From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]
[Sidenote: Need of Care in History]
The other danger is that of sacrificing brightness and charm of
presentation. When an effort is made to avoid generalisations, and
to squeeze into the narrative as many facts as the space will admit,
the narrative is apt to become dry, because compression involves
the curtailment of the personal and dramatic element. These are the
rocks between which every historian has to steer. If he has ample
space, he does well to prefer the course of giving all the salient
facts and leaving the reader to generalise for himself. If, however,
his space is limited, as must needs be the lot of those who write a
universal history, the impossibility of going into minute detail makes
generalisations inevitable, for it is through them that the result
and significance of a multitude of minor facts must be conveyed in a
condensed form.
[Sidenote: New Minds and New Facts]
All the greater, therefore, becomes the need for care and sobriety in
the forming and setting forth every summarising statement and general
conclusion or judgment. Probably the soundest guiding principle
and best safeguard against error is to be found in shunning all
preconceived hypotheses which seek to explain history by one set of
causes, or to read it in the light of one idea. The habit of magnifying
a single factor, such as the social factor, or the economic, or
the religious, has been a fertile source of weakness in historical
writing, because it has made the presentation of events one-sided,
destroying that balance and proportion which it is the highest merit
of any historian to have attained. Theory and generalisation are the
life-blood of history. They make it intelligible. They give it unity.
They convey to us the instruction which it always contains, together
with so much of practical guidance in the management of communities
as history is capable of rendering. But they need to be applied with
reserve, and not only with an impartial mind, but after a painstaking
examination of all the facts--whether or no they seem to make for the
particular theory stated--and of all the theories which any competent
predecessor has propounded.
For the historian, though he must keep himself from falling under the
dominion of any one doctrine by which it is sought to connect and
explain phenomena, must welcome all the light which any such doctrine
can throw upon facts. Even if such a doctrine be imperfect, even if it
be tainted by error, it may serve to indicate relations between facts,
or to indicate the true importance of facts, which previous writers
had failed to observe, or had passed too lightly over. It is thus
that history always needs to be re-written. History is a progressive
science, not merely because new facts are constantly being discovered,
not merely because the changes in the world give to old facts a new
significance, but also because every truly penetrating and original
mind sees in the old facts something which had not been seen before.
A universal history is fitted to correct such defects as may be
incident to that extreme specialism in historical writing which is now
in fashion. The broad and concise treatment which a history of all
times and peoples must adopt naturally leads to efforts to characterise
the dominant features and tendency of an epoch or a movement, whether
social, economic, or political.
[Sidenote: The Side Streams of History]
Yet even here there is a danger to be guarded against. No epoch, no
movement, is so simple as it looks at first sight, or as one would
gather from even the most honest contemporary writer. There is always
an eddy at the side of the stream; and the stream itself is the
resultant of a number of rivulets with different sources, whose waters,
if the metaphor may be extended, are of different tints. Let any man
study minutely a given epoch, such as that of the Reformation in
Germany, or that of the Revolutionary War in America, and he will be
surprised to find how much more complex were the forces at work than
he had at first supposed, and on how much smaller a number of persons
than he had fancied the principal forces did in fact directly operate.
Or let any one--for this is perhaps the best, if the most difficult,
method of getting at the roots of this complexity--study thoroughly
and dispassionately the phenomena of his own time. Let him observe how
many movements go on simultaneously, sometimes accelerating, sometimes
retarding, one another, and mark how, the more fully he understands
this complex interlacing, so much the less confident do his predictions
of the future become. He will then realise how hard it is to find
simple explanations and to deliver exact statements regarding critical
epochs in the past.
[Illustration:
Mercier
THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: POTTERY
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]
[Illustration:
Mercier
THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: THE FORGE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
]
[Sidenote: The Main Stream of History]
Nevertheless, the task of summarising and explaining is one to which
the writer of a History of the World must address himself. If he has
the disadvantage of limited space, he has the advantage of being able
to assume the reader’s knowledge of what has gone before, and to invite
the reader’s attention to what will come after. Thus he stands in a
better position than does the writer who deals with one country or one
epoch only for making each part of history illustrate other parts,
for showing how similar social tendencies, similar proclivities of
human nature, work similarly under varying conditions and are followed
by similar, though never identical, results. He is able to bring out
the essential unity of history, expunging from the reader’s mind the
conventional and often misleading distinctions that are commonly drawn
between the ancient, the mediæval, and the modern time. He can bring
the contemporaneous course of events in different countries into a
fruitful relation. And in the case of the present work, which dwells
more especially on the geographical side of history, he can illustrate
from each country in succession the influence of physical environment
on the formation of races and the progress of nations, the principles
which determine the action of such environment being everywhere
similar, though the forms which that action takes are infinitely
various.
