LARGER IMAGE
Mercier
THE FIRST INDUSTRIES: THE FORGE
From the painting by Ferdinand Cormon
LARGER IMAGE
The Main Stream of History
Nevertheless, the task of summarising and explaining is one to which the writer of a History of the World must address himself. If he has the disadvantage of limited space, he has the advantage of being able to assume the reader’s knowledge of what has gone before, and to invite the reader’s attention to what will come after. Thus he stands in a better position than does the writer who deals with one country or one epoch only for making each part of history illustrate other parts, for showing how similar social tendencies, similar proclivities of human nature, work similarly under varying conditions and are followed by similar, though never identical, results. He is able to bring out the essential unity of history, expunging from the reader’s mind the conventional and often misleading distinctions that are commonly drawn between the ancient, the mediæval, and the modern time. He can bring the contemporaneous course of events in different countries into a fruitful relation. And in the case of the present work, which dwells more especially on the geographical side of history, he can illustrate from each country in succession the influence of physical environment on the formation of races and the progress of nations, the principles which determine the action of such environment being everywhere similar, though the forms which that action takes are infinitely various.
Is there, it may be asked, any central thread in following which the unity of history most plainly appears? Is there any process in tracing which we can feel that we are floating down the main stream of the world’s onward movement? If there be such a process, its study ought to help us to realise the unity of history by connecting the development of the numerous branches of the human family.