The scope of history has gradually widened till it has come to include every aspect of the life of humanity.  No one would now dare to maintain with my old master Seeley that history was the biography of States or with Freeman that it was merely past politics.  The growth of nations, the achievements of men of action, the rise and fall of parties remain among the most engrossing themes of the historian; but he now casts his net wider and embraces the whole opulent record of civilization.  The influence of nature, the pressure of economic factors, the origin and transformation of ideas, the contribution of science and art, religion and philosophy, literature and law, the material conditions of life, the fortunes of the masses—­such problems now claim his attention in no less degree.  He must see life steadily and see it whole.  We must master such revealing works as Lecky’s histories of Rationalism and Morals, Burckhardt’s and Symonds’ interpretations of the Italian Renaissance, Sainte-Beuve’s full-length portrait of the Jansenists, Morley’s studies of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists, Dean Church’s sketch of the Oxford Movement, and Merz’s survey of European Thought in the nineteenth century, if we are to understand the throbbing life of the human spirit.  We must measure the operation of economic factors and forces and profit by the faithful labours of Schmoller and Thorold Rogers, Cunningham and Kovalevsky, the Webbs and the Hammonds, if we are to visualize the life of the unnumbered and the unknown who have done the routine work of the world.

The fifty years roughly sketched in this lecture witnessed an immense and almost immeasurable advance in historical studies.  The technique needed to turn raw materials into the finished article kept pace with the supply, and men learned to write the history of their own country, their own party, and their own beliefs, as impartially as that of other lands and other creeds.  But the Great War has ravaged the placid pastures of scholarship no less than the fields of France and Belgium.  Too many historians in every belligerent country have lost their heads and degenerated into shrieking partisans.  International co-operation in the pursuit of truth, which is the condition of progress in history no less than in science, has been rudely shattered by the clash of arms.  With all but the calmest minds, national self-consciousness and national self-righteousness have rendered frankness in dealing with the record of our late allies and fairness in dealing with our late enemies difficult if not impossible.  Many years will elapse before the European atmosphere regains the tranquillity in which alone the disinterested pursuit of truth can nourish.  Meanwhile it is a source of legitimate satisfaction that while the world was rocking to its foundations two English historians, Sir Adolphus Ward and Mr. William Harbutt Dawson, were narrating the development of Germany in the nineteenth century with a steadiness of pulse unsurpassed in the piping times of peace.  The historian is a man of flesh and blood and may love his country as ardently as other men; but, if he is to be worthy of his high calling, he must trample passion and prejudice under his feet and walk humbly and reverently in the temple of the Goddess of Truth.