230 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
But note however how this mauvaise honte and this reserve 
defeats itself in a sense and debars the historian—scientific though he 
may be—who is its victim, from discharging one of the chief functions 
of history. It is the merest commonplace that history should record 
not only wars and battles and royalties and constitutions, but the 
general life of the people themselves, social, industrial, artistic, moral 
and religious, and this quite apart from the modern or democratic 
conditions, which give more or less to the mass of the people the control 
of their governments, and therefore give the people of necessity a place 
in history. 
Even under autocratic governments, such as those of the East 
in Herodotus’ time, and since, we expect that the historian shall not 
confine himself to the doings and sayings of royalty, but shall describe 
the life of their subjects. This is what Herodotus has done, and though 
he might fairly and scientifically have argued that history was made 
in those days by kings and generals and that therefore their deeds 
and words were of the essence of history, he has yet gone far outside 
them and has described everything he saw and heard discussed: the 
customs, beliefs, even the dress and food of the ordinary man: the serv- 
ants he kept or did not keep, the ornaments the women wore, the 
uses to which they put them: the soil and climate: the yield of different 
cereals and fruits: the physical structure of the land and of its inhabi- 
tants: the flora and fauna: the life-history of great rivers and their 
effect on geography: the sources of the Nile, the circumnavigation of 
Africa and so on. He is an encyclopaedist, and an encyclopaedist 
all the more useful because he writes with verve and enthusiasm and is 
brimming over with a sense of the importance of his function as a 
reporter. 
The scientific historian Thucidides, on the other hand, is debarred 
by mauvaise honte, by his unfortunate sense of the dignity and im- 
partiality or even neutrality—that most abused of all words—the 
neutrality even, which he thinks incumbent on the historian. He 
is not to report frivolities and trivialities, he is not to become a tattler 
and a gossip 4v@pwrodoyos: he is not to descend to personalities: 
he is not to mention women: he is not to describe the petty local and 
picturesque occasions which serve as the odorous sulphur match to 
light great conflagrations; the occasion, for example, of the revolt of 
Mytilene from Athens. He is to confine himself to the great con- 
flagration—the revolt itself. All else is unnecessary and superfluous 
and supererogatory. He is not even to mention the names of speakers, 
when speeches are recorded. The speech is to show the great lines of 
thought, which animated peoples during the Peloponnesian War— 
the lines of thought will be blurred or at least reduced to insignificance, 
