st to know because it is the
best known and the most explicit. Earlier scenes stand out from a
background of obscurity. We soon reach the sphere of hopeless
ignorance and unprofitable doubt. But hundreds and even thousands of
the moderns have borne testimony against themselves, and may be
studied in their private correspondence and sentenced on their own
confession. Their deeds are done in the daylight. Every country opens
its archives and invites us to penetrate the mysteries of State. When
Hallam wrote his chapter on James II., France was the only Power whose
reports were available. Rome followed, and the Hague; and then came
the stores of the Italian States, and at last the Prussian and the
Austrian papers, and partly those of Spain. Where Hallam and Lingard
were dependent on Barillon, their successors consult the diplomacy of
ten governments. The topics indeed are few on which the resources have
been so employed that we can be content with the work done for us, and
never wish it to be done over again. Part of the lives of Luther and
Frederic, a little of the Thirty Years' War, much of the American
Revolution and the French Restoration, the early years of Richelieu
and Mazarin, and a few volumes of Mr. Gardiner, show here and there
like Pacific islands in the ocean. I should not even venture to claim
for Ranke, the real originator of the heroic study of records, and the
most prompt and fortunate of European pathfinders, that there is one
of his seventy volumes that has not been overtaken and in part
surpassed. It is through his accelerating influence mainly that our
branch of study has become progressive, so that the best master is
quickly distanced by the better pupil.[24] The Vatican archives alone,
now made accessible to the world, filled 3,239 cases when they were
sent to France; and they are not the richest. We are still at the
beginning of the documentary age, which will tend to make history
independent of historians, to develope learning at the expense of
writing, and to accomplish a revolution in other sciences as well.[25]

[Sidenote: MODERN HISTORY]

To men in general I would justify the stress I am laying on modern
history, neither by urging its varied wealth, nor the rupture with
precedent, nor the perpetuity of change and increase of pace, nor the
growing predominance of opinion over belief, and of knowledge over
opinion, but by the argument that it is a narrative told of ourselves,
the record of a lif