is only based
on the arbitrary assumption that the collective will of the people is
always transferred to the men whom we have noticed, it happens that the
activity of the millions who migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture,
and destroy one another never is expressed in the account of the
activity of some dozen people who did not burn houses, practice
agriculture, or slay their fellow creatures.

History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples of
the west at the end of the eighteenth century and their drive eastward
explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their mistresses
and ministers, and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot,
Beaumarchais, and others?

Is the movement of the Russian people eastward to Kazan and Siberia
expressed by details of the morbid character of Ivan the Terrible and by
his correspondence with Kurbski?

Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by
the life and activity of the Godfreys and the Louis-es and their ladies?
For us that movement of the peoples from west to east, without
leaders, with a crowd of vagrants, and with Peter the Hermit, remains
incomprehensible. And yet more incomprehensible is the cessation of that
movement when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusade--the deliverance
of Jerusalem--had been clearly defined by historic leaders. Popes,
kings, and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy Land; but the
people did not go, for the unknown cause which had previously impelled
them to go no longer existed. The history of the Godfreys and the
Minnesingers can evidently not cover the life of the peoples. And the
history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers has remained the history
of Godfreys and Minnesingers, but the history of the life of the peoples
and their impulses has remained unknown.

Still less does the history of authors and reformers explain to us the
life of the peoples.

The history of culture explains to us the impulses and conditions of
life and thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had
a hot temper and said such and such things; we learn that Rousseau was
suspicious and wrote such and such books; but we do not learn why after
the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why during the
French Revolution they guillotined one another.

If we unite both these kinds of history, as is done by the newest
historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, bu