Is there, it may be asked, any central thread in following which the
unity of history most plainly appears? Is there any process in tracing
which we can feel that we are floating down the main stream of the
world’s onward movement? If there be such a process, its study ought to
help us to realise the unity of history by connecting the development
of the numerous branches of the human family.
One such process has already been adverted to and illustrated. It is
the gradual and constant increase in man’s power over Nature, whereby
he is emancipated more and more from the conditions she imposes on
his life, yet is brought into an always closer touch with her by the
discovery of new methods of using her gifts. Two other such processes
may be briefly examined. One goes on in the sphere of time, and
consists in the accumulation from age to age of the strength, the
knowledge, and the culture of mankind as a whole. The other goes on in
space as well as in time, and may be described as the contraction of
the world, relatively to man.
[Sidenote: The Great Increase of Population]
The accumulation of physical strength is most apparent in the increase
of the human race. We have no trustworthy data for determining the
population, even of any one civilised country, more than a century
and a half ago; much less can we conjecture that of any country
in primitive or prehistoric times. It is clear, however, that in
prehistoric times--say, six or seven thousand years ago, there were
very few men on the earth’s surface. The scarcity of food alone would
be sufficient to prove that; and, indeed, all our data go to show it.
Fifty years ago the world’s population used to be roughly conjectured
at from seven to nine hundred millions, two-thirds of them in China and
India. It is now estimated at over fifteen hundred millions. That of
Europe alone must have tripled within a century, and can hardly be less
than four hundred millions. That of North America may have scarcely
exceeded four or five millions in the time of Christopher Columbus, or
at the date of the first English settlements, though we have only the
scantiest data for a guess. It may now be 130,000,000, for there are
over a hundred millions in the United States alone, about fifteen in
Mexico, and eight in Canada, besides the inhabitants of Central America.
[Sidenote: The Prolific Power of White People]
[Sidenote: Physical & Intellectual Power]
The increase has been most swift in the civilised countries, such
as Britain, Germany, Russia, and the United States; but it has
gone on in India also since India came under British rule (famines
notwithstanding), and in the regions recently colonised by Europeans,
such as Australia, Siberia, and Argentina, the disappearance of
aborigines being far more than compensated for by the prolific power
of the white immigrants. Some regions, such as Asia Minor and parts
of North Africa, are more thinly peopled now than they were under the
Roman Empire, and both China and Peru may have no larger population
than they had five, or ten, or fifteen centuries ago. But taking
the world at large, the increase is enormous, and will apparently
continue. Even after the vacant cultivable spaces which remain in
the two Americas, Northern Asia, and Australasia have been filled,
the discovery of new modes of enlarging the annually available stock
of food may maintain the increase. It is most conspicuous among the
European races, and is, of course, due to the greater production in
some regions of food, and in others of commodities wherewith food can
be purchased. It means an immense addition to the physical force of
mankind in the aggregate, and to the possibilities of intellectual
force also--a point to be considered later. And, of course, it
also means an immense and growing preponderance of the civilised
white nations, which are now probably one half of mankind, and may,
in another century, when they have risen from about five hundred
to, possibly, one thousand or fifteen hundred millions, be nearly
two-thirds.
[Sidenote: Modern Man Stronger than his Ancestors]
As respects the strength of the average individual man, the inquiry
is less simple. Palæolithic man and neolithic man were apparently
(though here and there may have been exceptions) comparatively feeble
creatures, as are the relics of the most backward tribes known to us,
such as the Veddas of Ceylon, the Bushmen, the Fuegians. Some savages,
as, for instance, the Patagonians, are men of great stature, and some
of the North American Indians possess amazing powers of endurance.
The Greeks of the fifth century B.C., and the Teutons of the time of
Julius Cæsar, had reached a high physical development. Pheidippides
is said to have traversed one hundred and fifty miles on foot in
forty-eight hours. But if we think of single feats of strength, feats
have been performed in our own day--such as Captain Webb’s swimming
across the Straits of Dover--equal to anything recorded from ancient
or mediæval times. To swim across the much narrower Hellespont was
then deemed a surprising exploit. Nor do we know of any race more to
be commended for physical power and vigour of constitution than the
American backwoodsmen of Kentucky or Oregon to-day. The swords used by
the knights of the fifteenth century have usually handles too small for
many a modern English or German hand to grasp.
[Sidenote: America’s Mingled Races]
Isolated feats do not prove very much, but there is good reason to
believe that the average European is as strong as ever he was, and
probably more healthy, at least if longevity is a test of health.
