nable attitude toward
it. Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the past is the key
to understanding the present. History deals with the past, but this past
is the history of the present. An intelligent study of the discovery,
explorations, colonization of America, of the pioneer movement westward,
of immigration, etc., should be a study of the United States as it
is to-day: of the country we now live in. Studying it in process of
formation makes much that is too complex to be directly grasped open
to comprehension. Genetic method was perhaps the chief scientific
achievement of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its principle
is that the way to get insight into any complex product is to trace the
process of its making,--to follow it through the successive stages of
its growth. To apply this method to history as if it meant only the
truism that the present social state cannot be separated from its past,
is one-sided. It means equally that past events cannot be separated
from the living present and retain meaning. The true starting point of
history is always some present situation with its problems.

This general principle may be briefly applied to a consideration of its
bearing upon a number of points. The biographical method is generally
recommended as the natural mode of approach to historical study. The
lives of great men, of heroes and leaders, make concrete and vital
historic episodes otherwise abstract and incomprehensible. They condense
into vivid pictures complicated and tangled series of events spread over
so much space and time that only a highly trained mind can follow and
unravel them. There can be no doubt of the psychological soundness
of this principle. But it is misused when employed to throw into
exaggerated relief the doings of a few individuals without reference to
the social situations which they represent. When a biography is related
just as an account of the doings of a man isolated from the conditions
that aroused him and to which his activities were a response, we do not
have a study of history, for we have no study of social life, which is
an affair of individuals in association. We get only a sugar coating
which makes it easier to swallow certain fragments of information. Much
attention has been given of late to primitive life as an introduction
to learning history. Here also there is a right and a wrong way of
conceiving its value. The seemingly ready-made character and the
com