the future, not by magic, but
by patiently acquired knowledge. To see clearly what the world has done,
and why, is to see at least vaguely what the world will do, and when.

Moreover, no man can understand himself unless he understands others;
and he cannot do that without some idea of the past, which has produced
both him and them. To know his neighbors, he must know something of the
country from which they came, the conditions under which they formerly
lived. He cannot do his own simple duty by his own country if he does
not know through what tribulations that country has passed. He cannot be
a good citizen, he cannot even vote honestly, much less intelligently,
unless he has read history. Fortunately the point needs little urging.
It is almost an impertinence to refer to it. We are all anxious, more
than anxious to learn--_if only the path of study be made easy_.

Can this be accomplished? Can the vanishing pictures of the past be made
as simply obvious as mathematics, as fascinating as a breezy novel of
adventure? Genius has already answered, yes. Hand to a mere boy
Macaulay's sketch of Warren Hastings in India, and the lad will see as
easily as if laid out upon a map the host of interwoven and elaborate
problems that perplexed the great administrator. Offer to the youngest
lass the tale told by Guizot of King Robert of France and his struggle
to retain his beloved wife Bertha. Its vivid reality will draw from the
girl's heart far deeper and truer tears than the most pathetic romance.

We begin to realize that in very truth History has been one vast
stupendous drama, world-embracing in its splendor, majestic, awful,
irresistible in the insistence of its pointing finger of fate. It has
indeed its comic interludes, a Prussian king befuddling ambassadors in
his "Tobacco Parliament"; its pauses of intense and cumulative suspense,
Queen Louise pleading to Napoleon for her country's life; but it has
also its magnificent pageants, its gorgeous culminating spectacles of
wonder. Kings and emperors are but the supernumeraries upon its boards;
its hero is the common man, its plot his triumph over ignorance, his
struggle upward out of the slime of earth.

_Yet the great historians are not being widely read_. The ablest and
most convincing stories of his own development seem closed against the
ordinary man. Why? In the first place, the works of the masters are too
voluminous. Grote's unrivalled history of Greece fills ten larg