I am approaching the subject of this lecture (essay) with considerable trepidation. I know that among my hearers (readers) there are professional historians whom I greatly respect, and I should not at all wish to seem desirous of instructing them as to how their work should be done. I shall write as a consumer, not a producer. In shops they have a maxim: "The customer is always right." But academic persons (among whom I should wish to include myself) are more lordly than shopkeepers: if the consumer does not like what he is offered, that is because he is a Philistine and because he does not know what is good for him. Up to a point I sympathize with this attitude. It would never do for a mathematician to try to please the general reader. The physical sciences in their serious aspects must be addressed primarily to specialists, though their more adventurous practitioners write occasional books designed to make your flesh creep. But such books are not regarded by their fellow scientists as part of their serious work, and detract from, rather than add to, their professional reputation. I think that in this respect history is in a position different from that of mathematics and physical science. There have to be physicists, worse luck, and there have to be mathematicians until calculating machines become cheaper, but when that happy consummation has been reached, there will be no point in teaching anybody to do sums, and the multiplication table can be placed alongside the birch as an out-of-date instrument of education. But history seems to me to be in a different category. The multiplication table, though useful, can hardly be called beautiful. It is seldom that essential wisdom in regard to human destiny is to be found by remembering even its more difficult items. History, on the other hand, is so I shall contend a desirable part of everybody's mental furniture in the same kind of way as is generally recognized in the case of poetry. If history is to fulfill this function, it can only do so by appealing to those who are not professional historians. I have myself always found very great interest in the reading of history, and I have been grateful to those historians who gave me what I, as a consumer, though not a producer, was looking for in their books. It is from this point of view that I wish to speak (write). I wish to set forth what those who are not historians ought to get from history. And this is a theme upon which you will, I think, admit that non-historians have a right to express an opinion.
There has been much argumentation, to my mind somewhat futile, as to whether history is a science or an art. It should, I think, have been entirely obvious that it is both. Trevelyan's Social History of England indubitably deserves praise from the artistic point of view, but I remember finding in it a statement to the effect that England's maritime greatness was due to a change in the habits of herrings. I know nothing about herrings, so I accept this statement on authority. My point is that it is a piece of science, and that its scientific character in no way detracts from the artistic value of Trevelyan's work. Nevertheless, the work of historians can be divided into two branches, according as the scientific or the artistic motive predominates.
When people speak of history as a science, there are two very different things that may be meant. There is a comparatively pedestrian sense in which science is involved in ascertaining historical facts. This is especially important in early history, where evidence is both scarce and obscure, but it arises also in more recent times whenever, as is apt to be the case, there is a conflict of testimony. How much are we to believe of Procopius? Is there anything of historical value to be made out of Napoleon's lucubrations in St. Helena? Such questions are in a sense scientific, since they concern the weight to be attached to different sources of evidence. They are matters as to which the historian may justifiably address himself to other historians, since the considerations involved are likely to be obscure and specialized. Work of this sort is presupposed in any attempt to write large-scale history. History, however much it may be pursued as an art, has to be controlled by the attempt to be true to fact. Truth to fact is a rule of the art, but does not in itself confer artistic excellence. It is like the rules of the sonnet, which can be scrupulously observed without conferring merit on the result. But history cannot be praiseworthy, even from the most purely artistic point of view, unless the historian does his utmost to preserve fidelity to the facts. Science in this sense is ab- solutely essential to the study of history.
