a plain landsman looks at the sea. To the landsman the
ocean seems one huge immeasurable flood, obeying a simple law of ebb and
flow, and offering to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet in truth
we know that the oceanic movement is the product of many forces; the
seeming uniformity covers the energy of a hundred currents and
counter-currents; the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subject
to untold conditions of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not one
mass, but many masses moving along definite lines of their own. It is
the same with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from summing
them up in single propositions. That the French Revolution led to an
immense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and for mankind,
can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its beneficent results
untempered by any mixture of evil, can only be maintained by men as mad
as Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess Corinna said to the youthful
Pindar, when he had interwoven all the gods and goddesses in the Theban
mythology into a single hymn, that we should sow with the hand and not
with the sack. Corinna's monition to the singer is proper to the
interpreter of historical truth: he should cull with the hand, and not
sweep in with the scythe. It is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain from
the widest conception of the sum of a great movement. A clear, definite,
and stable idea of the meaning in the history of human progress of such
vast groups of events as the Reformation or the Revolution, is
indispensable for any one to whom history is a serious study of society.
It is just as important, however, not to forget that they were really
groups of events, and not in either case a single uniform movement. The
World-Epos is after all only a file of the morning paper in a state of
glorification. A sensible man learns, in everyday life, to abstain from
praising and blaming character by wholesale; he becomes content to say
of this trait that it is good, and of that act that it was bad. So in
history, we become unwilling to join or to admire those who insist upon
transferring their sentiment upon the whole to their judgment upon each
part. We seek to be allowed to retain a decided opinion as to the final
value to mankind of a long series of transactions, and yet not to commit
ourselves to set the same estimate on each transaction in particular,
still less on each person associated with it. Why shall we not prize the
general