age finds it
necessary to reconsider at least some portion of the past, from points
of view furnished by new conditions which reveal the influence and
significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the
previous generation. Unquestionably each investigator and writer is
influenced by the times in which he lives and while this fact exposes
the historian to a bias, at the same time it affords him new instruments
and new insight for dealing with his subject.

If recent history, then, gives new meaning to past events, if it has to
deal with the rise into a commanding position of forces, the origin and
growth of which may have been inadequately described or even overlooked
by historians of the previous generation, it is important to study the
present and the recent past, not only for themselves but also as the
source of new hypotheses, new lines of inquiry, new criteria of the
perspective of the remoter past. And, moreover, a just public opinion
and a statesmanlike treatment of present problems demand that they be
seen in their historical relations in order that history may hold the
lamp for conservative reform.

Seen from the vantage-ground of present developments what new light
falls upon past events! When we consider what the Mississippi Valley has
come to be in American life, and when we consider what it is yet to be,
the young Washington, crossing the snows of the wilderness to summon the
French to evacuate the portals of the great valley, becomes the herald
of an empire. When we recall the huge industrial power that has centered
at Pittsburgh, Braddock's advance to the forks of the Ohio takes on new
meaning. Even in defeat, he opened a road to what is now the center of
the world's industrial energy. The modifications which England proposed
in 1794 to John Jay in the northwestern boundary of the United States
from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, seemed to him, doubtless,
significant chiefly as a matter of principle and as a question of the
retention or loss of beaver grounds. The historians hardly notice the
proposals. But they involved, in fact, the ownership of the richest and
most extensive deposits of iron ore in America, the all-important source
of a fundamental industry of the United States, the occasion for the
rise of some of the most influential forces of our time.

What continuity and meaning are furnished by the outcome in present
times of the movements of minor political parties