3 i8 THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



lem. These events of yesterday are but the latest episodes of a strug- 

 gle between the social organization of Asia and that of Europe for 

 predominance in the countries which border the iEgean and the Le- 

 vantine Seas, which has been going on for some thousands of years. 

 To say nothing of earlier events, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, 

 the expedition of Alexander, the Punic wars of Rome, the Saracen 

 occupation of Spain, the Crusades, the Turkish conquest of the Balkan 

 Peninsula, the Egyptian expedition of the first Napoleon, are names 

 of some of the long score of matches and return-matches played be- 

 tween East and West in the terrible game of war. And, in my judg- 

 ment, the grandson of the youngest boy here is not likely to see the 

 winner finally declared. For the contest depends not upon mere dy- 

 nastic interests, or the lust of conquest, but is the inevitable product 

 of the struggle for existence between incompatible forms of civiliza- 

 tion, antagonisms of religion, and antipathies of race. 



Twenty-four centuries, mainly occupied in fighting, do not afford 

 a very pleasant retrospect at the best, and it would be altogether hor- 

 rible, were not the affairs of this world so ordered that " there is a 

 soul of good in things evil." No doubt millions of men, women, and 

 children have suffered grievous misery and wrong, and whole nations 

 have been annihilated, as the tide of conquest, swept over them now 

 to the west, and now to the east. All that is sadly obvious, and, to 

 those who can see only that which is obvious, these wars, like all oth- 

 ers, must take the guise of purely diabolical evils. But a more patient 

 and penetrating vision may discern that all this suffering is the school 

 fee which the human race has had to pay for its education. As else- 

 where, bright and dull pay alike, and the bright profit ; which is, per- 

 haps, no great satisfaction to the dull, but it is the rule of the school, 

 and Ave have to put up with it. 



In the present case, the Western nations are the bright boys. Your 

 teachers of history are doubtless careful to point out to you all that 

 ancient Greece owed to its intercourse, whether hostile or peaceful, 

 with the East ; all the benefit which Saracen learning on the one hand, 

 and crusading enterprise on the other, conferred on Europe in the 

 middle ages, and how much the Turks, quite unintentionally, did for 

 the revival of learning. It is not to such familiar truths as these that 

 I wish to direct your attention, but rather to the fact that history, in 

 the modern sense of the word, was born of the very earliest of the 

 struggles to which I have adverted. 



I say history, in the modern sense of the word, that is, not barely a 

 chronicle of events and record of current traditions or venerable myths, 

 but a narrative based upon evidence which has been critically sifted, 

 and in which the narrator endeavors to trace, amid the tangled occur- 

 rences of human life, the thread of natural causation which connects 

 them with the needs and the passions of men. The chronicler is more 

 or less of a gossip, the historian more or less of a man of science. For 





