The second great condition of history is found in the division of mankind into races, with their various characteristics. Here again, a school of historians is found to claim the characteristics of race as the main-spring of history. The laws of heredity and of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for life can be applied to the history of mankind as well as to the history of birds and beasts. But in the one case as in the other there is danger in trying to make these laws explain everything. The origin of our free institutions to-day can be traced in the stubborn hardihood and love of personal freedom of the German stock from which we have sprung. The same steady bravery of the Teutonic stock which won the day at Gettysburg and at Saratoga, changed the history of Europe also at Waterloo, at the siege of Leyden, at Morgarten and at Lutzen. The same love of local freedom, which created the United States of America, created also the kindred Federation of Switzerland and the United States of the Netherlands. But why have a part of the same race in Germany for a thousand years submitted to petty local despotisms, from which they have but just emerged? Why did the Arabs sleep in their peninsu'a till Mohammed came; and what has since become of the old Norse love of daring adventure? What is the secret of the marvellous change now going on in Japan? These are questions which history indeed can answer, but not a history based on race alone. The law of heredity can best explain the temperaments, features and dispositions of mankind. Leading traits of character will be preserved by nations through every vicissitude of fortune and every change of faith or clime. The Gaul of Cæsar is the Frenchman of to day in disposition, but not in institutions, language or religion. His leading traits have survived the influence of imperial and of papal Rome and of the German conquest. The Turk on the throne is still the Tartar of the steppes in spite of the Koran on the one hand, and of Europe on the other. Three thousand years have not sufficed to change the physical or the moral traits of the Greek, the Hindoo or the Negro. The law of race has its limits; but within these it is powerful.

The third great condition or cause of history is found in ideas. Man is distinguished from all other forms of life on this globe by

his ability to grasp and to carry out an idea. The ideas which have ruled man may be grouped in four classes.

The most important ideas and the ones which have had most effect on history, belong to the first class, that of religious ideas. The history of modern Europe would not have been written at all had it not been for christianity, which recreated civilization. The great Protestant movement of the sixteenth century has given birth to Anglo Saxon freedom on both sides the Atlantic, and has built up a new German Empire on the ruins of the old. And the events of the past year are opening our eyes to the evil influ ence of the faith of Islam upon the destinies of the Orient.

The second class of ideas are the ideas of government. Until of late the history of the world was the history of its governments. Monarchy, aristocracy and democracy have all had their champions and their martyrs. The divine right of kings, the divine right of nobles and the divine right of majorities to rule, have each, at times, controlled the destiny of nations, and have been only less powerful than religious ideas in making history.

The third class of ideas are those concerning the family; whether it shall be composed of one man and one woman, with their children, or of one man and several women and their children, or of one woman with several men and their children; whether the union shall be for life, or at the pleasure of one or of both parties to the marriage contract; what shall be the position of the wife in the household, as a slave or an equal; what shall be the rule of inheritance for the children; what shall be the education of the sons, to the father's business or to whatever business they are fitted for; and the conceived analogies to the family found in the clan or in the nation. The history of China or of Turkey cannot be written without understanding the Chinese or the Turkish idea of the family. No one can rightly understand the complete social and political change in France since the revolution without studying the effect of the Napoleonic law of inheritance.

The fourth class are social causes, such as the tenure of lard, the condition of the laboring classes, the state of general education and of the higher education and the opportunities for rising in life. No history of the Roman republic can explain its speedy

decay without telling of the grasping land monopoly of the senatorial ring, and the consequent change of the Italian peasantry from free farmers to slaves. No history of the new Germany of Stein and Bismark could fail to tell of Prussian schools. And the whole history of our own country for the last half century turns upon the conflict of two systems of labor and two theories of education.

