editorials and sermons and magazine articles and even in pretentious volumes. The fact is that of late great progress has been made in historical investigation, and that not only have many details been corrected, but many old classifications and generalizations have gone by the board. The result is, especially in America, where higher education and advanced investigation have only recently attained great development and where history used to be taught very poorly in the schools, that any one who learned his history twenty or thirty years ago and has not kept up with the progress of the subject since is liable to have many false notions concerning both the past and the science of history itself. Consequently men learned in other fields—lawyers, natural scientists, teachers of literature and philosophy—often relate their studies of the past to a scheme of history which has been or is being rapidly discarded. One must be careful, then, where one gets one's historical information and especially any sweeping generalizations. It is also unfortunate that readable histories are apt to be the least reliable because they are generally written to sell by professional authors who know how to write entertainingly, but lack historical training and ideals. But after all history is not merely a branch of literature to be read with interest; it is a social science to be studied with care. One may consult critical bibliographies where the best books are listed with some statement of their scope and worth, and one may refer to the reviews of books in the historical journals. But the best thing to do is to cultivate a critical sense of one's own, to keep asking one's self how the author arrived at the conclusion which one is reading, to keep observing whether his tone seems fair and sane and his statement of details plausible and likely.
We have said that readable histories are often unreliable, but that does not prove that reliable histories are of necessity History
need not be
dry reading
dry. History may be hard, but it ought to be interesting. Unless life itself is dull, unless the heroes and writers of the past were tiresome personalities, unless the most painstaking and inspired
