ea must be understood before the idea itself can serve
fully to explain anything. We must go back of the idea to the causes
which gave it birth if we would interpret anything by it. We may trace
the American Revolution, for example, back to the revolutionary ideas of
the colonists, but that will not materially assist us to understand the
Revolution. For that, it is necessary to trace the ideas themselves to
their source, the economic discontent of an exploited people. This is
the spirit which illumines the works of historians like Green, McMaster,
Morse Stephens, and others of the modern school, who emphasize social
forces rather than individual facts, and find the _geist_ of history in
social experiences and institutions.

What has been called the "Great Man theory," the theory according to
which Luther created the Protestant Reformation, to quote only one
example, and which ignored the great economic changes consequent upon
the break-up of feudalism and the rise of a new industrial order, long
dominated our histories. According to this theory, an idea, developed in
the mind of Luther, independent of external circumstances, changed the
political and social life of Europe. Had there been no Luther, there
would have been no Reformation; or had Luther died before giving his
idea to the world, the Reformation would have been averted. The student
who seeks in the bulk of the histories written prior to, say, 1870, what
he has a legitimate reason for seeking, namely, a picture of the actual
life of the people at any period, will be sadly disappointed. He will
find records of wars and treaties of peace, royal genealogies and
gossip, wildernesses of names and dates. But he will not find such
careful accounts of the jurisprudence of the period, nor any hint of the
economical conditions of its development. He will find splendid accounts
of court life, with its ceremonials, scandals, intrigues, and follies;
but no such pictures of the lives of the people, their social
conditions, and the methods of labor and commerce which obtained. He
will be unable to visualize the life of the period. In other words, the
histories lack realism; they are unreal, and, therefore, deceptive. The
new spirit, in the development of which the materialist conception of
Marx and Engels has been an important creative influence, is concerned
less with the chronicle of notable events and dates than with their
underlying causes and the manner of life of the pe