Thus it should be with our national history.  Already the clergy have presented their cahiers in the shape of church histories and theological essays innumerable.  The nobles, that is, the statesmen and politicians, have formulated their lists of grievances in such works as Thirty Year’s View, The Great Conflict, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, etc.  But where is the cahier of the third estate?  The States-general has met and the tiers etat is not ready.  What excuse have they?  Quick comes the answer:  “Our electors have sent in but few cahiers, and these are defective.  We cannot tell our king, the nation, what the people were and what they are, what they have and what they want, until they tell us.  Our cahier must wait the pleasure of the people.”  Meanwhile, the regent, irreverently called Uncle Sam, who rules the land while his master is away in Utopia, reads the cahiers of the nobles, laughs in his sleeve at that of the clergy, and forgets all about that of the third estate.  Or if he thinks of it at all, it is only to try to fill its place with twenty-four-volume Census Reports and massive tomes from the other departments.

The cahiers of the third estate are, in truth, few and defective, yet there are some communities that have done their work well.  For example, there is The Memorial History of Boston which does credit even to the Hub of American historical literature.  It was the work of cultivated men, and although the cooks were many, the broth is excellent.  That the people were a-hungering for just such broth is shown by the fact that the net profits from it in the first twelve months after publication, as it is said, were over fifty thousand dollars.

Boston is almost the only city in the land that has been the subject of a full, accurate, and interesting history.  The History of New York, by Martha J. Lamb, is not so full as might have been wished, but is otherwise unexceptionable.  New York is fortunate in having the most graphic and humorous history of its early days that any city in the world ever had, but nobody except Diedrich Knickerbocker himself ever claimed a great amount of accuracy and truthfulness for his unrivaled work.

It was to be expected that our older cities,—­those whose seeds were planted by Puritans, Dutch traders, Catholic fugitives, Quakers, Cavalier spendthrifts and rogues, Huguenot exiles, and in general the motley crowd that sought the land of milk and honey in the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth centuries,—­it was to be expected that these cities would have historians ad nauseam.  The very nature of the early colonization of America, the elements of romance and adventure so conspicuous in the history of early days on the Atlantic coast, gave warrant to such expectations, and the event has justified them.  But where the romance and adventure end, the historian lays down his pen.  It is left to the census enumerator to complete the work, and the brazen age of statistics follows the golden age of history.