what a society is; it familiarises him
with the principal social phenomena and the different species of usages,
their variety and their resemblances. The study of events and evolutions
familiarises him with the idea of the continual transformation which
human affairs undergo, it secures him against an unreasoning dread of
social changes; it rectifies his notion of progress. All these
acquisitions render the pupil fitter for public life; history thus
appears as an indispensable branch of instruction in a democratic
society.

The guiding principle of historical pedagogy will therefore be to seek
for those subjects and those methods which are best calculated to
exhibit social phenomena and give an understanding of their evolution.
Before admitting a fact into the plan of instruction, it should be asked
first of all what educational influence it can exercise; secondly,
whether there are adequate means of bringing the pupil to see and
understand it. Every fact should be discarded which is instructive only
in a low degree, or which is too complicated to be understood, or in
regard to which we do not possess details enough to make it
intelligible.

IV. To make rational instruction a reality it is not enough to develop a
theory of historical pedagogy. It is necessary to renew the material
aids and the methods.

History necessarily involves the knowledge of a great number of facts.
The professor of history, with no resources but his voice, a blackboard,
and abridgments which are little better than chronological tables, is in
much the same situation as a professor of Latin without texts or
dictionary. The pupil in history needs a repertory of historical facts
as the Latin pupil needs a repertory of Latin words; he needs
collections of _facts_, and the school text-books are mostly collections
of _words_.

There are two vehicles of facts, engravings and books. Engravings
exhibit material objects and external aspects, they are useful
principally for the study of material civilisation. It is some time
since the attempt was first made in Germany to put in the hands of the
pupil a collection of engravings arranged for the purposes of historical
instruction. The same need has, in France, produced the _Album
historique_, which is published under the direction of M. Lavisse.

The book is the chief instrument. It ought to contain all the
characteristic features necessary for forming mental representations of
the events, the motiv