There is another sense in which history attempts to be scientific, and this sense raises more difficult questions. In this sense history seeks to discover causal laws connecting different facts, in the same sort of way in which physical sciences have succeeded in discovering interconnections among facts. The attempt to discover such causal laws in history is entirely praiseworthy, but I do not think that it is what gives the most value to historical studies. I found an admirable discussion of this matter in an essay which I had read forty years ago and largely forgotten: I mean George Trevelyan's Clio, a Muse. He points out that in history we are interested in the particular facts and not only in their causal relations. It may be, as some have suggested, that Napoleon lost the Battle of Leipzig because he ate a peach after the Battle of Dresden. If this is the case, it is no doubt not without interest. But the events which it connects are on their own account much more interesting. In physical science, exactly the opposite is true. Eclipses, for example, are not very interesting in themselves except when they give fixed points in very early history, as is the case with the eclipse in Asia Minor which helps to date Thales and the eclipse in China in 776 B.C. (Some authorities say that it was in 775 B.C. I leave this question to historians and astronomers.) But although most eclipses are not interesting in themselves, the laws which determine their recurrence are of the very highest interest, and the discovery of these laws was of immense importance in dispelling superstition. Similarly, the experimental facts upon which modern physics is based would be totally uninteresting if it were not for the causal laws that they help to establish. But history is not like this. Most of the value of history is lost if we are not interested in the things that happen for their own sakes. In this respect history is like poetry. There is a satisfaction to curiosity in discovering why Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan" as he did, but this satisfaction is a trivial affair compared to that which we derive from the poem itself.
I do not mean to deny that it is a good thing to discover causal sequences in history when it is possible, but I think the possibility exists only in rather limited fields. Gresham's law that bad money drives out good is an example of one of the best established of such causal sequences. The whole science of economics, in so far as it is valid, consists of causal laws illustrated by historical facts. But as everybody now recognizes, supposed laws of economics have a much more temporary and local validity than was thought a hundred years ago. One of the difficulties in searching for such laws is that there is not so much recurrence in history as in astronomy. It may be true, as Meyers maintains in his little book on The Dawn of History, that on four separate occasions drought in Arabia has caused a wave of Semitic conquest, but it is hardly to be supposed that the same cause would produce the same effect at the present day. Even when historical causal sequences are established as regards the past, there is not much reason to expect that they will hold in the future, because the relevant facts are so complex that unforeseeable changes may falsify our predictions. No historian, however scientific, could have predicted in the fourteenth century the changes brought about by Columbus and Vasco da Gama. For these reasons I think that scientific laws in history are neither so important nor so discoverable as is sometimes maintained.
This applies with especial force to those large schemes of historical development which have fascinated many eminent men from St. Augustine to Professor Toynbee. In modern times, the most important inventors of general theories as to human development, have been Hegel and his disciple Marx. Both believed that the history of the past obeyed a logical schema, and that this same schema gave a means of foretelling the future. Neither foresaw the hydrogen bomb, and no doctrine of human development hitherto concocted enables us to foresee the effects of this ingenious device. If this reflection seems gloomy, I will add another of a more cheerful sort: I cannot accept the view of Spengler that every society must inevitably grow old and decay like an individual human body. I think this view results from unduly pressing the analogy between a social and an individual organism. Most societies have perished by assassination, and not by old age. Some might maintain that Chinese society has been decrepit ever since the fall of the Han dynasty; but it survived because the countries immediately to the west of China were sparsely inhabited. What has put an end to the traditional civilization of China is not any new inherent weakness, but the improvement In means of communication with the West. Some among the Stoics thought that the world would be periodically destroyed by fire and then recreated. There is evidently something in this view which suits men's preconceptions, and in milder forms it underlies almost all general theories of human development that historians have invented. All alike, I should say, are no more than myths, agreeable or disagreeable according to the temperaments of their inventors.
There is a department of history which has always interested me, perhaps beyond its intrinsic importance. It is that of bypaths in history: communities which have become isolated from the main current of their parent countries, but have trickled by unforeseen courses into the main stream of quite other rivers. From this point of view I have long been fascinated by the Bactrian Greeks. I thought that they had been completely lost, like a river absorbed by the desert, and then I learned, to my no small delight, that they had become the source of Buddhist art and had inspired the statuary of the East through many ages and in many lands. Another example of the same kind of bypath is that of the Bogomils in Bulgaria, who were obscure disciples of Marcian and Mani, and whose doctrines, by means of certain misguided crusaders, were adopted by the Cathari in northern Italy and the Albigenses in southern France. A still more remarkable example of the same kind of thing appears in the history of New England. From early boyhood I had known of Pride's Purge, when the haughty soldier caused the Long Parliament to tremble in the name of theological truth and the wages due to the army. But it had never occurred to me to wonder what became of Pride after 1660. In 1896 I was taken to a place in New England called Pride's Crossing, and was informed that it was called after the eponymous hero of the Purge. I learned that he had had to leave his native country and settle upon a wild and rocky shore where the winter was long, the soil infertile, and the Indians dangerous. It might have seemed to Charles II and his courtiers that Pride had met his deserts, but after two and a half centuries his descendants rule the world and the descendants of Charles II tremble at their frown.
