THE VARIETY AND UNITY OF HISTORY 11 



their words, in the book of their art, or in the book of their material 

 arts, consumption, needs, desires; and the product is still organic. 

 Men play upon one another whether as individual souls or as political 

 and economic partners. 



What the specialist has discovered for us, whether he has always 

 discovered it for himself or not, is, that this social product which we 

 call history, though produced by the interplay of forces, is not always 

 produced by definite organs or by deliberation: that, though a joint 

 product, it is not always the result of concerted action. He has laid 

 bare to our view particular, minor, confluent but not conjoint influ- 

 ences, which, if not individual, are yet not deliberately cooperative, 

 but the unstudied, ungeneraled, scattered, unassembled, it may be 

 even single and individual expression of motives, conceptions, im- 

 pulses, needs, desires, which have no place within the ordered, cor- 

 porated ranks of such things as go by legislation or the edicts of 

 courts, by resolutions of synods or centred mandates of opinion, but 

 spring of their own spontaneous vigor out of the unhusbanded soil 

 of unfenced gardens, the crops no man had looked for or made ready 

 to reap. Though all soils from which human products suck their sus- 

 tenance must no doubt lie within the general sovereignty of society, 

 and no man is masterless in our feudal moral system, these things 

 which have come to light by the labor of those who have scrutinized 

 the detail of our lives for things neglected have not been produced 

 within the immediate demesnes of the crown. Historians who ponder 

 public policy only, and only the acts of those who make and admin- 

 ister law and determine the relationships of nations, like those who 

 follow only the main roads of literature and study none but the 

 greater works of art, have therefore passed them by unheeded, and 

 so, undoubtedly, have missed some of the most interesting secrets 

 of the very matters they had set themselves to fathom. Individuals, 

 things happening obscure and in a corner, matters that look like inci- 

 dents, accidents, and lie outside the observed movements of affairs, 

 are as often as not of the very gist of controlling circumstance and 

 will be found when fully taken to pieces to lie at the very kernel of 

 our fruit of memory. 



I do not mean to imply that the work of the specialist is now near 

 enough to being accomplished, his discoveries enough completed, 

 enough advertised, enough explained, his researches brought to a 

 sufficient point of perfection. I daresay he is but beginning to come 

 into his kingdom: is just beginning to realize that it is a kingdom, 

 and not merely a congeries of little plots of ground, unrelated, un- 

 neighborly even; and that as the years go by and such studies are 

 more and more clarified, more and more wisely conceived, this 

 minute and particular examination of the records of the human spirit 

 will yield a yet more illuminating body of circumstance and serve 



