in regard to the history
of foreign nations. Any accurate knowledge is worth while. It is harder,
in the long run, to remember a date slightly wrong than with accuracy.
The dateless man, who is as vague as I am about the League of Cambray or
Philip II, will loudly assert that the trouble incident to remembering a
date in history is a pure waste of time. He will allege that "a general
idea"--a very favorite phrase--is all that is necessary. In the case of
such a person you can safely gamble that his so-called "general idea" is
no idea at all. Pin him down and he will not be able to tell you within
_five hundred years_ the dates of some of the cardinal events of
European history--the invasion of Europe by the Huns, for instance. Was
it before or after Christ? He might just as well try to tell you that it
was quite enough to know that our Civil War occurred somewhere in the
nineteenth century.

I have personally no hesitation in advancing the claim that there are a
few elementary principles and fundamental facts in all departments of
human knowledge which every person who expects to derive any advantage
from intelligent society should not only once learn but should forever
remember. Not to know them is practically the same thing as being
without ordinary means of communication. One may not find it necessary
to remember the binomial theorem or the algebraic formula for the
contents of a circle, but he should at least have a formal acquaintance
with Julius Caesar, Hannibal, Charlemagne, Martin Luther, Francis I,
Queen Elizabeth, Louis XIV, Napoleon I--and a dozen or so others. An
educated man must speak the language of educated men.

I do not think it too much to demand that in history he should have in
mind, at least approximately, one important date in each century in the
chronicles of France, England, Italy and Germany. That is not much, but
it is a good start. And shall we say ten dates in American history? He
should, in addition, have a rough working knowledge of the chief
personages who lived in these centuries and were famous in war,
diplomacy, art, religion and literature. His one little date will at
least give him some notion of the relation the events in one country
bore to those in another.

I boldly assert that in a half hour you can learn by heart all the
essential dates in American history. I assume that you once knew, and
perhaps still know, something about the events themselves with which
they are connecte