ow
thoroughly we lack any true sense of what history is and is for.
We are so wrapped up in politics that our vision of the motions
of the Human Spirit is obscured. There were lots of politics in
Republican Rome, and you may say none in the empire; so we make
for the pettiness that obsesses us, and ignore the greatness
whose effects are felt yet. Rome played at politics: old-time
conqueror-race Patricians against old-time conquered-race
Plebians: till the two were merged into one and she grew tired
of the game. She played at war until her little raidings and
conquests had carried her out of the sphere of provincial
politics, and she stood on the brink of the great world. Then
the influx of important souls began; she entered into history,
presently threw up politics forever, and performed, so far as it
was in her to do so, her mission in the world. What does History
care for the election results in some village in Montenegro? Or
for the passage of the Licinian Rogations, or the high exploits
of Terentilius Harsa?

Yet, too, we must get a view of this people in pralaya, that we
may understand better the workings of the Human Spirit in its
fulness. But we must see the forest, and not lose sight and
sense of it while botanizing over individual trees. We must
forget the interminable details of wars and politics that amount
to nothing; that so we may apprehend the form, features, color,
of this aspect of humanity.

Here is a mighty river: the practical uses of mankind are mainly
concerned with it as far up as it may be navigable; or at most,
as far up as it may be turning mills and watering the fields of
agriculture. There may be regions beyond when poets and
mythologists may bring great treasures for the Human Spirit; but
do you do well to treat such treasures as plug material for
exchange and barter? They call for another kind of treatment.
The sober science of history may be said to start where the
nations become navigable, and begin to affect the world. You can
sail your ships up the river Rome to about the beginning of the
third century B.C., when she began to ermerge from Italian
provincialism and to have relations with foreign peoples:
Pyrrhus came over to fight her in 280. What is told of the
century before may be true or not; as a general picture it is
probably true enough, and only as a general picture does it
matter; its details are supremely unimportant. The river here
is pouting through the