ule
historically worthless. In the third place, both the real and the sham
are intensely dull.

Real histories are few, evidently because there is not demand enough to
encourage historians to enter the field, and not because material is
lacking. With the exception of the Atlantic seaboard, our country has
been developed in an age pre-eminent for records and statistics; and
there is scarcely a town or city in the land that has not its records
and its public documents, its newspaper files and its Fourth-of-July
orations,--all replete with information waiting for the historian.
Nearly every State has its Historical Society, and Pioneer Associations
are as plenty in our glorious West as was the fever and ague with which
their members were baptized. If the golden opportunities of
autobiography are lost, the American historian of the future will have
to be satisfied, as must be satisfied the New England historian of
to-day, with the meagre, lifeless information given by records, and the
hyperbolical, untrustworthy knowledge to be obtained from local
tradition and gossip.

We need go no farther to find the first reason why American histories
are so meagre and dull. They are not pictures from life. The fact is,
that the historian might as well try to write a valuable and interesting
history from the materials which our older cities possess, as a painter
might try to paint the battle of Crecy from the details given by
Froissart. To be sure we have all seen such pictures, but who has more
than admired them?

The absence of contemporaneous literature has been the greatest
misfortune of all history. Every student knows how great and deplorable
are the breaks constantly met with in tracing the thread of past events.
Shall we, then, let the students of posterity remain in the dark on such
questions as these: why Providence became the second city of New
England; why she left Newport so badly in the race for prosperity; why
Buffalo and Cincinnati went up, while Black Rock and North Bend went
down; why Chicago became the largest manufacturing city on the
continent; why New England kept the town-meeting, and the West preferred
the township and the county; and why a thousand and one other important
things happened. To be sure we have had Bancroft, and Sparks, and
Hildreth, but these and their brethren have told us as little about the
history of the people as Lingard, Hume, Hallam, and all the rest of them
told England. Within a very f