One may fairly conclude that with better and more abundant food,
the average of stature and strength has improved over the world at
large, so that in this respect also the force of mankind as a whole
has advanced. Whether this advance will continue is more doubtful. In
modern industrial communities the law of the survival of the fittest
may turn out to be reversed, for it is the poorer and lower sections
of the population that marry at an early age, and have the largest
families, while prudential considerations keep down the birth-rate
among the upper middle-class. In Transylvania, for instance, the
Saxons are dying out, because very few children are born to each pair,
while the less educated and cultured Rumans increase fast. In North
America, the Old New England stock of comparatively pure British blood
has begun to be swamped by the offspring of the recent immigrants,
mostly Irish or French Canadians; and although the sons of New England,
who have gone West, continue to be prolific, it is probable that the
phenomena of New England will recur in the Mississippi Valley, and
that the newcomers from Europe who form the less cultivated strata
of the population--Irish, Germans, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Slovaks,
Rumans--will contribute an increasing proportion of the inhabitants.
Some of these, and especially the Irish and the Germans and the
Scandinavians, are among the best elements in the American population,
and have produced men of the highest distinction. But the average
level among them of versatile aptitude and of intellectual culture is
slightly below that of the native Americans.
Now, the poorer sections are in most countries, though of course not
always to the same extent, somewhat inferior in physical as well as in
mental quality, and more prone to suffer from that greatest hindrance
to physical improvement, the abuse of alcoholic drinks.
We come next to another form of the increase of human resources, the
accumulation of knowledge, and of what may be called intellectual
culture and capacity, for it is convenient to distinguish these two
latter from knowledge.
[Illustration: PIONEERS OF MODERN CIVILISATION
The discovery of precious metals is a great factor in progress.
Seekers after gold are chief among the pioneers who help to carry
civilisation into new lands.
]
[Sidenote: Inventions Mean Progress]
In knowledge there has been an advance, not merely a tolerably
steady and constant advance, but one which has gone on with a sort
of geometrical progression, moving the faster the nearer we come to
our own time. Whatever may have befallen in the prehistoric darkness,
history knows of only one notable arrest or setback in the onward
march--that which marks the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries of
the Christian era. Even this set-back was practically confined to
Southern and Western Europe, and affected only certain departments
of knowledge. It did not, save, perhaps, as regards a few artistic
processes, extinguish that extremely important part of the previously
accumulated resources of mankind which consisted in the knowledge of
inventions. It is in respect of inventions, especially mechanical and
physical or chemical inventions, that the accumulation of knowledge has
been most noteworthy and most easy to appreciate.
A history of inventions is a history of the progress of mankind, of a
progress to which every race may have contributed in primitive times,
though all the later contributions have come from a few of the most
civilised. Every great invention marks one onward step, as one may see
by enumerating a few, such as the use of fire, cooking, metal working,
the domestication of wild animals, the tillage of the ground, the use
of plough and mattock and harrow and fan, the discovery of plants
or trees useful for food or for medicine, the cart, the wheel, the
water-mill (overshot, undershot, and turbine), the windmill, the
distaff (followed long, long after by the spinning-wheel), the loom,
dyestuffs, the needle, the potter’s wheel, the hydraulic press, the
axe-handle, the spear, the bow, the shield, the war-chariot, the
sling, the cross-bow, the boat, the paddle, the oar, the helm, the
sail, the mariner’s compass, the clock, picture-writing, the alphabet,
parchment, paper, printing, photography, the sliding keel, the
sounding-lead, the log, the brick, mortar, the column, the arch, the
dome, till we come down to explosives, the microscope, the cantilever,
and the Röntgen rays.
[Illustration: THE FIRST SETTLEMENT OF A NEW CITY
Many flourishing cities in South Africa, Australia, and America
have grown up around the sites where the first gold-seekers pegged
out their claims in unexploited territories and began digging for
the precious metal.
]
The history of the successive discovery, commixture, and applications
of the metals, from copper and bronze down to manganese, platinum, and
aluminium, or of the successive discovery and utilisation of sources of
power--the natural sources, such as water and wind, the artificially
procured, such as steam, gas, and electricity--or of the production and
manufacture of materials available for clothing, wool, hair, linen,
silk, cotton, would show how every step becomes the basis for another
step, and how inventions in one department suggest or facilitate
inventions in another. Recent discoveries in surgery and medicine, such
as the use of antiseptics, tend to improve health and to prolong life;
and in doing so, they increase the chances of further discoveries being
made.
