In our time, when the study of history threatens to become almost an impossibility--such is the mass of details which historians collect in archives and pour out before us in monographs--it seems to me more than ever the duty of the true historian to find out the real proportion of things, to arrange his materials according to the strictest rules of artistic perspective, and to keep completely out of sight all that may be rightly ignored by us in our own passage across the historical stage of the world. It is this power of discovering what is really important that distinguishes the true historian from the mere chronicler, in whose eyes everything is important, particularly if he has discovered it himself. I think it was Frederick the Great who, when sighing for a true historian of his reign, complained bitterly that those who wrote the history of Prussia never forgot to describe the buttons on his uniform. And it is probably of such historical works that Carlyle was thinking when he said that he had waded through them all, but that nothing should ever induce him to hand even their names and titles down to posterity. And yet how much is there even in Carlyle's histories that might safely be consigned to oblivion! Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each generation need not start again from the same point and toil over the same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came before, may advance toward higher points and nobler aims. As a child when growing up might ask his father or grandfather _who_ had built the house they lived in, or who had cleared the field that yielded them their food, we ask the historian whence we came, and how we came into possession of what we call our own. History may tell us afterward many useful and amusing things, gossip, such as a child might like to hear from his mother or grandmother; but what history has to teach us before all and everything, is our own antecedents, our own ancestors, our own descent. Now our principal intellectual ancestors are, no doubt, the _Jews_, the _Greeks_, the _Romans_, and the _Saxons_, and we, here in Europe, should not call a man educated or enlightened who was ignorant of the debt which he owes to his intellectual ancestors in Palestine, Greece, Rome, and Germany. The whole past history of the world would be darkness to him, and not knowing what those who came before him had done for him, he would probably care little to do anything for those who are to come after him. Life would be to him a chain of sand, while it ought to be a kind of electric chain that makes our hearts tremble and vibrate with the most ancient thoughts of the past, as well as with the most distant hopes of the future.