Yet the great historians are not being widely read.  The ablest and most convincing stories of his own development seem closed against the ordinary man.  Why?  In the first place, the works of the masters are too voluminous.  Grote’s unrivalled history of Greece fills ten large and forbidding volumes.  Guizot takes thirty-one to tell a portion of the story of France.  Freeman won credit in the professorial world by devoting five to the detailing of a single episode, the Norman Conquest.  Surely no busy man can gather a general historic knowledge, if he must read such works as these!  We are told that the great library of Paris contains over four hundred thousand volumes and pamphlets on French history alone.  The output of historic works in all languages approaches ten thousand volumes every year.  No scholar, even, can peruse more than the smallest fraction of this enormously increasing mass.  Herodotus is forgotten, Livy remains to most of us but a recollection of our school-days, and Thucydides has become an exercise in Greek.

There is yet another difficulty.  Even the honest man who tries, who takes down his Grote or Freeman, heroically resolved to struggle through it at all speed, fails often in his purpose.  He discovers that the greatest masters nod.  Sometimes in their slow advance they come upon a point that rouses their enthusiasm; they become vigorous, passionate, sarcastic, fascinating, they are masters indeed.  But the fire soon dies, the inspiration flags, “no man can be always on the heights,” and the unhappy reader drowses in the company of his guide.

This leads us then to one clear point.  From these justly famous works a selection should be made.  Their length should be avoided, their prosy passages eliminated; the one picture, or perhaps the many pictures, which each master has painted better than any rival before or since, that and that alone should be preserved.

Read in this way, history may be sought with genuine pleasure.  It is only pedantry has made it dreary, only blindness has left it dull.  The story of man is the most wonderful ever conceived.  It can be made the most fascinating ever written.

With this idea firmly established in mind, we seek another line of thought.  The world grows smaller every day.  Russia fights huge battles five thousand miles from her capital.  England governs India.  Spain and the United States contend for empire in the antipodes.  Our rapidly improving means of communication, electric trains, and, it may be, flying machines, cables, and wireless telegraphy, link lands so close together that no man lives to-day the subject of an isolated state.  Rather, indeed, do all the kingdoms seem to shrink, to become but districts in one world-including commonwealth.