[Sidenote: The Prolonging of Life]
Who can tell what the world may have lost by the early death of many a
man of genius? One peculiar line of discovery which at first seemed to
have nothing to do with practice has proved to be of signal service;
the working out of mathematical methods of calculation by means of
which the mechanical and physical sciences have in recent times made a
progress in their practical application undreamt of by those who laid
the foundations of geometry and algebra many centuries ago. It may,
indeed, be said that all the sciences need one another, and that none
has been without its utilities for practice, since even that which
deals with the heavenly bodies has been used for the computation of
time, was used by the agriculturist before he had any calendars to
guide him, and has been of supreme value to the navigator. It has also
been suggested that an observation of sun spots may enable the advent
of specially hot seasons, involving droughts, to be predicted.
Another kind of knowledge also grows by the joint efforts of many
peoples, that which records the condition of men in the past and the
present, including history, economics, statistics, and the other
so-called social sciences. This kind also is useful for practice, and
has led to improvements by which nearly all nations have profited,
such as an undebased currency, banking and insurance, better systems
of taxation, corporations, and joint stock companies. With this we may
couple the invention of improved political institutions.
The accumulation of knowledge, especially of scientific knowledge
applied to the exploitation of the resources of Nature, means the
accumulation of wealth--that is to say, of all the things which
men need or use. The total wealth of the world must have at least
quadrupled or quintupled within the last hundred years. Nearly all of
it is in the hands or under the control of the civilised nations of
European stock, among whom the United States stands foremost, both
in rate of economic growth and in the absolute quantity of values
possessed.
[Sidenote: Knowledge Means Wealth]
Two further observations belong to this part of the subject. One is
that this stock of useful knowledge, the accumulation of which is the
central fact of the material progress as well as of the intellectual
history of mankind, now belongs to (practically) all races and states
alike. Some, as we shall note presently, are more able to use it than
others, but all have access to it. This is a new fact. It is true
that most races have contributed something to the common stock; and
that even among the civilised peoples, no one or two or three (except
possibly the Greeks as respects ancient times) can claim to have
contributed much more than the others. But in earlier ages there were
peoples or groups of peoples who were for a time the sole possessors
of inventions which gave them great advantages, especially for war.
Superior weapons as well as superior drill enabled Alexander the Great,
and afterward the Romans, to conquer most of the civilised world.
Horses and firearms, with courage and discipline, enabled two Spanish
adventurers to seize two ancient American empires with very scanty
forces, as they enabled a handful of Dutch Boers to overcome the hosts
of Mosilikatze and Dingaan. So there were formerly industrial arts
known to or practised by a few peoples only. But now all inventions,
even those relating to war, are available even to the more backward
races, if they can learn how to use them or can hire white men to do
so for them. The facilities of communication are so great, the means
of publicity so abundant, that everything becomes speedily known
everywhere.
[Sidenote: Inventions are now Universal]
The other observation is that there is now no risk that any valuable
piece of knowledge will be lost. Every public event that happens, as
well as every fact of scientific consequence, is put on record, and
that not on a single stone or in a few manuscripts, but in books, of
which so many copies exist that even the perishable nature of the
material will not involve the loss of the contents, since, if these
contents are valuable, they will be transferred to and issued in other
books, and so _ad infinitum_. Thus every process of manufacture is
known to so many persons that while it continues to be serviceable it
is sure to be familiar and transmitted from generation to generation
by practice as well as by description. We must imagine a world totally
different from the world we know in order to imagine the possibility of
any diminution, indeed of any discontinuance of the increase, of this
stock of knowledge which the world has been acquiring, and which is not
only knowledge but potential wealth.
When one passes from knowledge considered as a body of facts
ascertained and available for use to the thing we call intellectual
aptitude or culture--namely, the power of turning knowledge to
account and of producing results in spheres other than material--and
when we inquire whether mankind has made a parallel advance in this
direction, it becomes necessary to distinguish three different kinds of
intellectual capacity.
The first may be called the power of using scientific methods for
investigating phenomena, whether physical or social.
[Sidenote: No Decrease of Knowledge is now Likely]
The second is the power of speculation, applied to matters which
have not hitherto been found capable of examination by the methods
of science, whether observational, experimental, or mathematical.
The third is the power of intellectual creation, whether literary or
artistic.
The methods of scientific inquiry may almost be classed with the
ascertained facts of science or with inventions, as being parts of
the stock of accumulated knowledge built up by the labour of many
generations. They are known to everybody who cares to study them, and
can be learnt and applied by everybody who will give due diligence.
Just as every man can be taught to fire a gun, or steer a ship, or
write a letter, though guns, helms, and letters are the result of
discoveries made by exceptionally gifted men, so every graduate in
science of a university can use the methods of induction, can observe
and experiment with a correctness which a few centuries ago even the
most vigorous minds could scarcely have reached.
[Sidenote: Original Thinkers are still Rare]