his own history and usages, which he wishes to preserve and unfortunately-also to force upon the othGerman persecuted Magyar until 1867; to-day the liberated Magyar lords it over the Slav and Rou

ers.

manian. And the Roumanian, in turn, persecutes the Bulgarian in the Dobrudja, which he conquered from Bulgaria in 1913. The only hope lies in a federation, and a chance for each-but is it possible?

By the time of the American Revolution the population of the English colonies upon the Atlantic was already of mixed stock; but however significant for our later history the infusions of Dutch, Scotch, Roman Catholic and Protestant Irish, Huguenots, and German sectarians - to mention only some of the more important strains - it was the earlier English immigrants who began the settlement of the colonies and laid the enduring foundations of institutional life, and it was into these English ways of doing things and these English habits of thought that the others gradually fell. An enlightening instance of this process may be found in the trial of the German John Peter Zenger, in which the Dutch Rip van Dam had been involved, and in which a Scotch lawyer played a leading role-all in relation to the English law of libel.

The first element in colonial civilization that stamped it as English was, of course, the mothertongue. Politically this was very important: the two countries needed no interpreter. With this went, too, a cultural union based on a common literary heritage, religious and secular. Both the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare have been possessions of America as well as of England. The very ballads of our mountaineers, handed down for generations by word of mouth, are living reminders of the age of colonization.

Secondly, when the English settlement took place the period of the Reformation had not yet closed. England, if she had concluded to remain Protestant, had not decided just how Protestant her State Church should be, and there had begun to be those who disliked any State Church at all. The indecision at home was reflected in the colonies, with the difference that the conservative elements would always tend to be weaker, and the radical elements to be stronger. A common opposition to Roman Catholicism, moreover, would be for awhile a national bond between the English in their old and their new homes.

Thirdly, there are to be considered the institutions which we call political. In seventeenth century England these, like the religious, were in unstable equilibrium. At no time were the claims of the monarchy greater than under James I and Charles I: within a few years England made her sole experiment of a republican government. In normal times the monarchy, with the Privy Council, the royal officers, and the courts, bore daily upon the life of every citizen. In the colonies, on the contrary, the king was usually but a name, and there was little to make real the working of the central government, so powerful at

home. The other great factor in the central government, the House of Commons, influenced the colonists in two contrasting ways. On the one hand the "Mother of Parliaments was the model for the colonial assemblies, which, both in the "corporate" colonies and, more particularly, in the "provinces," repeated in miniature the English struggle between the legislature and the executive. On the other hand the House of Commons, viewed as a part of the home government was, like the king, far removed from the daily life of the Americans. In the early days there was, indeed, a disposition to appeal colonial interests from the king to the Parliament. But as time progressed and the real power in England passed from the crown to the Commons, and laws were passed which the colonists thought bore hardly upon them, the dislike which had attached to royal interference was transferred to Parliament. It is not too much to say that one great cause of the American Revolution was the fact that Parliament, which in England did stand for what there was of political progress, failed of this end as to the colonists.

But it was in the field of local government that the institutional life in England was most completely reproduced in the colonies. The English county and the English parish reappeared, with changes, to be sure, in the settlements in New England and in the South. In the New England township, in the hundreds, manors, parishes, and counties of the South, and in the officers whose duties were connected with these divisions, was laid the real substructure of the political life of the colonies, to be passed on, later, through the land-system of the United States, and through the pioneers, to the younger generations of the West.

A word remains to be said as to the legal and political ideas of the colonists. They were constantly claiming the "rights of Englishmen "--but what were these rights? An English official might gruffly reduce these to the sole one "not to be sold as slaves." On the other hand the elder Dulany, in a pamphlet, "The Right of the Inhabitants of Maryland to the Benefit of the English Laws" laid claim both to the common law, and to the statutes of England. "No one can tell," said another, "what is law and what is not in the plantations." The problem was a complicated one, and was made more so by the fact that the colonial courts, rather than those of England, had the matter in their keeping. The question of appeals to England arose, as it was bound to do. By way of summary it may be said that English law was at the very foundation of the legal ideas of the colonies, but

that the adoption of English law was accomplished by an irregular selective process, and that no complete system applicable everywhere had been worked out when the Revolution took place. As to the whole matter, the relation of Ireland to the English Parliament, and the great question of our own history, "Does the Constitution follow the flag?" offer interesting bases for comparison.