I come now to my main theme, which is what history can do and should do for the general reader. I am not thinking of what history does for historians; I am thinking of history as an essential part of the furniture of an educated mind. We do not think that poetry should be read only by poets, or that music should be heard only by composers. And, in like manner, history should not be known only to historians. But clearly the kind of history which is to contribute to the mental life of those who are not historians must have certain qualities that more professional work need not have, and, conversely, does not require certain things which one would look for in a learned monograph. I will try to speak (write) though I find it very difficult what I feel that I personally have derived from the reading of history. I should put first and foremost something like a new dimension in the individual life, a sense of being a drop in a great river rather than a tightly bounded separate entity. The man whose interests are bounded by the short span between his birth and death has a myopic vision and a limitation of outlook which can hardly fail to narrow the scope of his hopes and desires. And what applies to an individual man, applies also to a community. Those communities that have as yet little history make upon a European a curious impression of thinness and isolation. They do not feel themselves the inheritors of the ages, and for that reason what they aim at transmitting to their successors seems jejune and emotionally poor to one in whom the past is vivid and the future is illuminated by knowledge of the slow and painful achievements of former times. History makes one aware that there is no finality in human affairs; there is not a static perfection and an unimprovable wisdom to be achieved. Whatever wisdom we may have achieved is a small matter in comparison with what is possible. Whatever beliefs we may cherish, even those that we deem most important, are not likely to last forever; and, if we imagine that they embody eternal verities, the future is likely to make a mock of us. Cocksure certainty is the source of much that is worst in our present world, and it is something of which the contemplation of history ought to cure us, not only or chiefly because there were wise men in the past, but because so much that was thought wisdom turned out to be folly which suggests that much of our own supposed wisdom is no better.
I do not mean to maintain that we should lapse into a lazy skepticism. We should hold our beliefs, and hold them strongly. Nothing great is achieved without passion, but underneath the passion there should always be that large impersonal survey which sets limits to actions that our passions inspire. If you think ill of Communism or Capitalism, should you exterminate the human race in order that there may be no more Communists or Capitalists as the case may be? Few people would deliberately assert that this would be wise, and yet it is a consummation toward which some politicians who are not historically minded seem to be leading mankind. This is an extreme example, but it is by no means difficult to think of innumerable others.
Leaving these general and rather discursive considerations, let us come to the question how history should be written if it is to produce the best possible result in the non-historical reader. Here there is first of all an extremely simple requirement: it must be interesting. I mean that it must be interesting not only to men who for some special reason wish to know some set of historical facts, but to those who are reading in the same spirit in which one reads poetry or a good novel This requires first and foremost that the historian should have feelings about the events that he is relating and the characters that he is portraying. It is of course imperative that the historian should not distort facts, but it is not imperative that he should not take sides in the clashes and conflicts that fill his pages. An historian who is impartial, in the sense of not liking one party better than another and not allowing himself to have heroes and villains among his characters, will be a dull writer. If the reader is to be interested, he must be allowed to take sides in the drama. If this causes an historian to be one-sided, the only remedy is to find another historian with an opposite bias. The history of the Reformation, for example, can be interesting when it is written by a Protestant historian, and can be equally interesting when it is written by a Catholic historian. If you wish to know what it felt like to live at the time of the Wars of Religion you will perhaps succeed if you read both Protestant and Catholic histories, but you will not succeed if you read only men who view the whole series of events with complete detachment. Carlyle said about his history of the French Revolution that his book was itself a kind of French Revolution. This is true, and it gives the book a certain abiding merit in spite of its inadequacy as an historical record. As you read it you understand why people did what they did, and this is one of the most important things that a history ought to do for the reader. At one time I read what Diodorus Siculus has to say about Agathocles, who appeared as an unmitigated ruffian. I looked up Agathocles afterward in a modern reference book and found him represented as bland and statesmanlike and probably innocent of all the crimes imputed to him. I have no means of knowing which of these two accounts is the more true, but I know that the whitewashing account was completely uninteresting. I do not like a tendency, to which some modern historians are prone, to tone down everything dramatic and make out that heroes were not so very heroic and villains not so very villainous. No doubt a love of drama can lead an historian astray; but there is drama in plenty that requires no falsification, though only literary skill can convey it to the reader.
