, for instance, tells us of the war with
the Volsci, we sometimes have the brief announcement: "This year war was
carried on with the Volsci."

2. A second species of Reflective history is what we may call the
pragmatical. When we have to deal with the past and occupy ourselves
with a remote world, a present rises into being for the mind--produced
by its own activity, as the reward of its labor. The occurrences are,
indeed, various; but the idea which pervades them-their deeper import
and connection--is one. This takes the occurrence out of the category of
the past and makes it virtually present. Pragmatical (didactic)
reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and
indefeasibly of the present, and quicken the annals of the dead past
with the life of today. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly
interesting and enlivening depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral
reflections must here be specially noticed--the moral teaching expected
from history; the latter has not infrequently been treated with a direct
view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate
the soul and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for
impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of people and
states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their
affairs, present quite another field. Rulers, statesmen, nations, are
wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience
offers in history; yet what experience and history teach is this-that
peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, nor
have they acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved
in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so
strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by
considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the
pressure of great events a general principle gives no help.

It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the past. The pallid
shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the
present. Looked at in this light nothing can be shallower than the
oft-repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples during the French
Revolution; nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and
that of our times. Johannes von Mueller, in his _Universal History_ as
also in his _History of Switzerland_, had such moral aims in view. He
designed to prepare a body of political do