Finally, we must not forget the influence of political philosophy. From the beginning of settlement un

During the past twenty-five years there has been a marked change in the content of the courses in history as given in our schools and colleges. One of the results of this change has been the almost complete elimination of the military phase. Whereas in former years the greater part of the course in American history, in the schools at least, consisted of rather detailed accounts of the wars in which our country had become engaged, in recent years these wars have been dealt with in such reduced form as to make them constitute only a very small part of the course. The fascinating accounts of Schenectady, Louisburg, Quebec, Saratoga, Yorktown, New Orleans, Chapultepec, Bull Run and Gettysburg that adorned the pages of our earlier text-books have disappeared altogether, and in their place we have a few brief statements outlining the different campaigns with little or nothing of incident or detail.

Political history, by the way, has been dealt with in the same summary fashion. We no longer proceed through the pages of our history by presidential administrations, noting in chronological order the events that occurred in each, whether they were of great importance or not. Indeed we have come to such a state as to ignore the existence of some of our worthy chief executives and to pass them over without even the mere mention of their names. A recent text-book for the seventh and eighth grades that has found ready favor fails to mention the names of four of our presidents. Such a thing as this would have been an impossibility when presidential administrations were taken as the indispensable mile-posts in American history, and when politics was given equal emphasis along with wars.

What has happened in American history has also happened in ancient, medieval and modern and English history. We no longer study at great length the Græco-Persian, the Peloponnesian, and the Punic wars. Neither do we go into detail concerning the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, the campaigns of Frederick the Great and of Napoleon, and the Franco-Prussian War. Marathon, Syracuse, Cannae, Crecy, Bosworth Field, Rossbach, Austerlitz, and Sedan take but little of our time, and have come to be scarcely more than mere names in a diminishing

catalogue of military engagements that are still allowed to find a place in our text-books. Likewise we have discontinued to recount the personal deeds and exploits of kings and princes, and many of the heroes that once stood out very prominently in our earlier histories are now passed over in absolute silence.

If we turn for an explanation for this tendency to eliminate the military and the political phases from our courses in history, we shall find it in the widespread desire to consider in some detail the social and the economic phases of history. We have lost interest in military and political strifes because we have become more concerned in finding out how men lived, what institutions they created and developed, and what ideals and motives controlled their actions. We have been pleased to let the common man crowd the ruler and the warrior off the stage of history in many of its scenes, and to make the conditions in which he lived the chief topic of our study in history.

This interest in the social and the economic phases of history that has arisen in recent times has been due primarily to the increasing interest that we have been taking in our present-day problems. Under the leadership of the sociologist, the economist, and the political scientist we have in the last few years thought more on the welfare of society than ever before. As a people we have been going through a process of socialization. It was therefore perfectly natural that our growing interest in the social and the economic conditions of to-day should react upon our interest in the past and should lead us to attempt to approach the past from the same point of view as that of the present. It is no wonder, therefore, that we shoved the purely military and political phases of history to one side and made room for these newer phases. Not to have done so would have left us out of harmony with ourselves.

In taking into account this shifting of interest from the military and the political to the social and the economic phases of history, we must not ignore the influence of the pacifist and the socialist. Their hatred of war and their repeated declarations and assurances prior to 1914 that there would be no more great wars not only lulled us to sleep and made us feel secure against the probability of the renewal of

war, but they contributed very materially to the growing dislike toward war as a subject for study in our courses in history.

