INTRODUCTION 
THERE is a tradition among historians that, since history 
deals with the past, the further a subject is removed from 
the present, the more historical it is. School-books and lec- 
tures often reflect this point of view. The Peloponnesian 
War was forced upon the innocent children of the nineteenth 
century in all its wearisome detail, while the pages of the 
history manuals closed either with Napoleon in exile or at 
most with Bismarck dictating terms of peace. Just across 
the threshold of the world of to-day one read the word 
“finis.”” It was the close of the world’s story! 
The exclusion of recent events from the field of history 
was justified by the historians upon the plea that only as 
events receded into the past could their proper perspective 
be seen. Often what seems of most moment at the time 
proves to be but temporary and local in importance. The 
Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, for example, is 
now seen to have been an incident of less importance than 
the relatively unknown social revolution of 1789, which 
destroyed the remnants of medieval feudalism in France. 
The dramatic interest of the tragedy led those closest to it 
to concentrate unduly upon the story of mobs and guillotine, 
and only the sober historian of a later day could correct 
the perspective, after the issues involved had ceased to 
arouse the passions of the investigator. Warned by such 
experiences, scientific historians of the last century accepted 
it as a canon, that one could write accurately and intelli- 
gently only of things that happened before one’s time. 
There is much force in this contention, but if carried out 
to its logical conclusion — that one must wait for facts to