Our earliest teachers

We have done much towards understanding the past when we have learned to value and to honour such men.

It is almost better to know nothing of history than to know with the narrow coldness of a pedant a record which ought to fill us with emotion and reverence. Our closest friends, our earliest teachers, our parents themselves, are not more truly our benefactors than they. To them we owe what we prize most — country, freedom, peace, knowledge, art, thought, and higher sense of right and wrong. What a tale of patience, courage, sacrifice, and martyrdom is the history of human progress! It affects us as if we were reading in the diary of a parent the record of his struggles for his children. For us they toiled, endured, bled, and died ; that we by their labour might have rest, by their thoughts might know, by their death might live happily. For whom did these men work, if not for us ? Not for themselves, when they gave up peace guided tour ephesus, honour, life, reputation itself—as when the great French republican exclaimed, ‘May my name be accursed, so that France be free!’ not for themselves they worked, but for their cause, for their fellows, for us. Not that they might have fame, but that they might leave the world better than they found it. This supported Milton in his old age, blind, poor, and dishonoured, when he poured out his spirit in solitude, full of grace, tenderness, and hope, amidst the ruin of all he loved and the obscene triumph of all he despised.

It supported Dante, the poet of Florence, when an outlaw and an exile he was cast off by friends and countrymen, and wandered about begging his bread from city to city, pondering the great thoughts which live throughout all Europe. This spirit, too, was in one, the noblest victim of the French Revolution, the philosopher Condorcet; who, condemned, hunted to death, devoted the last few days of his life to serene thought of the past, and, whilst the pursuers were on his track, wrote in his hiding-place that noble sketch of the progress of the human race.

THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY

Let us now try to sketch the outline of this story, link century to century, continent to continent, and judge the share each has in the common work of civilisation. To do so, we must go back to ages long before records began. It is but of the latter and the shorter portion of the duration of progress, that any record has been made or preserved. Yet for a general view, sufficient materials of certain knowledge exist. If we write the biography of a man we do not begin with the year of his life in which his diary opens; we seek to know his parentage, education, and early association. To understand him we must do so. So, too, the biography of mankind must not confine itself to the eras of chronological tables, and of recorded events.

In all large instances the civilisation of an epoch or a people has a certain unity in it — their philosophy, their policy, their habits, and their religion must more or less accord, and all depend at last upon the special habit of their minds. It is this central form of belief which determines all the rest. Separately no item which makes up their civilisation as a whole, can be long or seriously changed. It is what a man believes, which makes him act as he does. Thus shall we see that, as their reasoning powers develop, all else develops likewise; their science, their art break up or take new forms ; their system of society expands ; their life, their morality, and their religion gradually are dissolved and reconstructed.

Let us, then, place ourselves back in imagination at a period when the whole surface of the earth was quite unlike what it is now. Let us suppose it as it was after the last great geologic change — the greater portion of its area covered with primeval forests, vast swamps, dense jungles, moors, prairies, and arid deserts. We must not suppose that the earth had always the same face as now. Such as it is, it has been made by man ; the rich pasturages and open plains have all been created by his toil — even the grain, and fruits, and flowers that grow upon its soil have been made what they are by his care. Their originals were what we now should regard as small, valueless, insipid berries or weeds. As yet the now teeming valleys of the great rivers, such as the Nile, or the Euphrates, or the Po, were wildernesses or swamps.

The rich meadows of our own island were marshes ; where its cornfields stand now, were trackless forests or salt fens. Such countries as Holland were swept over by every tide of the sea, and such countries as Switzerland, and Norway, and large parts of America, or Russia, were submerged beneath endless pine-woods. And through these forests and wastes ranged countless races of animals, many, doubtless, long extinct, in variety and numbers more than we can even conceive.