12 HISTORICAL SCIENCE 



more and more directly and copiously for the rectification of all his- 

 tory. What I do mean, and what, I daresay, I am put here to pro- 

 claim, is, that the day for synthesis has come; that no one of us can 

 safely go forward without it; that labor in all kinds must hence- 

 forth depend upon it, the labor of the specialist no less than the 

 labor of the general historian who attempts the broader generaliza- 

 tions of comment and narrative. 



In the English-speaking world we have very recently witnessed 

 two interesting and important attempts at synthesis by cooperation 

 in Mr. H. D. TrailPs Social England and Lord Acton's Cambridge 

 Modern History, the one now complete, the other still in course of 

 publication. We have had plans and proposals for a somewhat 

 similarly constructed history of the United States. Mr. Justin 

 Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America hardly furnishes 

 an example of the sort of work attempted in the other series of which 

 I have spoken. Aside from its lists and critical estimates of author- 

 ities, it is only history along the ordinary lines done in monographs, 

 covering topics every historian of America has tried to cover. Mr. 

 Traill's volumes, as their general title bears evidence, run upon a 

 wider field, whose boundaries include art, literature, language, and 

 religion, as well as law and politics. They are broader, at any rate 

 in their formal plan, than Lord Acton's series, if we may judge by the 

 three volumes of the Cambridge Modern History already published. 

 The chapter-headings in the Cambridge volumes smack much more 

 often of politics and public affairs than of the more covert things of 

 private impulse and endeavor. Their authors write generally, how- 

 ever, with a very broad horizon about them and examine things 

 usually left unnoted by historians of an earlier age. The volumes 

 may fairly be taken, therefore, to represent an attempt at a com- 

 prehensive synthesis of modern historical studies. 



Both Mr. Traill's volumes and the Cambridge Modern History are 

 constructed upon essentially the same general plan. The sections of 

 the one and the chapters of the other are monographs pieced together 

 to make a tessellated whole. The hope of the editors has been to 

 obtain, by means of carefully formulated instructions and suggestions 

 issued beforehand to their corps of associates, a series of sections 

 conceived and executed, in some general sense, upon a common 

 model and suitable to be worked in together as parts of an intelligible 

 and consistent pattern; and, so uniform has been our training in 

 historical research and composition in recent years, that a most sur- 

 prising degree of success has attended the effort after homogeneous 

 texture in the narrative and critical essays which have resulted; a 

 degree of success which I call surprising, not because I think it very 

 nearly complete, but because I am astonished that, in the circum- 

 stances, it should have been success at all and not utter failure. 



