710 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts , and Letters. 
the disposition to laud the most recent history as pre¬ 
eminently worthy of study. This theory has been widely 
accepted by pedagogues and unfortunately has been advo¬ 
cated by a large group of historical students, one of whom 
“declares roundly that he has no real interest in anything 
that happened prior to 1870.” He does not realize that he 
can not really know the truth about any of the international 
complications, or about many of the other events, since 
1870. The documents in the archives of the various nations 
can not be consulted, because each nation establishes “a 
dead line,” usually about fifty or sixty years back, and 
allows no access to the material since. In connection with 
the present struggle several of the warring nations have 
published books of some color, white, orange, gray, etc., 
giving a part of the diplomatic correspondence prior to the 
outbreak of the war. Each is carefully edited in order to 
produce the desired impression, and any trained observer 
notes at once the incompleteness of each collection. Some 
supplementary material, real or fictitious, has come to light 
since the publications, but the whole mass is inadequate 
and probably no one of us will ever have access to the sup¬ 
pressed material. Our grandchildren will be able to form 
a more correct idea of the causes which precipitated the 
conflict. Studying the diplomatic history of the last fifty 
years is like studying the nervous system of an animal 
without having access to the spinal cord or brain. 
Moreover, exclusive devotion to recent history is a denial 
of the historical-mindedness which has been called the pre¬ 
dominant characteristic of the present era. “An ironical 
lawyer assures us that it would be better to be convicted of 
petty larceny than to be found wanting in ‘historical-mind¬ 
edness!’ ” This devotion is partly due to a pride in our 
own advance and a contempt for the unenlightened ages 
which have gone before. Far more true was the saying of 
Bernard of Chartres, 800 years ago, “We are like pigmys 
mounted upon the shoulders of giants, so that we can see 
more and farther than they could; yet not by virtue of the 
keenness of our eyesight nor through the tallness of our 
stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft upon the 
giant mass.” This tendency to study only recent history 
is particularly dangerous, because it is in line with many 
