CONCEPTION AND METHODS OF HISTORY 49 



toward evening, it lightened and thunder was heard. That in 852 

 " The steel of the heathen glistened ; excessive heat, a famine followed. 

 There was not fodder enough for the animals. The pasturage for the 

 swine was more than sufficient." The Times tells us on its first page 

 that on September 11, 1904, at two o'clock in the morning a rat bit 

 a baby in Jersey City. On the same day, during the morning service, 

 a bad man set off a firecracker in Westminster Abbey, and a pigeon 

 lighted on the minute-hand of a clock in York, Pennsylvania, and 

 remained there full fifteen minutes. 



Until within a hundred years or so history was frankly narrative, 

 except when it bethought itself to be instructive. Under the latter 

 term may properly be included both the moral and theological inter- 

 pretations by which writers sought to enhance the dignity of what 

 would otherwise seem a mere story and bind together into an edifying 

 whole the scattered episodes and arid annals which constituted their 

 knowledge of the past. The moral, even the theological, attitude 

 toward history has by no means disappeared. The admirable address 

 prepared by Henry C. Lea for the last meeting of the American His- 

 torical Association is still fresh in the minds of American scholars. 

 It is directed against Lord Acton's defense of an immutable moral 

 standard, which should be ever before the mind of the historian and 

 guide him in judging the past and determining whether it be good or 

 evil. Dr. Lea discovers no historic basis for such an assumption. 

 Historically, good and evil are and must always be relative. This is a 

 conclusion toward which scientific study of the past has for some time 

 been tending. When it is generally accepted, it will do much to eman- 

 cipate the historian from some of the most serious disabilities under 

 which he has labored. 



Since the middle of the eighteenth century new interests other 

 than the literary, moral, and theological have been rapidly develop- 

 ing, which have exercised a remarkable influence upon historical 

 research, radically altering its spirit and aims, and broadening its 

 scope. Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws reviews the past with the purpose 

 of establishing a purely scientific proposition, namely, the relativity 

 of all human institutions, social, political, educational, economic, 

 legal, and military. The discussion attending the drafting of the first 

 French constitution served to stimulate an interest in constitutional 

 history which has never flagged. Indeed, to not a few scholars this 

 particular branch of research appears to constitute history par 

 excellence. Yet even in this chill region one may discover now and 

 then a glow of warm partisanship, which suggests that science has 

 not yet done its perfect work. But we need Freeman as well as 

 Stubbs, and Waitz as well as Fustel de Coulanges. 



Political economy has wrought a still more radical change in the 

 content of history than has the constitution-making of the last 



