16 ■ Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



decay without telling of the grasping land monopoly of the sena- 

 torial ring, and the consequent change of the Italian peasantry 

 from free farmers to slaves. No history of tlie new Germany of 

 Stein and Bismark could fail to tell of Prupsian schools. And 

 the whole history of our own country for the last half century 

 turns upon the conflict of two systems of labor and two theories 

 of education. 



There are thus three great sets of causes which govern history : 

 geographical causes, ethnological causes, and ideal causes. In an 

 individual man we should call these outward circumstances, 

 hereditary character and purposes of life. If we know these 

 three things about a man, we know what that man is ; and so with 

 a nation, if we know the outward circumstances in which it is 

 placed, if we know what sort of hereditary character it has, and 

 if we know its leading ideas we know its history. Most histo- 

 rians err either by neglecting these underlying causes of history 

 entirely, or by attaching far too great importance to some one of 

 thern at the expense of the others. In all ages of the world each 

 of these causes has had some effect upon history. In the earlier 

 ages arid in all times among uncivili^ied tribes, geographical 

 causes have had much greater power than among civilized nations 

 to-day. Undoubtedly the differences of climate and locality 

 worked far more rapidly in the first ages of the world, when men 

 first divided the earth between them, than they do now. The 

 whole history of barbarism is a history of adjustment to condi- 

 tions of nature and the whole history of civilization is a history of 

 triumph over nature. Obstacles which were insuperable even a 

 century ago, are now easily overcome. To the barbarians of the 

 Homeric song, a petty expedition against a small Asiatic city in- 

 volved more difficulties and consumed as much time as it required 

 of the later Greeks to conquer the whole Orient. 



And as civilization is overcoming geographical difficulties by 

 intellectual power, so also it is overcoming hereditary difficulties 

 by moral power. The progress of civilization has been two-fold, 

 in a material progress of subduing nature, and in a moral pro- 

 gress of subduing man. The history of government and of reli- 

 gion is the history of a constant triumph of ideal forces over 