"Literary skill" is a large and general phrase, and it may be worth while to give it a more specific meaning. There is, first of all, style in the narrow sense of the word, especially diction and rhythm. Some words, especially those invented for scientific purposes, have merely a dictionary meaning. If you found the word "tetrahedron" on a page, you would at once begin to feel bored. But the word "pyramid" is a fine, rich word, which brings Pharaohs and Aztecs floating into the mind. Rhythm is a matter dependent upon emotion: What is strongly felt will express itself naturally in a rhythmical and varied form. For this reason, among others, a writer needs a certain freshness of feeling which is apt to be destroyed by fatigue and by the necessity of consulting authorities. I think though this is perhaps counsel of perfection that before an historian actually composes a chapter, he should have the material so familiarly in his mind that his pen never has to pause for verification of what he is saying. I do not mean that verification is unnecessary, because everybody's memory plays tricks, but that it should come after, and not during, composition. Style, when it is good, is a very personal expression of the writer's way of feeling, and for that reason, among others, it is fatal to imitate even the most admirable style. Somewhere in Milman's History of Christianity (I write from memory), he says: "Rhetoric was still studied as a fine,
though considered as a mere, art." The shade of Gibbon, if it was looking over Milman's shoulder, must have been pained by this sentence.
If expository prose is to be interesting, there has to be a period of incubation, after the necessary knowledge has been acquired, when the bare facts will become clothed with such associations as are appropriate, of analogy or pathos or irony or what not, and when they will compose themselves into the unity of a pattern as in a play. This sort of thing is hardly likely to happen adequately unless the author has a fair amount of leisure and not an unfair amount of fatigue. Conscientious people are apt to work too hard and to spoil their work by doing so. Bagehot speaks somewhere of men he knew in the City who went bankrupt because they worked eight hours a day, but would have been rich if they had confined themselves to four hours. I think many learned men could profit by this analogy.
Within the compass of history as an art there are various kinds of history, each of which has its own peculiar kind of merit. One of these kinds of merit is especially exemplified by Gibbon, who offers us a stately procession of characters marching through the ages, all in court dress and yet all individual. Not long ago I was reading about Zenobia in the Cambridge Ancient History, but I regret to say that she appeared completely uninteresting. I remembered somewhat dimly a much more lively account in Gibbon. I looked it up, and at once the masterful lady came alive. Gibbon had had his feelings about her, and had imagined what it would be like to be at her court. He had written with lively fancy, and not merely with cold desire to chronicle known facts. It is odd that one does not more resent the fact that his characters all have to be fitted into an eighteenth-century mold. I remember that somewhere in dealing with the Vandals after the time of Genseric he speaks of "the polished tyrants of Africa." I am quite unable to believe that these men were polished, though I have no difficulty in believing that they were tyrants. But somehow, in spite of such limitations, Gibbon conveys an extraordinarily vivid sense of the march of events throughout the centuries with which he deals. His book illustrates what I am firmly persuaded is true, that great history must be the work of a single man and cannot possibly be achieved by a compendium in which each contributor deals with his own specialty. Learning has grown so multifarious and complex that it has been thought impossible for any one mind to embrace a large field. I am sure that this is a most unfortunate
mistake. If a book is to have value except as a work of reference it must be the work of one mind. It must be the result of holding together a great multiplicity within the unity of a single temperament. I will admit at once that this is growing
more and more difficult, but I think means can be devised by which it will still be possible, and I think they must be devised if great histories are not to be a thing of the past.