All these familiar facts regarding the study and the teaching of history in our schools and colleges have been reviewed for the purpose of raising the question as to what effects the present war is going to have on our future attitude toward the military phase of history. The greatest war in all history has been going on for over three years. As a nation we have passed from the position of spectator to that of active participant. We are just beginning to awake to the full significance of the war and are eagerly watching its progress and development. When it shall have drawn to a close and the time shall have come to give it a place in our courses in history, will the text-book writer deal with it in the same manner in which he has been accustomed to deal with former wars? Will the history teacher be content to pass over it in the same summary fashion in which he has run over the great struggles of former times? Not by any means. For a generation at least this war will be recounted in our classrooms with a great wealth of detail, much of which will be concerned with the purely military phase. The invasion of Belgium, the battles of the Marne and the Aisne, the bombardment of Rheims, the siege of Verdun, the fall and recapture of Przemysl, the capture of Warsaw, the inundation of Serbia and of Roumania, the failure of the Gallipolis campaign, the surrender of Kut-el-Amara, and the capture of Bagdad; the sinking of the Lusitania, and the awful unrestricted submarine warfare; the Zeppelin attacks and the aeroplane engagements; the horrible atrocities committed by the Germans on Belgians and Poles, and by the Turks on the Armenians-all these things, together with the events that are yet to follow, especially the engagements in which our own troops will take part, will be related and discussed by our pupils and students in the classroom for years to come. The Kaiser, von Hindenburg, Lloyd George, Joffre, Kerensky and Pershing, together with a great many other names, will live a long, long while, some of them as long as history will be recounted. Many of these men, it should be noted, will be known only for their connection with this war in a military capacity.

It is expected that as the years pass by and the present conflict recedes more and more into the background, less attention will be given to it by the historians of the future than by the historians of the present. The student of fifty years hence will, of course, be interested in it, as will also the student of a thousand years from now, but with different dgrees of interest from that which we now have in it. Perhaps their interest will be comparable to that which the present generation has in the Civil War of the sixties and the wars of Hannibal and Cæsar. But whatever may be the interest of the future students of history in the present world-wide war, there is no denying the fact that this war is of paramount importance to us now, and that it will bulk large in our history courses for a generation at least. Not only

will the subject be given considerable attention, but many of the rules that have been observed in the treatment of wars as topics in history will be completely discarded. The battles of the Marne and the Aisne, for example, are not going to be considered as mere events, just to be barely mentioned as we nowadays mention Waterloo, Gettysburg, and Sedan — and pass on. and pass on. They are going to be explained in detail. Maps will be drawn, numerous pictures will be used, and many incidents will be told. Moreover, many other noteworthy military engagements in this war will be dealt with in like manner.

But more important than the place we are going to give this war in our history courses is the question as to what will be the effects of this interest in the purely military phase of the present war upon the manner in which we shall treat the history of former wars. Will we continue to deal with them in the same summary manner of the last few years, or will we put into their study something of the method by which we approach and deal with the present war? In attempting an answer to this question we shall always need to keep in mind the time element in our curricula. History is not the only subject offered in our educational institutions, neither is it the same in content from year to year as mathematics and the languages are. It is a rapidly expanding subject and it has to compete with other subjects, many of which are new and are insistent on recognition. It is, therefore, impossible for the history teacher to do all with his subject that he would like to do. He must be content to confine himself within a limited amount of time and to a limited number of topics. Recognizing these restrictions that rest upon the study of history as a subject in our curricula, let us see whether any change can be or should be made in our treatment of the great wars of former times.

At the outset let us admit that wars can not be entirely eliminated from history. The social scientists, the socialists and the pacifists have succeeded in reducing it to its lowest terms, but as long as history continues to be pursued as a subject of study, war will always remain a constituent element in that subject. Even supposing that wars should cease and that this one should prove to be the last, it would be doing violence to the subject if we should ignore war as a phase of history when it did exist.

