The last and greatest of the triumvirate, Treitschke, the Bismarck of the Chair, devoted his life to a history of Germany in the nineteenth century which occupies the same unique place in the affections of German readers as Macaulay’s unfinished masterpiece enjoys throughout the English-speaking world.  Unlike the works of Droysen and Sybel, the German History was far more than a political narrative, and presented an encyclopaedic picture of national development.  His theme was the conflict of the forces which were promoting and opposing the transformation of his country into a powerful Empire, and he judges men and states by the measure in which they promoted or obstructed that purpose.  On the one side stands Prussia, feeling her way to the realization of her historic task, on the other the middle and smaller states, aided and abetted by the arch-enemy Austria and deeply infected with the doctrinaire liberalism of France.  Treitschke’s stage is a battlefield, with the historian looking down and encouraging his friends with loud cries of applause.  Such methods could not survive the realization of the aim which they had done so much to assist, and with Treitschke’s death in 1896 the Prussian School disappeared.  Its members were the political schoolmasters of Germany at a time of uncertainty and discouragement, and they braced their countrymen to the efforts which culminated in the creation of a mighty Empire.  If the purpose of history is to stir a nation to action, Droysen, Sybel, and Treitschke are among the greatest masters of the craft.  If its supreme aim is to discover truth and to interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim to a place in the first class.  The stream, temporarily deflected by their powerful influence, began to return to the channel which Ranke had marked out for it.  Such works as Moriz Ritter’s narrative of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Koser’s biography of Frederick the Great, Max Lehmann’s biographies of Scharnhorst and Stein, and Erich Marcks’ studies of Bismarck and his master are as notable for their judgement as for their erudition.

The cooling process noted in the Old World has also occurred in the New, and America of the twentieth century smiles at Bancroft’s complacent idealization of the Puritan colonies.  Even the slavery struggle, the ashes of which are scarcely yet cold, has found in James Ford Rhodes a historian who can do justice to Jefferson Davis and Lee no less than to Lincoln and Grant.  But no American scholar compares in world-wide influence with Mahan, whose study of Sea-Power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, published in 1889, not only founded a school of naval history but was inwardly digested by distinguished pupils in both hemispheres, among them the Emperor William II and Theodore Roosevelt.  The Admiral’s writings owe their importance not to research, for few new facts are brought to light, but to the new angle from which familiar events are envisaged.  Occasionally, perhaps, the element of sea-power in the determination of a particular result is over-emphasized at the expense of other factors; but he was the first to seize the wider bearings of naval history and to make the general reader aware of its momentous significance.