What is needed is division of labor. Gibbon profited by Tillemont, and probably could not otherwise have achieved his work in a lifetime. The archaeologist or the man who delves in unpublished manuscript material is likely to have neither the time nor the energy for large-scale history. The man who proposes to write large-scale history should not be expected himself to do the spade work. In the sciences, this sort of thing is recognized. Kepler's laws were based upon the observations of Tycho Brahe. Clerk Maxwell's theories rested upon the experiments of Faraday. Einstein did not himself make the observations upon which his doctrines are based. Broadly speaking the amassing of facts is one thing, and the digesting of them is another. Where the facts are numerous and complex, it is scarcely possible for one man to do both. Suppose, for example, you wish to know the effect of the Minoan civilization on the classical civilization of Greece. You will hardly expect the most balanced or the best informed opinion from a man who has been engaged in the very difficult work of ascertaining Minoan facts. The same sort of thing applies to less recondite problems, say, for example, the influence of Plutarch on the French Revolution.
The name of Plutarch brings to mind another department of history. History is not concerned only with large-scale pageants, nor with the delineation of different kinds of societies. It is concerned also, and equally, with individuals who are noteworthy on their own account. Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans have inspired in many ambitious young men valiant careers upon which they might not otherwise have ventured. I think there is a tendency in our time to pay too little attention to the individual and too much to the mass. We are so persuaded that we live in the Age of the Common Man that men become common even when they might be otherwise. There has been a movement, especially in teaching history to the young, toward emphasis on types of culture as opposed to the doings of individual heroes. Up to a point, this is entirely praiseworthy. We get a better sense of the march of events if we are told something about the manner of life of Cromagnon man or Neanderthal man, and it is wholesome to know about the tenement houses in Rome where the Romans lived whom Plutarch does not mention. A book like the Hammonds' Village Labourer presents a whole period from a point of view of which there is nothing in the older conventional histories. All this is true and important. But what, though important, is not true, but most perniciously false, is the suggestion, which easily grows up when history is studied only in this way, that individuals do not count and that those who have been regarded as heroes are only embodiments of social forces, whose work would have been done by someone else if it had not been done by them, and that, broadly speaking, no individual can do better than let himself be borne along by the current of his time. What is worst about this view is that, if it is held, it tends to become true. Heroic lives are inspired by heroic ambitions, and the young man who thinks that there is nothing important to be done is pretty sure to do nothing important. For such reasons I think the kind of history that is exemplified by Plutarch's Lives is quite as necessary as the more generalized kind. Very few people can make a community: Lenin and Stalin are the only ones who have achieved it in modern times. But a very much larger number of men can achieve an individual life which is significant. This applies not only to men whom we may regard as models to be imitated, but to all those who afford new material for imagination. The Emperor Frederick II, for example, most certainly does not deserve to be imitated, but he makes a splendid piece in one's mental furniture. The Wonder of the World, tramping hither and thither with his menagerie, completed at last by his Prime Minister in a cage, debating with Moslem sages, winning crusades in spite of being excommunicate, is a figure that I should be sorry not to know about. We all think it worth while to know about the great heroes of tragedy Agamemnon, Oedipus, Hamlet and the rest but there have been real men whose lives had the same quality as that of the great tragic heroes, and had the additional merit of having actually existed. All forms of greatness, whether divine or diabolic, share a certain quality, and I do not wish to see this quality ironed out by the worship of mediocrity. When I first visited America nearly sixty years ago, I made the acquaintance of a lady who had lately had a son. Somebody remarked lightly, "perhaps he will be a genius." The lady, in tones of heartfelt horror, replied, "Oh, I hope not!" Her wish, alas, was granted.