Starting, then, with the proposition that war will always constitute a part of the content of the study of history, we may ask whether we should return to the old method of dealing with war and once more make it the chief topic. May we be saved from such a fall from grace as that! Far better to pursue our present method than to revert to what has been abandoned. But the present war is provoking us to ask questions about wars and warfare that we have seldom thought of; or, if we thought of them, we did not consider them worth pursuing very far. Let us see what suggestions we can get from some of these questions. For example, the very methods and agencies of destruction employed in the present war raise the question as to the methods and agencies employed in earlier

wars. Many of those in use to-day are new. The aeroplane and the submarine have come into effective use in this war as implements of warfare for the first time. New explosives and new types of guns and projectiles have been introduced. Even the trench has been so systematically used as to make it appear to most people as altogether new, though as a matter of fact breastworks and sapping have long been in use. The present war has been marked also for the immense numbers of men under arms and confronting each other, and for the manner in which, after the first few weeks, it settled down to a series of duels between sectors of the almost continuous line of trenches surrounding the Central Powers.

Now these familiar facts concerning the present war ought to furnish us with at least one very definite problem as we approach the study of the wars of the past, namely, what were the methods and agencies employed in those wars? Suppose we should take up this problem in connection with the Punic wars, the campaigns of Cæsar, and the Napoleonic wars. We should not only see Hannibal crossing the Alps, Cæsar pursuing the Gauls, and Napoleon humbling the Austrians, but we should become acquainted with the methods of making war that were characteristic of these men, and would thus get a new view of the times in which they lived. Furthermore, if some sort of an effort was made to study the arms and armament used, not in just one or two wars, but in the various wars from earliest times to the present, we would be able to trace the evolution of the science of warfare from the simple stone hatchet of primitive times to the complicated enginery of destruction used to-day. In tracing this evolution we should see how in the longdrawn-out series of conflicts one type of weapon displaces another, how a new weapon demands a new means of defense, and how this new means of defense produces the necessity of a new method of offense. This method of procedure would add to our opportunities to discover the principle of continuity in history, which is one of the most desired ends to be attained in the study of the subject. We might also perceive the futility of one nation trying to outstrip another in armament. The history of warfare shows that when nations attempt to outdo each other in preparation for war, they enter upon a practically neverending race, which becomes swifter and more exhausting as it continues. Let the historian and the history teacher make that fact clear to the students of this generation and they will in time contribute greatly to the forces that are making for the ultimate disarmament of the nations of the world and for the league to enforce peace.

In undertaking to develop the methods of warfare employed from time to time, it might be well to study some of the great battles in detail. A study of Hastings, Crecy, Luetzen, Mantua and Sedan, for example, would afford an opportunity to bring out the methods of warfare of William the Conqueror, the Black Prince, Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon, Von Von Moltke, and other men of their times.

However important it may be to trace the evolution of the modern methods of warfare from their earliest beginnings, it is still more important to attempt to get at the significance of the great wars of the past, especially those of modern times. Every history teacher raises the question with his classes as to the causes and the effects of the Thirty Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, and the great Napoleonic wars, and he doubtless takes up for discussion the terms upon which these wars were brought to a close. Now it so happens that the wars just mentioned have some interesting points in common with each other and with the present war. For one thing, all the leading powers of Europe were involved in each of these wars. Again, in each some one power was attempting to dominate all the rest of Europe. What an opportunity there is here for comparing the situation then and now! What new interest can be given to the Treaty of Westphalia, the Treaty of Utrecht, and the Congress of Vienna, when it is understood that they brought about a resettlement of all of Europe, just as in some future congress the affairs of the world are going to be resettled. What a fine problem can be set before the students for them to work out as they proceed with their study of modern times! Given the map of Europe in the sixteenth century and as it was at the opening of the present war: show how through the wars of the intervening period the map of the sixteenth century became that of 1914. When the present war is closed, extend that problem down to date. problem down to date. In solving that problem it will be seen, among other things, how the dominance of Spain in the sixteenth century gave way to that of France in the seventeenth century, and how England supplanted France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how Germany has risen. with ambitions "to make for herself a place in the sun" in these latter years. It is only by thinking of the great wars of modern times as constituting a series, and not as isolated struggles, that we get at their real significance and their bearing upon the present-day conditions.

