The herald., 1897-02-28

The history of the world can never
{ be written in catalogues of Its kings
and potentates, or in the enactments
of its parliaments and congresses. He
who seeks the key to the evolution
of civilization in it's battles and its gov
ernments goes far afield. The eye that
sees in the long, long stretch of the ages
which lie behind US only tortuous road,
tlrat twists and turns past the monu-
n1ents of entombed royalty and the
time e-gnawed ruins Of decaying palaces,
or that slips across the wastes where
war has reaped her bloody sheaves,
leaving the myriad hosts Of slain to rot
into a nameless oblivion like stubble
when the wheat Is gathered, is blind to
the glorious soul of history, which.
breaking forth in perennial resurrection
from the grave where the hands Of the
present are ever laying the dead past,
Is going before the world into its Galilee
and its Bethany. History is the story Of
life, not the Book of the Dead" But
rarely has the man who aspires to be
called historian succeeded in becoming
more than a mere chronicler of events,
a sort of rosary maker, stringing to-
gether his facts and fancies. to enable
the droning schoolboy to humble his
list of names and dates. Few have been
the glimpses given us of those vital
forces that are working out the eternal
development of human society.
THE CONSTRUCTIVE CENTER
History is not written in events, but
in idcas-not in the biography of few
noble and mighty, but In the faiths and
feelings of the many. The constructive
center of social evolution does not lie
I'M the intrigues Of princes, but in the
ideals of the people The historic un
foldment OF fcivilization has been marked
by certain. movements of the crowd.
when, aflame with a new thought, they
have burned up the wood and hay and
stubble in human institutions The
epochs by which we divide the past are
not the accessions of kings or the trans
actions of courts, but the mighty up
heavals of the people. "When the struc-
ture of civilization is rotten, 1t is always
the masses that bring about its down.
fall"
IDEAS, NOT MEN
The history of nation cannot be re-
corded in its great names. 1t was not
Luther who made the Reformation; it
was not Danton who changed the face Of
France; It was not Lincoln who freed
the enslaved millions of the south. These
men were not the creators of history
they were it's creation. What they
were and what they did was due to the
fact that they became the co-ordinators
of resistless public spirit. The people
had come under the spell of a mighty
idea. These men were great enough
to become the instruments of its or
ganic utterance. They We're the lenses
through which the thought Of the mass
es became focused in action. The epoch
making energy lodged in the idea of
the people. Says Gustave LIE Bon: "The
great upheavals which precede changes
of civilization /" seem at first
sight determined more especially by po-
litical transformations, foreign inva-
sion, or the overthrow of dynasties. But
q more attentive study of these events
show that behind their apparent
causes the real cause is generally seen
to be a profound modification in the
ideas Of the peoples. The true llistor-
ical upheavals are not those that as
tonish us by their grandeur and vio-
lence. The only important changes.
whence the renewal of civiliZat tion re-
suits, affect ideas conceptions, beliefs.
The memorable events of Nstory are
tne visible effects of the invisible
changes OF human thought" Great facts
are the legitimate offspring of great con.
victions.
UNFOLDING OF FORCES
Evolution is not primarily a change in
forms, but an unfolding of forces. Ma
ture shifts andvaries like vast kaleid-
oscope. Her history seems to be written
IN myriad shapes that move in a strange
procession out of the mists that hang
about life's beginning, and wind their
way from the mere protoplasmic clot to
man. But the true history deals not
with the forms but with the life that Ut
tiers itself through forms. Matter is but
the alphabet of force, whereby energy.
unfolding under the divine law of eVo-
1utfon, spells out in physical expression
the story OF its progress. 1t is life that
Is ever climbing from low to high, build
ing Tor itself new upper chambers to be
Its transient tarrying place. And we
forget the life in wondering about the
visible house of life. Civilization
changes under the same mighty law
that holds the physical universe in it's
grasp. Political, industrial and social
forms appear in series of mutations
that move slowly and painfully out Of
the dim ages of antiquity, through fam
lily and clan and kingdom to democracy
And we have thought that the force of
historic evolution lay somehow in the
forms that have taken shape before us.
But what Is government save the
visible word in which people writes
down for a season its political convic-
tions? And what is society but the ut
terance of the social conscience of the
people in forms that can be seen? Not
11t1cal ideals that strive to express
in the forms but in the moral and DO.
themselves in forms lies the evolution
ary factor of civilization. Civilizations
change when the people become charged
with a new idea. Governments fall
and they ought to--when they cease to
utter the political faith of the people.
Society disintegrates when it comes
short of expressing the developing So
cial instinct of the multitude. The adj
,justment of forms follows the evolution
of ideas. Governments and systems are
summoned one by one before the mex
Orable judgment-seat of public opinion
to justify their claim to place among
men, and when these institutions fail
to establish their case, then the people
record against them their sentence in
an upheaval often violent. always re-
Sistless. The historic evolution of the
world is written down in series Of revo-
lutionS, and at the root of each reVolu-
tiOn lies thought.
THE OVERSOUL
Here we are confronted by a paradox
For, though the development of human
ity has taken place through the progress
of IDEAS yet the evolution of society is
not intellectual in the sense of being the
result of deliberate reasoning on the
part of the masses. The potoatial center
of every popular movement lies back of
reason in the region of Inconsistencies
whence spring our motives and our
Impulses. For we are all bat parts of a