I do not mean to subscribe to Carlyle's cult of heroes, still less to Nietzsche's exaggeration of it. I do not wish for one moment to suggest that the common man is unimportant, or that the study of masses of men is less worth pursuing than the study of notable individuals. I wish only to preserve a balance between the two. I believe that remarkable individuals have done a great deal to mold history. I think that, if the hundred ablest men of science of the seventeenth century had all died in infancy, the life of the common man in every industrial community would now be quite different from what it is. I do not think that if Shakespeare and Milton had not existed someone else would have composed their works. And yet this is the sort of thing that some ' 'scientific" historians seem to wish one to believe.
I will go a step farther in agreement with those who emphasize the individual. I think that what is most worthy to be known and admired in human affairs has to do with individuals rather than with communities. I do not believe in the independent value of a collection of human beings over and above the value contained in their several lives, and I think it is dangerous if history neglects individual value in order to glorify a state, a nation, a church, or any other such collective entity. But I will not pursue this theme farther for fear of being led into politics.
The interest of the general reader in history has, I think, declined during the present century, and for my part I greatly regret this decline. There are a number of reasons for it. In the first place, reading altogether has declined. People go to the movies, or listen to the radio, or watch television. They indulge a curious passion for changing their position on the earth's surface as quickly as possible, which they combine with an attempt to make all parts of the earth's surface look alike. But even those who persist in the habit of serious reading spend less of their time on history than serious readers formerly did. My friend Whitehead at one time employed Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent as a bed book. I doubt whether there is now any person living who does likewise. History has ceased to be as interesting as it used to be, partly because the present is so full of important events, and so packed with quick-moving changes, that many people find neither time nor inclination to turn their attention to former centuries. A life of Hitler or Lenin or Stalin or Trotsky can be quite as interesting in itself as a life of Napoleon, and has, in addition, more relevance to present problems. But I am afraid we must admit that there is another cause for the decline of historical reading, and that is the decline of historical writing in the grand manner. I do not know how eagerly their contemporaries lapped up Herodotus or Thucydides or Polybius or Plutarch or Tacitus, but we all know the eagerness with which historians were welcomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Britain there was a long procession from Clarendon's History of the Rebellion to Macaulay. In France, from the time of Voltaire onward, history was a battleground of rival philosophies. In Germany, under the inspiration of Hegel, historians combined brilliance and wickedness in equal proportions. I do not think it would be unfair to Mommsen to say that his history had two themes: one, the greatness of Caesar because he destroyed liberty; the other, that Carthage was like England and Rome was like Germany and that the future Punic Wars to which he looked forward would have an outcome analogous to that of their predecessors. The influence of Treitschke in spreading a pernicious myth is generally recognized. When we speak of the importance of history, we must admit its importance for evil as well as for good. This applies especially to the popular myths which have gradually become a part of folklore. I went once to Ireland with my two young children. My daughter, aged five, made friends with a peasant woman who treated her with great kindness. But, as we went away, the woman said: "She's a bonny girl, in spite of Cromwell." It seemed a pity that the woman did not know either more history or less.
The decay in the writing of great histories is only part of the decay in the writing of great books. Men of science now- adays do not write books comparable to Newton's Principia or Darwin's Origin of Species. Poets no longer write epics. In the learned world, everything moves so fast that a massive book would be out of date before it could be published. Conributions to learning appear in periodicals, not in separate books, and few men in any branch of learning feel that there is time for that leisurely survey from which great books formerly sprang. There are of course exceptions. One of the most noteworthy is Professor Toynbee, whose work is as massive as any of those of former times. But the exceptions are not sufficiently numerous to disprove the general trend. I suppose the trend will remain until the world settles down to some form of progress less helter-skelter than the present race toward the abyss.