There are thus three great sets of causes which govern history: geographical causes, ethnological causes, and ideal causes. In an individual man we should call these outward circumstances, hereditary character and purposes of life. If we know these three things about a man, we know what that man is; and so with a nation, if we know the outward circumstances in which it is placed, if we know what sort of hereditary character it has, and if we know its leading ideas we know its history. Most historians err either by neglecting these underlying causes of history entirely, or by attaching far too great importance to some one of them at the expense of the others. In all ages of the world each of these causes has had some effect upon history. In the earlier ages and in all times among uncivilized tribes, geographical causes have had much greater power than among civilized nations to-day. Undoubtedly the differences of climate and locality worked far more rapidly in the first ages of the world, when men first divided the earth between them, than they do now. The whole history of barbarism is a history of adjustment to conditions of nature and the whole history of civilization is a history of triumph over nature. Obstacles which were insuperable even a century ago, are now easily overcome. To the barbarians of the Homeric song, a petty expedition against a small Asiatic city involved more difficulties and consumed as much time as it required of the later Greeks to conquer the whole Orient.

And as civilization is overcoming geographical difficulties by intellectual power, so also it is overcoming hereditary difficulties by moral power. The progress of civilization has been two-fold, in a material progress of subduing nature, and in a moral progress of subduing man. The history of government and of religion is the history of a constant triumph of ideal forces over

inherited barbarism, and the gradual growth of a hereditary civilization.

Thus if we are to study the laws of history rightly, we shall allow a greater relative power to geographical and to ethnological causes in the earlier ages than in the later, and among barbarian than among civilized men. For instance, the time was when civilization was limited to navigable waters, because commerce was thus limited. And the teaching of Ritter that the proportionate extent of coast line on the several continents determines the amount of their civilization is true as far as it goes. But now commerce no longer depends on coast lines, but boldly explores the interior of great continents with its arms of iron, and civilization at once finds a home in Wisconsin as congenial as in the British Isles. The power of thought has conquered the resistance of nature, and ideas have reconstructed geography. Again, in the early ages of the world the first great nations were found in a subtropical climate under the isothermal of 70°. As men gained in skill in resisting the influences of cold on themselves and their works, the yet greater nations of classical antiquity grew up under the isothermal of 60°. And now the mental, and therefore the material power of the world, is found at about the isothermal of 50°.

Or take the rude barbarians over whom Alfred ruled, or the pagan savages, their ancestors of a few generations before, and contrast them with the Englishmen and Americans of to-day, and see what the combined forces of Christian faith, constitutional government, and scholarly learning have wrought, and see how the whole course of our history has been changed and ennobled by these ideas.

The ideal force in man is a greatly varying force and is capable of almost infinite growth, while the forces of climate and of race are nearly constant forces. While these are relatively more important factors of history at first, the force of ideas is a growing force which comes to be in modern history by far the most important. The student of history will err if he regards these forces as having a constant ratio to one another, and neglects to note the growing power of ideas.

It would be a fascinating subject of inquiry to ask what are the relations to one another of the ideas that have ruled the world, and the relative importance of each; but the limits of this essay forbid me to enter on that subject.

The three great conditions or causes of history, which we have thus far considered, are constant causes always at work. The influence of any one of them may be more or less in different ages or countries, but it is always something. There are other causes in history, which are occasional and temporary in their character, but which sometimes have great weight, and turn the course of history to a certain extent. But because they are occasional and transitory their effects are far less than these constant forces of which we have spoken.

There is. first, the influence of nations on one another. Mankind in past ages have been uniformly so selfish and narrow and cruel, as to think that one nation can only be happy and prosperous at the expense of other nations. The arts of war have had the honor and the service which rightfully belongs to the arts of peace. The history of the relations of nations has been a record of war, of conquest and of oppression. And, therefore, the decisive battles of the world are of interest to the student of history. Sometimes their results were a foregone conclusion, as when the training of Prussia in school and camp was matched with the ignorance of Austria on the field of Sadowa, or when Philip planned and Alexander carried out the first united effort of Greeks to conquer the effete Persian despotism. Sometimes they are decided by that class of providences which men call chance, as when the fire at Moscow broke the power of Napoleon, or the storm shattered the pride of the Armada. And not only the decisive contests, but the indecisive ones also have had great and varied effects upon the course of history. Of the Thirty Years' War, it is not enough to say that it resulted in a drawn battle between Protestantism and Catholicism; history must note also that it put back the progress of Germany two centuries, and made her for that time a mere mere "geographical expression."

The Crusades directly accomplished nothing; but indirectly