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OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 21 
his written injunctions had been heeded not one of 
the nineteen victims could have been sent to the 
gallows. When the poem was published, exhibiting 
the great clergyman in this new light, some sage 
critics shook their heads and muttered, “ Poetic 
license!” But it has been abundantly proved that 
Longfellow was quite right. 
I have said enough about going to original sources. 
It is time to point out a different sort of contrast be- 
tween old and new ways of treating history. Let us con- 
sider how history began. In primitive times, of which 
modern savage life is a wayside survival, after a tribe 
had returned from a successful campaign, there was a 
grand celebration. Amid feast and hilarity, booty 
was divided and captives were slaughtered. Then 
the warriors painted their faces and danced about the 
fire, while medicine-men chanted the prowess of the 
victorious chieftain and boasted the number of ene- 
mies slain. There were also sacrifices to the tutelar 
ghost-deities, and homage was paid to their ancestral 
virtues. In such practices epic poetry and history had 
their common origin, and it must be said that to this 
day history retains some of the traces of its savage 
infancy. With most people it is still little more than 
a glorified form of ancestor-worship. One sees this 
not only in the difficulty of arousing general interest 
in events that have happened at a distance, but also in 
the absurdly narrow views which different countries 
or different sections of the same country take with 
regard to matters of common interest. In reading 
French historians one perpetually feels the presence 
of the tacit assumption that divides the human race 
into Frenchmen and Barbarians; but in this regard 