I think that in bringing sanity to our intoxicated age, history has an important part to play. I do not mean that this is to be brought about by any supposed "lessons of history," or indeed by anything easily put into a verbal formula. What history can and should do, not only for historians but for all whose education has given them any breadth of outlook, is to produce a certain temper of mind, a certain way of thinking and feeling about contemporary events and their relation to the past and the future. I do not know whether one should accept Cornford's thesis that Thucydides modeled his history on Attic tragedy; but, if he did, the events that he recorded fully justified his doing so, and the Athenians, if they had seen themselves in the light of actors in a possible tragedy, might have had the wisdom to avert the tragic outcome. It is an ancient doctrine that tragedy comes of hubris, but it is none the less true for being ancient, and hubris recurs in every age among those who have forgotten the disasters to which it has always led. In our age, mankind collectively has given itself over to a degree of hubris surpassing everything known in former ages. In the past, Prometheus was regarded as a would-be liberator, restrained in his beneficent work by the tyranny of Zeus, but now we begin to wish that there were some Zeus to restrain the modern followers of Prometheus. Prometheus aimed to serve mankind: his modern followers serve the passions of mankind, but only in so far as they are mad and destructive. In the modern world there are clever men in laboratories and fools in power. The clever men are slaves, like Djinns in the Arabian Nights. Mankind collectively, under the guidance of the fools and by the ingenuity of the clever slaves, is engaged in the great task of preparing its own extermination. I wish there were a Thucydides to treat this theme as it deserves. I cannot but think that if the men in power were impregnated with a sense of history they would find a way of avoiding the catastrophe which all see approaching and which none desire, for history is not only an account this nation or that, nor even of this continent or that; its theme is Man, that strange product of evolution which has risen by means of skill to a mastery over all other forms of life, and even, at great peril to himself, to mastery over the forces of inanimate nature. But Man, in spite of his cleverness, has not learned to think of the human family as one. Although he has abolished the jungle, he still allows himself to be governed by the law of the jungle. He has little sense of the common tasks of humanity, of its achievements in the past and its possible greater achievements in the future. He sees his fellow man not as a collaborator in a common purpose, but as an enemy who will kill if he is not killed. Whatever his sect or party may be, he believes that it embodies ultimate and eternal wisdom, and that the opposite party embodies ultimate and absolute folly. To any person with any historical culture such a view is absurd. No portion of mankind in the past was as good as it thought itself, or as bad as it was thought by its enemies; but, in the past, humanity could achieve its common purposes in spite of strife, though haltingly and with temporarily disastrous setbacks. But in our age the new cleverness is only compatible with survival if accompanied by a new wisdom. The wisdom that is needed is new only in one sense: that it must appeal to masses of men, and above all, to those who control great power. It is not new in the sense that it has never been proclaimed before. It has been proclaimed by wise men for many ages, but their wisdom has not been heeded. Now, the time is past when wisdom could be treated as nothing but the idle dream of visionaries. Sometimes in the moments when I am most oppressed by the fear of coming disaster, I am tempted to think that what the world needs is a Prophet who will proclaim, with a voice combining thunder with the deepest compassion, that the road upon which mankind is going is the wrong road-- a road leading to the death of our children and to the extinction of all hope-- but that there is another road which men can pursue if they will, and that this other road leads to a better world than any that has existed in the past. But, although this vision of a prophet can afford a momentary consolation, what the world needs is something more difficult, more rare. If a prophet were to arise in the East, he would be liquidated; if a prophet were to arise in the West, he would not be heard in the East and in the West would be condemned to obloquy. It is not by the action of any one individual, however great and however eloquent, that the world can be saved. It can be saved only when rulers and their followers in the most powerful countries of the world become aware that they have been pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp which is tempting them only toward ignominious death in a mire of futile hatred. The collective folly is not yet universal. Some nations stand wholly outside it, some are only partially victims to it. It is not too late to hope that mankind may have a future as well as a past. I believe that if men are to feel this hope with sufficient vividness to give it dynamic power, the awareness of history is one of the greatest forces of which the beneficent appeal must be felt.
