188 ROBINSON— THE NEW HISTORY. [April 22, 



schools and colleges and presented to the adult public in many well 

 known older and newer treatises. 



In order to appreciate the arbitrary nature of the selection of 

 historic facts offered in these standard text books and treatises, let 

 us suppose that a half dozen alert and well trained minds had never 

 happened to be biased by the study of anv outline of history and had 

 by some happy and incredible fortune never perused a " standard " 

 historical work. Let us suppose that they had nevertheless learned 

 a good deal about the past of mankind directly from the vast range 

 of sources that we now possess, both literary and archaeological. 

 Lastly, let us assume that they were all called upon to prepare inde- 

 pendently a so-called general history, suitable for use in the higher 

 schools. They would speedily discover that there was no single 

 obvious rule for determining what should be included in their review 

 of the past. Having no tradition to guide them, each would select 

 what he deemed most important for the young to know of the past. 

 Writing in the twentieth century, they would all be deeply influenced 

 by the interests and problems of the day. Battles and sieges and the 

 courts of kings would scarcely appeal to them. Probably it would 

 occur to none of them to mention the battle of Issus, the Samnite 

 wars, the siege of Numantia by the Romans, the advent of Hadrian, 

 the Italian enterprises of Otto I., the six wives of Henry VIII. or the 

 invasion of Holland by Louis XI\ . It is tolerably safe to assume 

 that none of these events, which are recorded in practically all of our 

 manuals to-day, would be considered by any one of our writers as 

 he thought over all that man had done, and thought, and suffered, 

 and dreamed, through thousands of years. All of them would agree 

 that what men had known of the world in which they lived, or had 

 thought to be their duty, or what they made with their hands, or the 

 nature and style of their buildings, public and private, would any of 

 them be far more valuable to rehearse than the names of their 

 rulers and the conflicts in which they engaged. Each writer would 

 accordingly go his own way. He would look back on the past for 

 explanations of what he found most interesting in the present and 

 would endeavor to place his readers in a position to participate 

 intelligently in the life of their own time. The six manuals when 

 completed would not only differ greatly from one another but would 



