OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY 165 
in St. Louis and other great cities, and something of 
the sort had been seen under the very shadow of Har- 
vard’s elms in Cambridge. Both Dr. Peabody and 
Mr. Goodell make express mention of these recent 
disturbances, and either assert or imply that approval 
of any of the irregular acts in Boston which preceded 
the Revolution is equivalent to approval of modern 
boycotting with all its attendant outrages. Now, if 
there is any one source of confusion against which the 
student of history needs to be eternally vigilant, it is 
the tendency to argue from loose or false analogies. 
Every one remembers how Mr. Mitford, some seventy 
years ago, wrote a History of Ancient Greece under 
the influence of his dread of the approaching reform 
of Parliament, and a precious mess he made of it. In 
his eyes the one thing the Athenians had done for 
mankind was to give it an object lesson in the evils of 
democracy. Very little insight into history is gained 
by studying it in this way; vague generalizations are 
grossly misleading; real knowledge is attained only 
when the events of a period are studied in their causal 
relations to one another amid all their concrete com- 
plexity. It is this which makes the study of history, 
rightly pursued, such a superb discipline for the intel- 
lectual powers. It is this which enables us to reach 
conclusions which have the force of reasoned convic- 
tions. There is something rather comical in the 
spectacle of a writer whose verdicts upon past events 
are at the mercy of the next ragamuffin who may throw 
a bomb in Chicago or set fire to a barn in Vermont. 
The opinions here quoted seem to show that in the 
current notions concerning the immediate causes of the 
American Revolution there is too much vague generali- 
