The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 127 pages of information about The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884.

The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 127 pages of information about The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884.

The great fault of this book, as of all books of this class, is the lack of the proper classification, the scholarly reflection and comment, the thoughtful contrast and comparison, the exercise of intelligent judgment in forming conclusions,—­all which are necessary to make history palatable, not to say valuable.  Nowhere is this lack shown more forcibly than in this book in the treatment of the subject of riots and mob violence.  It may not be generally known, especially among the younger portion of the community, that no American and but few European cities have such an unenviable and disgraceful record on this head as Baltimore.  The accounts of its riots remind one too forcibly of the worst days of the French Revolution, and all of them read more like the incidents so plentiful in the sensational stories of the day, than like the cold, dispassionate record of history.  And this, mind you, is the record of a city famed far more for monuments, pleasure-grounds, and beautiful women, than for lawlessness and sans-culottism, a city proud of its families and its culture, a city one of the oldest and richest in the land.  However unpleasant it may be to look at the black side of such a city’s history, yet the study must be profitable if by it we Americans, proud of our tolerance and our humanity, jealous of aught past or present that may blot our escutcheon, wondering at and scornfully pitying nations that could have had Lord George Gordon riots and blood-thirsty land-leagues, a reign of terror and a commune,—­if we may learn not to be quite so arrogant in our righteousness, quite so boastful in our Pharisaism; if we may learn how much reason we of the New World have to bear in mind, when we read about the past and present of the Old World, the divine command:  “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Yet Scharf gives merely the bare details of these, the most vivid scenes in Baltimore’s history, and goes little into causes or results, leaving us almost wholly in the dark as to how a civilized city in the most enlightened country on earth could have grafted on its history such anomalous things as these riots.  This feature of Baltimore’s history seems to us to be the feature most peculiar to itself, and, therefore, like that feature of a human face peculiar to the person we are studying, the most interesting; but our historian gives it no distinctive treatment, puts no emphasis on it, forces the reader to compare, contrast, account for, explain, and draw conclusions for himself.  That he should slide over this side of Baltimore’s history would be natural enough, but of this he cannot be accused.  His treatment of this subject is characteristic of the whole book.

As a good example of an even more disappointing type of chronological histories we may take the History of Lynn, including Lynnfield, Saugus, Swampscott, and Nahant, by Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, an octavo of six hundred and twenty pages, published in 1865.  The book seems to have been condensed from a series of very poor diaries, and the mass of detail under the year-headings is ridiculous in its minuteness and laughable in its absurdity.  Every year has its paragraphic entries, more or less full.  The narrative of one year may here be quoted to show the nature of the whole, and, for that matter, the nature of fifty similar town histories.

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The Bay State Monthly — Volume 1, No. 5, May, 1884 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.