history of
England. This is no paradox, but the deliberate opinion of many of
those who have thought most deeply about the far-reaching chain of
human progress. When I was on a visit to the United States some years
ago--things may have improved since then--I could not help noticing
that the history classes in their common schools all began their work
with the year 1776, when the American colonies formed themselves into
an independent confederacy. The teaching assumed that the creation of
the universe occurred about that date. What could be more absurd, more
narrow and narrowing, more mischievously misleading as to the whole
purport and significance of history? As if the laws, the
representative institutions, the religious uses, the scientific
methods, the moral ideas, which give to an American citizen his
character and mental habits and social surroundings, had not all their
roots in the deeds and thoughts of wise and brave men, who lived in
centuries which are of course just as much the inheritance of the vast
continent of the West as they are of the little island from whence its
first colonisers sailed forth.

Well, there is something nearly as absurd, if not quite, in our common
plan of taking for granted that people should begin their reading of
history, not in 1776, but in 1066. As if this could bring into our
minds what is after all the greatest lesson of history, namely, the
fact of its oneness; of the interdependence of all the elements that
have in the course of long ages made the European of to-day what we
see him to be. It is no doubt necessary for clear and definite
comprehension to isolate your phenomenon, and to follow the stream of
our own history separately. But that cannot be enough. We must also
see that this stream is the effluent of a far broader and mightier
flood--whose springs and sources and great tributaries lay higher up
in the history of mankind.

'We are learning,' says Mr. Freeman, whose little book on the _Unity
of History_ I cannot be wrong in warmly recommending even to the
busiest among you, 'that European history, from its first glimmerings
to our own day, is one unbroken drama, no part of which can be rightly
understood without reference to the other parts which come before and
after it. We are learning that of this great drama Rome is the centre,
the point to which all roads lead and from which all roads lead no
less. The world of independent Greece stands on one side of it; the
wo