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We need go no farther to find the first reason why American histories are so meagre and dull. They are not pictures from life. The fact is, that the historian might as well try to write a valuable and interesting history from the materials which our older cities possess, as a painter might try to paint the battle of Crecy from the details given by Froissart. To be sure we have all seen such pictures, but who has more than admired them?
The absence of contemporaneous literature has been the greatest misfortune of all history. Every student knows how great and deplorable are the breaks constantly met with in tracing the thread of past events. Shall we, then, let the students of posterity remain in the dark on such questions as these: why Providence became the second city of New England; why she left Newport so badly in the race for prosperity; why Buffalo and Cincinnati went up, while Black Rock and North Bend went down; why Chicago became the largest manufacturing city on the continent; why New England kept the town-meeting, and the West preferred the township and the county; and why a thousand and one other important things happened. To be sure we have had Bancroft, and Sparks, and Hildreth, but these and their brethren have told us as little about the history of the people as Lingard, Hume, Hallam, and all the rest of them told England. Within a very few years historians have begun to see this defect, and such men as Green, Lodge, and MacMaster have undertaken to give us histories of the people, the first and last taking the lead on their respective sides of the Atlantic. MacMaster's work is excellent as far as it goes. His first volume is deep and scholarly, and does credit to American literature. It is clear that the task of its preparation was immense, and more time must have been spent in merely collecting authorities than has been bestowed altogether on more pretentious histories. Where Mr. MacMaster found all these authorities is a puzzle, for even such libraries as those in Boston and Cambridge have not all the materials for such an undertaking. Yet even he leaves many points untouched, or cursorily disposed of. Among the subjects referred to, of which we would like to learn more, may be mentioned: the township system of the West, the development of American municipal institutions, and, above all, the origin and rise of the various centres of population and business which we call cities.
The history of a nation should be compiled in the same way that the French people of the ancien régime compiled their lists of grievances to be presented to the king. In the early States-generals the deputies of all the orders received from the electors mandates of instructions containing an enumeration of the public grievances of which they were to demand redress. From the multitude of these cahiers (or codices), the three estates, that is, the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate (the people), compiled each a single cahier to serve as the exponent of its grievances and its demands. When this complex process had been completed and the three residual cahiers had been given to the king, the States-general, the only representative body of France, was dissolved.
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Thus it should be with our national history. Already the clergy have presented their cahiers in the shape of church histories and theological essays innumerable. The nobles, that is, the statesmen and politicians, have formulated their lists of grievances in such works as Thirty Year's View, The Great Conflict, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, etc. But where is the cahier of the third estate? The States-general has met and the tiers état is not ready. What excuse have they? Quick comes the answer: "Our electors have sent in but few cahiers, and these are defective. We cannot tell our king, the nation, what the people were and what they are, what they have and what they want, until they tell us. Our cahier must wait the pleasure of the people." Meanwhile, the regent, irreverently called Uncle Sam, who rules the land while his master is away in Utopia, reads the cahiers of the nobles, laughs in his sleeve at that of the clergy, and forgets all about that of the third estate. Or if he thinks of it at all, it is only to try to fill its place with twenty-four-volume Census Reports and massive tomes from the other departments.
The cahiers of the third estate are, in truth, few and defective, yet there are some communities that have done their work well. For example, there is The Memorial History of Boston which does credit even to the Hub of American historical literature. It was the work of cultivated men, and although the cooks were many, the broth is excellent. That the people were a-hungering for just such broth is shown by the fact that the net profits from it in the first twelve months after publication, as it is said, were over fifty thousand dollars.
Boston is almost the only city in the land that has been the subject of a full, accurate, and interesting history. The History of New York, by Martha J. Lamb, is not so full as might have been wished, but is otherwise unexceptionable. New York is fortunate in having the most graphic and humorous history of its early days that any city in the world ever had, but nobody except Diedrich Knickerbocker himself ever claimed a great amount of accuracy and truthfulness for his unrivaled work.
It was to be expected that our older cities,—those whose seeds were planted by Puritans, Dutch traders, Catholic fugitives, Quakers, Cavalier spendthrifts and rogues, Huguenot exiles, and in general the motley crowd that sought the land of milk and honey in the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth centuries,—it was to be expected that these cities would have historians ad nauseam. The very nature of the early colonization of America, the elements of romance and adventure so conspicuous in the history of early days on the Atlantic coast, gave warrant to such expectations, and the event has justified them. But where the romance and adventure end, the historian lays down his pen. It is left to the census enumerator to complete the work, and the brazen age of statistics follows the golden age of history.