From what has been said it would seem that the present war is reviving our interest in the military phase of history and is forcing upon us a reconsideration of the significance of the great wars of the past. Once more we see how history as a subject for study adjusts itself to conform to the dominating interests of the times. That this renaissance in the military phase of history will remain unchanged and undiminished for all time to come is not to be expected, especially if we should some day enter upon a period of permanent world-wide peace. But for the present the study of wars is again finding favor. The military historian is coming back into his own. Let it be hoped that this revival of interest in military history will contribute not only to a better understanding of the past, but to the making of wars an impossibility in the future!

The Bulletin on Social Studies recently published by the National Bureau of Education, and already familiar to readers of THE HISTORY TEACHER'S MAGAZINE,' offers to the teacher of European history much food for thought. Hitherto the special aims in teaching European history have been only vaguely defined. In this report, however, the committee in charge, which bears the rather formidable name of the Committee on Social Studies of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education of the National Education Association, lays special emphasis on the function of the history of other nations in the schools as an instrument for inculcating an international spirit in distinction from the aim of the study of American history, which is the development of national patriotism. In the words of the report: 'One of the conscious purposes of instruction in the history of nations other than our own should be the cultivation of a sympathetic understanding of such nations and their peoples, of an intelligent appreciation of their contributions to civilization and of a just attitude toward them."

In the furtherance of that aim it has been proposed that one year of the history course in the high school be supplemented by a course called "A Study of Nations," starting with the present condition of typical modern nations and using the history of each nation as an explanation of its present place in civilization. The hope is expressed that history, used in this way, may tend to reduce friction in international relations, as such friction often results from popular clamor, born of a lack of understanding of foreign nations," that it may "help to a truer understanding and appreciation of the foreigners who come to our shores," and 'lead us to be more helpful in our relations with backward peoples." These suggestions, made by Clarence D. Kingsley, the chairman of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, have been further elaborated by him in an article in "School and Society." 2 'The idea should be developed," Mr. Kingsley says in part, "that 'that every nation has or may have something of worth to contribute to other nations, and to humanity as a whole. . . . This conception of the supplementary value of the dissimilarities of the different nations and peoples, together with the ideal of human brotherhood, which is generally thought of in terms of es

sential similarity, should do much to establish genuine internationalism, free from sentiment, founded on fact, and actually operative in the affairs of nations."

The proposed course in the "Study of Nations commended itself to the mind of the writer for several reasons. First, the point of approach from the present day seemed to offer to the beginner in history a more inviting prospect than the traditional mode of procedure. The first pages of the text-books are generally sufficiently uninspiring to deter all but the most ambitious from any further voluntary pursuit of the subject. Only rarely is any attempt made to enlist the interest of the pupil as a means to the effective mobilization of his intellectual forces. The writer once asked a class of beginners why they were going to study history. They replied promptly and unanimously, "Because we have to." When asked why they supposed the learned men who decide what subjects shall be required for admission to college had included history among the requirements, they were at a loss. Finally two or more ventured the explanation: "Because, if they didn't, there would be no more history teachers." The incident was a painful revelation. If a subject so full of richness and variety as history offers to the beginner no more alluring vista than an unbroken line of history teachers, clearly a new way of approach must be found. Just now the great war has set the whole adult world to searching the facts of history in the hope of finding explanation of its strange phenomena. Why not use it in the same way to minister to the need of high school pupils?

Moreover, this use of current events as an approach to history bids fair to free the teacher from the constant temptation to cheapen history in order to popularize it. So much has been said of the necessity of

making history interesting," that teachers have resorted to every device in the effort to lighten its traditional burden of dullness. Some have gone into the show business, more or less legitimately. Others have placed their reliance on colored crayon, and have apparently measured the value of their historical instruction by the amount of manual labor they have extracted from the pupils. extracted from the pupils. The proposed course calls for no such artificial stimulus. It meets the pupil at the point of his present interest, and there ministers to his growth, according to the most approved modern pedagogy. The teacher is a guide, not a task master, and his most insidious temptation is removed.