HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION
The thesis of this school is, in brief, as follows. The
Teutonic peoples were originally endowed with singular
political talents and aptitudes; Teutonic tribes invaded
England and destroyed the last vestiges of the older Roman
and British culture; they then set an example to the world
in the development of “free” government. Descendants
of this specially gifted race settled America and fashioned
their institutions after old English models. The full fruition
of their political genius was reached in the creation of the
Federal Constitution.
For more than a generation the Teutonic theory of our
institutions deeply influenced historical research in the
United States; but it was exhausted in the study of local
government rather than of great epochs; and it produced
no monument of erudition comparable to Stubbs’ Consti-
tutional History of England. Whatever may be said of this
school, which has its historical explanation and justifica-
tion,! it served one exceedingly useful purpose: it was
scrupulously careful in the documentation of its preconcep-
tions and thus cultivated a more critical spirit than that
which characterized the older historians.?
The third school of historical research is not to be charac-
terized by any phrase. It is marked rather by an absence
of hypotheses. Its representatives, seeing the many pitfalls
which beset the way of earlier writers, have resolutely
turned aside from “interpretation” in the larger sense, and
concerned themselves with critical editions of the documents
and with the “impartial” presentation of related facts.
' It has been left to a Russian to explain to Englishmen the origin of Teutonism
in historical writing. See the introduction to Vinogradoff, Villainage in England.
W. J. Ashley, in his preface to the translation of Fustel de Coulanges, Origin of
Property in Land, throws some light on the problem, but does not attempt a sys-
lematic study.
t Note the painstaking documentation for the first chapters in Stubbs’ great work.
