We need go no farther to find the first reason why American histories are so meagre and dull.  They are not pictures from life.  The fact is, that the historian might as well try to write a valuable and interesting history from the materials which our older cities possess, as a painter might try to paint the battle of Crecy from the details given by Froissart.  To be sure we have all seen such pictures, but who has more than admired them?

The absence of contemporaneous literature has been the greatest misfortune of all history.  Every student knows how great and deplorable are the breaks constantly met with in tracing the thread of past events.  Shall we, then, let the students of posterity remain in the dark on such questions as these:  why Providence became the second city of New England; why she left Newport so badly in the race for prosperity; why Buffalo and Cincinnati went up, while Black Rock and North Bend went down; why Chicago became the largest manufacturing city on the continent; why New England kept the town-meeting, and the West preferred the township and the county; and why a thousand and one other important things happened.  To be sure we have had Bancroft, and Sparks, and Hildreth, but these and their brethren have told us as little about the history of the people as Lingard, Hume, Hallam, and all the rest of them told England.  Within a very few years historians have begun to see this defect, and such men as Green, Lodge, and MacMaster have undertaken to give us histories of the people, the first and last taking the lead on their respective sides of the Atlantic.  MacMaster’s work is excellent as far as it goes.  His first volume is deep and scholarly, and does credit to American literature.  It is clear that the task of its preparation was immense, and more time must have been spent in merely collecting authorities than has been bestowed altogether on more pretentious histories.  Where Mr. MacMaster found all these authorities is a puzzle, for even such libraries as those in Boston and Cambridge have not all the materials for such an undertaking.  Yet even he leaves many points untouched, or cursorily disposed of.  Among the subjects referred to, of which we would like to learn more, may be mentioned:  the township system of the West, the development of American municipal institutions, and, above all, the origin and rise of the various centres of population and business which we call cities.

The history of a nation should be compiled in the same way that the French people of the ancien regime compiled their lists of grievances to be presented to the king.  In the early States-generals the deputies of all the orders received from the electors mandates of instructions containing an enumeration of the public grievances of which they were to demand redress.  From the multitude of these cahiers (or codices), the three estates, that is, the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate (the people), compiled each a single cahier to serve as the exponent of its grievances and its demands.  When this complex process had been completed and the three residual cahiers had been given to the king, the States-general, the only representative body of France, was dissolved.