This has been done by the inventions that have given us steam and electricity as motive forces, making transport quicker and cheaper, and by the application of electricity to the transmission of words. No changes that have occurred in the past (except perhaps changes in the sphere of religion) are comparable in their importance as factors in history to those which have shortened the voyage from Western Europe to America to five and a half days, and made communication with Australia instantaneous. For the first time the human race, always essentially one, has begun to feel itself one, and civilised man has in every part of it become a contemporaneous observer of what passes in every other part. The general result of these various changes has been that while the materials for writing a history of the world have been increased, the conception of what such a history should be has been at the same time both enlarged and defined. Its scope is wider; its lines are more clearly drawn. But what do we mean by a Universal History? Briefly, a History which shall, first, include all the races and tribes of man within its scope; and, secondly, shall bring all these races and tribes into a connection with one another such as to display their annals as an organic whole. [Sidenote: Importance of the Small Races] Universal history has to deal not only with the great nations, but also with the small nations; not only with the civilised, but also with the barbarous or savage peoples; not only with the times of movement and progress, but also with the times of silence and apparent stagnation. Every fraction of humanity has contributed something to the common stock, and has lived and laboured not for itself only, but for others also, through the influence which it has perforce exercised on its neighbours. The only exceptions we can imagine are the inhabitants of some remote isle, “far placed amid the melancholy main.” Yet they, too, must have once formed part of a race dwelling in the region whence they came, even if that race had died out in its old home before civilised man set foot on such an oceanic isle in a later age. The world would have been different, in however small a measure, had they never existed. As in the realm of physical science, so in that of history no fact is devoid of significance, though the true significance may remain long unnoticed. The history of the backward races presents exceptional difficulties, because they have no written records, and often scarcely any oral traditions. Sometimes it reduces itself to a description of their usages and state of life, their arts and their superstitions, at the time when civilised observers first visited them. Yet that history is instructive, not only because the phenomena observable among such races enlarge our knowledge, but also because through the study of those which survive we are able to interpret the scanty records we possess of the early condition of peoples now civilised, and to go