We have constantly to check ourselves in reading history with the remembrance that, to the actors in the drama, events appeared very differently from the way they appear to us. We know what they were doing far better than they knew themselves. We are in the position of the novel reader who looks, before he begins to read, to see how the plot turns out. This orderly and dramatic chronicle of history that thrills us as we read has only been orderly and dramatic to readers of the present time, who can see the _dénouement_ of the story. History is peculiarly the creation of the present. Even the great men of the past are largely the agglomerations of centuries of hero-worship. Genius is as much a slow accretion of the ages as an endowment of man. Few great poets were seen in the full glory of their superhuman capacity by their fellows. Contemporary opinion of the great has been complimentary but seldom excessively laudatory, and there are sad instances of the decay and deflation of a supernatural personality through the smooth, gentle, imperceptibly creeping oblivion of the centuries. We rarely see what is distinctive in our own time. The city builders of the West are quite unconscious of the fact that they are leaving behind them imperishable and mighty memorials of themselves. Few of the things that we admire now will be considered by posterity as noteworthy and distinctive of our age. All depends on the vitality of our customs and social habits, and some show as high a mortality as others do a stubborn tenacity of life. What we are witnessing is a gigantic struggle of customs and ideas to survive and propagate their kind. The means of subsistence is limited; it is impossible that all should be able to live. The fascinating problem for the social philosopher is which of these beliefs and tendencies will prove strong enough to overcome their rivals and make their stock a permanent type. How many of the fads and brilliant theories and new habits of thought and taste will be able to maintain their place in the world? If we could discern them, we should know the distinction of our age. Definite epochs of the past we distinguish and celebrate because they contained the germs of ideas or the roots of institutions that still survive among us, or customs and habits of thought that flourished in them with great brilliancy but have now utterly passed away. Now these beginnings are quite too subtle for us to see in our contemporary life, and there are so many brilliancies that it is impossible to pick out with any definiteness the things which have power to project themselves into the future, and cast a broad trail of light back to our age. Most of those very things that seem to us imperishable will be the ones to fade,--fade, indeed, so gradually that they will not even be missed. It is this gradual disappearance that gives the most thorough oblivion. History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.