The Dim Background.
This great development of civilization among the peoples we are to study, of course implies long preparatory ages of slow and bitter struggle upward from savagery. These stages may be hinted at enough to make the pupils reflect that there has been such a weary fight in unrecorded days. And now our story begins in the middle and not at the beginning of things. In our year’s work we are to take up the study of some eight or ten of the great peoples who have helped make our modern world what it is. We are to note what is like and what unlike our own ways of doing things; what we owe to these bygone folk.
Many mighty peoples are to be passed by. Why do we begin west of the Indian peninsula, and ignore the Hindoos, the Chinese, the Japanese? Because these peoples are out of the great stream of development. The progressive life of to-day’s world owes little to them, if anything. But the nations we are to take up have had a direct connection with us. One has handed on to another the torch of progress which now burns with electric splendor in our hands.