TIME AND PLACE RELATIONS IN HISTORY, WITH SOME LOUISIANA AND MISSISSIPPI APPLICATIONS
PROF. H. E. CHAMBERS.
A student or writer of history, imbued with the true and scientific spirit of historical research and expression, would hesitate to accept the task of compiling the narrative of a State or country if it were required of him to confine himself strictly to local events. He would, indeed, find it difficult to isolate the facts bearing upon the State or country from their antecedents, distant in time and space, or from their consequents when communicated to contemporaneous and succeeding communities, or social organizations.
The great stream of human affairs is a tide of many currents. He who would pilot by his pen the reading multitude must note the crossings and the blendings, the counter-runnings and the parallelings. He cannot take an arbitrary stand and say that this tide of affairs began in this place and ended in that; or that this course of events began in such a year and ended in such another. Back of every motion is an impelling power. Back of every individual action lies the basic principles of human conduct. Back of every manifestation of corporate activity may be found a pulsive social force. Neither individual nor social movement can be studied understandingly alone. Each forms a link in a chain whose beginning and end may not be clearly seen, but whose continuity may be inferred from upholding and depending contiguous links.
This continuity when once perceived enables us to bring into relation widely associated ideas. For instance, the history of Oregon, through the first English explorer of its shores, leads us to the point where the intense vitality of the English nation was first directed to securing the naval supremacy of the world. The history of any one of our north-central States introduces us to the follies, fashions, and ambitions of the French Court under several Louises; to a long series of moves in one of the most complicated games ever played upon the chess-board of European politics; and to the most critical period in American affairs when Virginia by generously renouncing an empire appeased discordant and jealous elements and made possible the formation of the Federal Union. Patrick Henry's passionate plea for liberty was but the echo of the clarion call which rang over Runnymede centuries before, and this call was but the voicing of an idea which dominated the most primitive of Teutonic peoples in the remotest past. And so I might make innumerable citations to show that the present is but the heir to the past; and that what is, stands in close relation to what has been.
If time relations may be demonstrated by the association of remotely associated ideas, or by tracing modern institutional fruitage to their root points buried in the soil of the past, then may other correlations be as easily established.
The idea of place as a background to historic treatment has, to a certain extent, undergone change. The former conception has been that of a region with artificial bounds established by accident, treaty, or legislative enactment. The more modern conception is that of a physiographic area whose limits nature herself has fixed and within whose confines fundamental ethnic ideas crystalized into institutional, social, political, and religious forms have reached or are reaching complete or incomplete expression.
Every great civilization that has ever arisen is or has been a composite civilization. Isolate an individual, a community, a people, or a race and no matter how favorable may be the circumstances and environment, the advance made will only be so far and no further, the final point of which advance is characterized by rigidity of thought, fixity of forms, and slavish repetition of actions. The greater Chinese Wall of non-intercourse encircling the Mongolian nation for centuries cast the civilization of the Flowery Kingdom into molds of monotony whose stiffness has yielded only to the breaking of Occidental hammers upon Chinese commercial portals.