Among all the subjects of college study and college teaching, among all the means of liberal education fitting young men for civic life and public duty not one stands higher than the study and teaching of History.
In my senior year at Amherst College, President Julius H. Seelye gave my class a single lecture on the Philosophy of History. Among other good things he said: "History is the grandest study in the world." That remark made the profoundest impression upon my student imagination. I said to myself, "If History is the grandest study in the world, that is exactly the study I want." The good President proved his statement to my satisfaction by showing the relation of Greek and Roman civilizations to the spread of Christianity and the education of Europe.
In Germany I first learned the true method, and at the same time, the most practicable ways and means of studying and teaching history. Amid a pleasant variety of academic courses by brilliant lecturers like Kuno Fischer, Zeller, Ernst Curtius, Grimm, Treitschke, Droysen, Du Bois Raymond, Lepsius, and others, I somehow felt a lack of educational unity and system. There was need of some backbone to unite the skeleton of human deeds and historic experiences. This I found at last in the teachings of my old master, Dr. J. C. Bluntschli, at Heidelberg. In his lecture courses on the State, on the Constitutional Law, on Politics and on the International Law of Modern Civilized States, I first began to realize that government and law are the real forces which bind society and the world together. I began to see that the true unity of the world's life is to be found in the succession of States, Empires, Federations, and in the International Relations, which are slowly leading to such great aggregations as the United States of America and the United States of Europe. In Germany I learned from a reading of Bluntschli's various writing, including many noble articles in his Staatsworterbuch, that there is such a thing as the World-State now in process of evolution. From the published records of the Institute of International Law, of which Dr. Bluntschli was the president, and from a study of the subjects of Arbitration and International Tribunals, I thought I could dimly discern the beginnings of that Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World, of which the Poet Tennyson sings in his Locksley Hall.
When I came to Baltimore three ideas of study and teaching were uppermost in my mind: (1) the study of the origins of municipal life, in order to find out whether it was Roman or Germanic; (2) the study of the relations of Church and State, from their beginning down to the present, for I had learned to believe in Germany that the separation of civil from religious society is America's greatest contribution to the world's progress; (3) the continued study of art history for its own sake and as illustrating the history of civilization.
Out of the first of these ideas, developed by a reading of the works of Sir Henry Maine, has grown my Historical Seminary and a long series of University Studies in Historical and Political Science (chiefly on Municipal, Economic and Institutional themes). Out of the second idea evolved successive courses of lectures on Church and State, or Religion and Government in the Ancient and Graeco-Roman World, together with my whole system of graduate instruction upon the Early History of Society, Greek and Roman Polities, Jewish and Church History, and certain modern States like Prussia and France. The third idea never had a good chance for development until recent years when I have fairly begun to realize my original conception of illustrating in concrete, artistic ways the progress of civilization.
Goldwin Smith, in his Lecture on History, says there can be no philosophy of history until we realize the unity of the human race and that history must be studied as a whole. Twenty years ago, at the Johns Hopkins University, I began to teach Local History, as representative of Universal History. I began with New England Village Communities, with Plymouth Plantations, Salem and the Massachusetts Bay Towns, those little republics which seemed to me the very protoplasm of State life. The survival, continuity or revival of old Germanic forms of village settlement, with common fields and town commons, impressed my imagination and interested my students. They carried this kind of study into this State of Maryland and original papers by Maryland boys were published upon such subjects as Parishes, Manors, and other local institutions. These lines of inquiry were extended down the Atlantic seaboard to Virginia and the Carolinas. Gradually the field of interest has been widened from towns, plantations, parishes, and counties until now the constitutional, economic and educational history of entire States is in review or contemplation.
While I still believe in Local History and in limited subjects of student research, I now recognize more fully than I used to do, the importance of General History, especially for college students and college graduates in the early part of their course. After all, the great fact in History, as well as in Geography, is that the world is round. You must recognize all human experience on this globe as parts of one great whole, just as you recognize that the continents and outlying islands are but related parts of one vast geographical system. In every properly arranged course of school and college instruction in the domain of History, this doctrine of unity ought to be taken for granted. It is like the doctrine of divine unity in theology or in nature, like the sun in our heavens. It gives light and rationality to any and every course of study.
I used to think that it was the first duty of a boy to know the history of his own State and country; but I am now persuaded that he should know the history of mankind and of the world. Nobody would study geography or geology from a purely local point of view. You must have a consciousness of the whole in order to appreciate the parts of any subject. It is a mistake to imagine that a boy or girl cares most for what is nearest and most familiar. Children are always gifted with imagination. They rejoice in the thought of lands that are far off, of men who lived in olden times. They take the greatest pleasure in heroic tales of Cyrus and of Hannibal, of Horatius and of the great twin brethren, Castor and Pollux. Mythology, minstrelsy, Bible stories, and lives of great wariors, explorers, discoverers, inventors, these are of supreme interest to boys and girls. American History should be taught to American youth, but chiefly the heroic, the romantic, the biographical, in short the more human sides of our colonel and national life.
History begins and ends with Man. Biographical approaches to the world's life are the oldest, and best beaten paths for youth to follow. Carlyle and Froude are among the champions of the biographical method of studying and teaching History. When Froude succeeded Freeman at Oxford the biographical idea was at once brought to the front. Froude quoted Carlyle as saying: "The history of mankind is the history of its great men; to find out these, clean the dirt from them, and place them on their proper pedestals, is the true function of the historian." And Froude, the new professor, entered at once upon those splendid and inspiring courses of lectures, in which the personal and biographical elements entered so strongly.
Every American student should read Froude's lectures on "English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century," that brilliant account of Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, and the great captains of England who gained a new world for Elizabeth and defeated the Spanish Armada. You should also read Froude's Lectures on the "Life and Letters of Erasmus" if you would understand the relation of the great religious reform to the new learning, which Erasmus represented.