death in 1896 the Prussian School disappeared. Its members
were the political schoolmasters of Germany at a time of uncertainty and
discouragement, and they braced their countrymen to the efforts which
culminated in the creation of a mighty Empire. If the purpose of history
is to stir a nation to action, Droysen, Sybel, and Treitschke are among
the greatest masters of the craft. If its supreme aim is to discover
truth and to interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim to a
place in the first class. The stream, temporarily deflected by their
powerful influence, began to return to the channel which Ranke had
marked out for it. Such works as Moriz Ritter's narrative of the
Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Koser's biography of
Frederick the Great, Max Lehmann's biographies of Scharnhorst and Stein,
and Erich Marcks' studies of Bismarck and his master are as notable for
their judgement as for their erudition.

The cooling process noted in the Old World has also occurred in the New,
and America of the twentieth century smiles at Bancroft's complacent
idealization of the Puritan colonies. Even the slavery struggle, the
ashes of which are scarcely yet cold, has found in James Ford Rhodes a
historian who can do justice to Jefferson Davis and Lee no less than to
Lincoln and Grant. But no American scholar compares in world-wide
influence with Mahan, whose study of Sea-Power in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, published in 1889, not only founded a school of
naval history but was inwardly digested by distinguished pupils in both
hemispheres, among them the Emperor William II and Theodore Roosevelt.
The Admiral's writings owe their importance not to research, for few new
facts are brought to light, but to the new angle from which familiar
events are envisaged. Occasionally, perhaps, the element of sea-power in
the determination of a particular result is over-emphasized at the
expense of other factors; but he was the first to seize the wider
bearings of naval history and to make the general reader aware of its
momentous significance.

The scope of history has gradually widened till it has come to include
every aspect of the life of humanity. No one would now dare to maintain
with my old master Seeley that history was the biography of States or
with Freeman that it was merely past politics. The growth of nations,
the achievements of men of action, the rise and fall of parties remain
among the most engr