OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 31 
before. It is proved beyond a doubt that the insti- 
tutions of civilized society are descended from institu- 
tions like those now to be observed in savage society. 
Savages and barbarians are simply races that have 
remained in phases of culture which more civilized 
races have outgrown; and hence one helps to explain 
the other. Certain obscure local institutions, for 
example, in ancient Greece and Rome, have been 
made quite intelligible by the study of similar insti- 
tutions among American Indians. In these ways 
history, without ceasing to be a study of individuals 
and nations, has come to be in the broadest sense 
the study of the growth and decay of institutions. 
Thus for a good many reasons we see that the new 
ways of treating history are better than the old. We 
are better equipped for getting at the truth, and it isa 
larger kind of truth when we have got it. Yet the 
historian is forgetting his highest duty if he allows 
himself to become unjust to the men of past times. 
There were giants in former days, and if we can see 
farther than they, it is because we stand upon their 
shoulders. Nor will all our boasted science make 
great historians, in the absence of the native genius. 
Let us never fail in reverence to the masters of our 
craft. The world will never know a more delightful 
narrator than Herodotus, careful and critical as we 
now know him to be, wide in outlook and keenly in- 
quisitive, with his touches of quaint philosophy and 
his delicious Ionic diction. Or consider Thucydides, 
with his mournful story of the war in which the Pelo- 
ponnesian states combine against Athens, one of the 
greatest crimes known to history, — somewhat such a 
crime as war between the United States and Great 
