1 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 
This tendency in American scholarship has been fruitful in 
its results, for it has produced more care in the use of his- 
torical sources and has given us many excellent and accurate 
surveys of outward events which are indispensable to the 
student who would inquire more deeply into underlying 
causes. 
Such historical writing, however, bears somewhat the 
same relation to scientific history which systematic botany 
bears to ecology ; that is, it classifies and orders phenomena, 
but does not explain their proximate or remote causes and 
relations. The predominance of such a historical ideal 
in the United States and elsewhere is not altogether inex- 
plicable ; for interpretative schools seem always to originate 
in social antagonisms.? The monarchy, in its rise and 
development, was never correctly understood as long as it 
was regarded by all as a mystery which must not be waded 
into, as James I put it, by ordinary mortals. Without the 
old régime there would have been no Turgot and Voltaire; 
Metternich and Joseph de Maistre came after the Revolu- 
tion. 
But the origin of different schools of interpretation in 
controversies and the prevalence of many mere preconcep- 
tions bolstered with a show of learning should not lead us 
to reject without examination any new hypothesis, such as 
1'What Morley has said of Macaulay is true of many eminent American historical 
writers: ** A popular author must, in a thoroughgoing way, take the accepted max- 
ims for granted. He must suppress any whimsical fancy for applying the Socratic 
elenchus; or any other engine of criticism, scepticism, or verification to those senti- 
ments or current precepts or morals which may in truth be very equivocal and may 
be much neglected in practice, but which the public opinion of his time requires to 
be treated in theory and in literature as if they had been cherished and held semper, 
ubique, et ab omnibus.” Miscellantes, Vol. I, p. 272. 
1 For instance, intimate connections can be shown between the vogue of Dar- 
winism and the competitive ideals of the mid-Victorian middle-class in England. 
Darwin got one of his leading ideas, the struggle for existence, from Malthus, who 
originated it as a club to destroy the social reformers, Godwin, Condorcet, and 
sthers, and then gave it a serious scientific guise as an afterthought.