HIST O II Y 23 adventures in historical enterprise. After the heroic ages of Christendom, the heroic ages of Greece were opened to explorers. And soon all exclusiveness disappeared. The whole past history of man was felt to be worthy of man s study, a wide field into which many labourers entered. So much for the change in feeling. No less a change had taken place in the condition of knowledge. Speculation had for a long time been feeling its way to a closer contact with the problems suggested by the growing wealth and industry of the modern world. Adam Smith in his memorable work resumed, co-ordinated, and enlarged the labours of his numerous predecessors, and placed the study of economics on a new and positive basis. But the suggestive stimulus of his researches spread beyond the limits of the science with which he was immediately concerned. The indirect services rendered by political economy to history have not perhaps been adequately recog nized. The elucidation of the sources of wealth in the present became a means of explaining the prosperity and decay of states in the,past, which soon led to valuable results, the more striking as they were unexpected. Hitherto wealth had been thought a source rather of degeneracy than of improvement. The great danger was always under stood to be " luxury." Poverty was the parent of virtue. Primitive times were virtuous because they were poor. Pagan philosophers and Christian saints had agreed in condemning riches as the source of all evil, and denying the rich man a high place in their ideal republic or the city of God. Political economy cleared up the confusion of thought here implied. The wealth of states has nothing to do with the excessive opulence of a small class. Never has the mass of the people in any country or in any age .suffered from an overabundance of wealth. The excessive wealth of the few generally means the poverty of the many. In short, the evil lies in the great inequality of the dis tribution of wealth. These common-places of economics would have been paradoxes in the early part of the 18th century, and the historians of that age show a profound ignorance of their bearing, as was only natural. So, when they have to explain the decay of a state they seek to show that it had lost its gold and silver, or that luxury had made fearful inroads, or that martial valour had somehow strangely declined. The notion that poverty in the mass of the people was very often the chief and sometimes the only cause did not occur to them. When therefore Adam Smith devoted the third book of the Wealth of Nations to " the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations," it seemed as if a lamp had suddenly been lit in a dark place. That book was in truth a lofty historical review of the facts of the past, guided by the principles of economic science. The question which has already come before us, and which exercised so much, as well it might, the thinkers of that age, the decline of Piome, was approached in a much more promising manner when one element of it, the decay of agriculture in Italy, was spoken of thus : " Tillage in that part of ancient Italy which lay in the neighbourhood of Home must have been very much discouraged by the distributions of corn which were frequently made to the people, either gratuitously or at a very low price. This corn was brought from the conquered provinces, of which several, instead of taxes, were obliged to furnish a tenth part of their produce at a stated price. The low price at which this corn was distributed to the people must necessarily have sunk the price of what could be brought to the Roman market from Latium or the ancient territory of Rome, and must have discouraged its cultivation in that country." This was catching a glimpse of a rera causa of the effect to be explained, and the vein of thought thus opened proved to be richer the further it was explored. Both the moral and the intellectual tendencies at work to produce a new temper with regard to history received an incalculable impetus from the French Revolution. That cataclysm revealed the deeper forces of society which had lain silent and unsuspected under the deceitful calm of the ancien regime in its latter days. It was very certainly a revelation, though light came from the flames of Tophet, in Mr Carlyle s phrase. Men saw the depth of the abyss over which they had lived in quiet ignorance, and their notions on man, society, and history underwent a great change. Passions undreamed of were let loose, and the passions of the present threw light on those of the past. History was read with new eyes. " Whenever," says a man who lived through the tempest and profited as much as any one by it, " W T henever," says Niebuhr, "an historian is reviving past times, his interest in them and sympathy with them will be the deeper the greater the events he has witnessed with a bleeding or rejoicing heart" (Preface to Hist, of Rome). Few generations have seen events which alternately made men s hearts bleed and rejoice more passionately than Niebuhr s own, and none have ever stimulated history so much. With the peace of 1815 historical studies acquired an activity and scope they never had before. All history, it was perceived, needed rewriting from new points of view, with more knowledge, deeper insight, keener sympathy. The French led the van of the new movement with their usual brilliancy and mastery of literary form. But it was their position as the nearest witnesses and the greatest sufferers and gainers by the Revolution which did most to open their eyes. A truly illustrious band of scholar.* and writers under the Restoration, the Monarchy of July, raised history into a position of honour it had never enjoyed before. Michaud, the two Thierrys, Sismondi, Guizot, De Barante, Michelet, and many more rendered services to history which must not be forgotten because on many points their labours have been superseded. It is indeed a capital proof of the merit of their labours that they fur nished the means and the incentive to their supersession, a proof that their studies were vital and progressive. The Germans, with their solid erudition, were not slow in fol lowing the French. Between the two, the Middle Ages, Greek and Roman antiquity, and the history of the Christian Church were studied with a minuteness and breadth never known before. History had entered on its modern phase. This is not the place to dwell in detail on the achieve ments of the modern school of historians. The whole field of history has been explored afresh with such superior in sight, knowledge, and just conception of the task in hand that all historical writings anterior in date to the end of the 18th century are entirely superseded, with the single ex ception perhaps of Gibbon, who alone, as Mr Freeman says, has not been set aside by subsequent research. Ancient history, chiefly in consequence of the extraordinary zeal and diligence of the Germans in what they call the science of antiquity (Alterthumswissenschaft), has become a reality, vivid in interest, and fruitful in knowledge, instead of the nebulous unreality it had been before. The rejection of the fabulous elements in the histories of Greece and Rome was the first step, but a long one, which it required many years and much effort to make. The next was to obtain a firm grasp of the idea that the Greeks and Romans were living men, and not statues like the Elgin Marbles, and to look at their politics, institutions, and religions with the discriminating eye of common sense, and a real wish to see them as they were. The true nature of Athenian democracy, of the Spartan oligarchy, of the commons and patricians of Rome, of the party struggles which caused and justified the transition from the republic to the empire, has been put in a clear light, which can hardly be appreciated by those who
are not aware of the darkness which it replaced. Points of
