliament"; its pauses of intense and cumulative suspense,
Queen Louise pleading to Napoleon for her country's life; but it has
also its magnificent pageants, its gorgeous culminating spectacles of
wonder. Kings and emperors are but the supernumeraries upon its
boards; its hero is the common man, its plot his triumph over ignorance,
his struggle upward out of the slime of earth.
Yet the great historians are not being widely read. The ablest and most
convincing stories of his own development seem closed against the
ordinary man. Why? In the first place, the works of the masters are too
voluminous. Grote's unrivalled history of Greece fills ten large and
forbidding volumes. Guizot takes thirty-one to tell a portion of the story
of France. Freeman won credit in the professorial world by devoting
five to the detailing of a single episode, the Norman Conquest. Surely
no busy man can gather a general historic knowledge, if he must read
such works as these! We are told that the great library of Paris contains
over four hundred thousand volumes and pamphlets on French history
alone. The output of historic works in all languages approaches ten
thousand volumes every year. No scholar, even, can peruse more than
the smallest fraction of this enormously increasing mass. Herodotus is

forgotten, Livy remains to most of us but a recollection of our
school-days, and Thucydides has become an exercise in Greek.
There is yet another difficulty. Even the honest man who tries, who
takes down his Grote or Freeman, heroically resolved to struggle
through it at all speed, fails often in his purpose. He discovers that the
greatest masters nod. Sometimes in their slow advance they come upon
a point that rouses their enthusiasm; they become vigorous, passionate,
sarcastic, fascinating, they are masters indeed. But the fire soon dies,
the inspiration flags, "no man can be always on the heights," and the
unhappy reader drowses in the company of his guide.
This leads us then to one clear point. From these justly famous works a
selection should be made. Their length should be avoided, their prosy
passages eliminated; the one picture, or perhaps the many pictures,
which each master has painted better than any rival before or since, that
and that alone should be preserved.
Read in this way, history may be sought with genuine pleasure. It is
only pedantry has made it dreary, only blindness has left it dull. The
story of man is the most wonderful ever conceived. It can be made the
most fascinating ever written.
With this idea firmly established in mind, we seek another line of
thought. The world grows smaller every day. Russia fights huge battles
five thousand miles from her capital. England governs India. Spain and
the United States contend for empire in the antipodes. Our rapidly
improving means of communication, electric trains, and, it may be,
flying machines, cables, and wireless telegraphy, link lands so close
together that no man lives to-day the subject of an isolated state. Rather,
indeed, do all the kingdoms seem to shrink, to become but districts in
one world-including commonwealth.
To tell the story of one nation by itself is thus no longer possible. Great
movements of the human race do not stop for imaginary boundary lines
thrown across a map. It was not the German students, nor the Parisian
mob, nor the Italian peasants who rebelled in 1848; it was the "people
of Europe" who arose against their oppressors. To read the history of

one's own country