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