38 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



influences, which act sometimes as checks, sometimes as a stim- 

 ulus. 



I venture to think that whatever be our judgment of his practical 

 success, the validity of this procedure was even better and earlier 

 perceived by an American pupil of Heeren than by any of the triad 

 of uncommon men we have been considering. And to all that they 

 possessed he added another element, the profound conviction of 

 God working in history; his reading of "philosophy working by 

 examples" was "God working by examples." This was George 

 Bancroft. Contemporary with Macaulay, Ranke, and Taine, he 

 was their peer as scholar, philosopher, or statesman. He had not 

 perhaps the imagination of one, nor the style of another, nor the 

 dispassionate judgment of another. But he had the insight and 

 sympathy to catch the spirit of his age as Macaulay did the amaz- 

 ing circulation of his volumes in all lands proved it. Utopian and 

 poetic he is, yet his pages neither flash nor dazzle; they commend 

 themselves by sobriety of argument and solidity of research. His 

 use of state papers was as extensive as Ranke's, his appreciation of 

 contemporary memoirs was as keen as Taine 's. But he was neither 

 indifferent nor agnostic. The son of a pious Unitarian clergyman, 

 he kept the Puritan spirit untarnished to the end. His instinct for 

 immediacy, for direct touch with the springs of action, made him 

 a philosopher from his youth upward. These are his peculiar qual- 

 ities and permeate all his work. With the discussion goes the lesson: 

 in all history, truth and justice reign supreme. The writer of history, 

 therefore, must observe two maxims: (1) Distinguish between 

 original authority and historical memorials or aids; by the former 

 we get a fact recorded at first hand, by the second, a decision of 

 principle or authority; (2) represent every man from his own 

 standpoint, judge him from your own. These acute and far-reaching 

 principles were enough in themselves, when conscientiously applied, 

 to mark his work as original. 



His philosophy, however, was quite as original. His book may be 

 considered as a treatise on the evolution of liberty along the central 

 axis: this axis is the land designated by Providence as fitted not for 

 freedom's relative but for its absolute development. Its heterogene- 

 ous population brought and brings from all other lands the elements 

 of national character, and by this compulsion of origins the environ- 

 ment, though eliminating all that cannot be assimilated, retains 

 all useful elements, incorporating them into an intricate but orderly 

 whole. Hence Bancroft's studies in universal history, interjected 

 from time to time as tributaries to the main narrative, were writ- 

 ten with a consummate skill and a thorough knowledge, which 

 found him readers in every important tongue and all over the 

 civilized world. As an exhibit of the divine order, he further holds, 



