14 HISTORICAL SCIENCE 



I did, and took the law into their own hands as I did; and their expe- 

 rience and mine is the moral of my criticism. No sort of cunning 

 joinery could fit their several pieces of workmanship together into 

 a single and consistent whole. No amount of uniform type and sound 

 binding can metamorphose a series of individual essays into a book. 

 I may be allowed to express my surprise, in passing, that some indi- 

 vidual historians should have tried to compound and edit themselves 

 in the same way, by binding together essays which were conceived 

 and executed as separate wholes. The late Mr. Edward Eggleston 

 furnished us with a distinguished example of this in his Beginners 

 of a Nation, whose chapters are topical and run back and forth 

 through time and circumstance without integration or organic relation 

 to one another, treating again and again of the same things turned 

 about to be looked at from a different angle. And if a man of capital 

 gifts cannot fuse his own essays, or even beat and compress them into 

 solid and coherent amalgam, how shall editors be blamed who find 

 the essays of a score of minds equally intractable? No doubt the 

 Cambridge volumes are meant for scholars more than for untrained 

 readers, though Mr. TrailFs, I believe, are not; but even the docile 

 scholar, accustomed of necessity to contrast and variety in what he 

 pores upon and by habit very patient in reconciling inconsistencies, 

 plodding through repetitions, noting variations and personal whim- 

 sies, must often wonder why he should thus digest pieces of other 

 men's minds and eat a mixture of secondary authorities. The fact is, 

 that this is not synthesis, but mere juxtaposition. It is not even 

 a compounding of views and narratives. It is compilation. There is 

 no whole cloth, no close texture, anywhere in it. The collected pieces 

 overlap and are sometimes not even stitched together. Events 

 even events of critical consequence are sometimes incontinently 

 overlooked, dropped utterly from the narrative, because no one of 

 the writers felt any particular responsibility for them, and one and 

 another took it for granted that some one else had treated of them, 

 finding their inclusion germane and convenient. 



But if we reject this sort of cooperation as unsatisfactory, what 

 are we to do? Obviously some sort of cooperation is necessary in this 

 various and almost boundless domain of ours; and if not the sort 

 Mr. Traill and Lord Acton planned, what sort is possible? The ques- 

 tion is radical. It involves a great deal more than the mere deter- 

 mination of a method. It involves nothing less than an examination 

 of the essential character and object of history, I mean of that 

 part of man's book of words which is written as a deliberate record 

 of his social experience. What are our ideals? What, in the last 

 analysis, do we conceive our task to be? Are we mere keepers and 

 transcribers of records, or do we write our own thoughts and judg- 

 ments into our narratives and interpret what we record? The ques- 



