this point, and not at all from the theological, he judged all religious life. What is it worth to men and what has it accomplished? He greets the barefoot friar, the Lollard, the Puritan, and the primitive Methodist with the same question. He treats them all as of beneficent origin.

Let us pass by Gardiner, great and in some respects unparalleled historian that he is. He writes with the day of doom in mind, and the crack of doom will be here before the end of his piece. The writings of a more popular, if less able, man must take precedence of Gardiner's. Lecky comes the nearest to realizing the true all-round history. His "History of England in the Eighteenth Century" is in parts exceedingly eloquent and strong. I think I shall find myself on one point at difference with the body of American scholars. Lecky is not satisfactory on the American Revolution. A man cannot embrace two countries. At least no one except De Tocqueville and Bryce has done so. Lecky complains that the Revolution was merely a quarrel about money. What were most of the great struggles of history? About money. What is money? It is bread for women and children. It is liberty. It is power. It is everything that a man wants. Incomparable Burke pointed out that the whole commerce of America had grown up under a system of smuggling and violation of customs laws made abroad. The attempt to suppress this was an attempt to put down trade entirely-to reduce the colonies to gaunt famine.

No man can judge America in the eighteenth century without taking her circumstances into account. Even in little things Lecky fails to understand us-he says Americans invented a new punishment of riding a man on an iron bar. He means riding on a rail, and only a few years before a man had died in the process in London. For the state of America he depends on Washington's letters-letters written always to procure appropriations. But America aside, his "England," and especially his "Ireland," in the eighteenth century, are very great books. Leave the American Revolution to be written by one who understands it and knows what it was.

I remember the enjoyment with which I discovered that Hilliard had inserted here and there a little paragraph on manners. Hilliard used only printed authorities, he was dry, he

did not make a lasting history. His touches of folk history are his best work. Bancroft labored long, he labored learnedly. But he has repelled more young people from the study of history than all other influences in America. Nearly twenty years ago I sat at Mr. Parkman's table one Sunday and he remarked with that sweet candor which was characteristic: "I cannot read Bancroft." I replied: "Mr. Parkman, if you had not said it, I should not have dared to say so; but I cannot read Bancroft." A cultivated lady at the table said, "If you gentlemen say that, what is the ground of his great reputation?" We answered simultaneously, “His great knowledge." He knew nearly everything a historian ought to know except culture history. He never conceived of the seventeenth century man as living before science. And one other difficulty he had. He was a politician or, if you please, a statesman. He was a diplomatist. He could not speak candidly. "I hold my hand full," he said, "I open my little finger. The American people cannot stand more." Mr. Bancroft held in his hand a lot of disagreeables. He knew, for instance, that a majority of the preRevolutionary ancestors of the post-Revolutionary Americans, Colonial Dames as like as not, came to this country in an unfree condition and were sold off the ship to pay their passage. But he left all that on one side as contemned culture history. This is why his volumes are left in undisturbed repose on those shelves where stand the books which no gentleman's library is complete without.

I must avoid mention of books whose authors are still alive. I must for want of time omit more than complimentary mention of the special studies of our post-graduates on the township community and other institutional history. I am myself greatly indebted to them. See how lame is Macaulay's allusion to enclosures in his third chapter for want of such knowledge. I must mention with praise the humble historian who writes of town or city the annals that will be greedily sought after in time to come. And I may say that history is the great prophylactic against pessimism. There never was a bad, in the five progressive ages, that was not preceded by a worse. Our working people live from hand to mouth-in the eighteenth century it was from half-empty hand to starving mouth. Never

was the race better situated than in this nineteenth century— this twentieth century on the very verge of which we stand.

History will be better written in the ages to come. The soldier will not take the place he has taken. I do not say that the "drum and trumpet history" will have gone out, but when the American Historical Association shall assemble in the closing week a hundred years hence, there will be, do not doubt it, gifted writers of the history of the people. It will not seem so important for impartial Gardiner to weigh the men and motives of the Commonwealth history. We shall have the history of culture, the real history of men and women.

CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT

DEFECTS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION
REVEALED BY THE WAR

This address was delivered before The League for Political Education on November 23, 1918, in Carnegie Hall, New York. It reveals Mr. Eliot in his eighty-fifth year still a leader in educational thought and a master of lucid and incisive expression. Mr. Eliot was born at Boston in 1834, was president of Harvard University for forty years from 1869 to 1909, and continued after his retirement to instruct his countrymen in the paths of wisdom. He died in 1926. Other addresses by Mr. Eliot are given in Volumes II and IV.

THE war has revealed to the American public the unexpected fact that there is a considerable amount of illiteracy in the population, unevenly distributed among the different states, but disappointingly large on the average-7.7 per cent. This illiteracy was conspicuous in the army and navy, which the government undertook to recruit rapidly by draft, and was at once seen to present serious obstacles to the rapid training of effective government forces. The public promptly perceived that the prevention of illiteracy was a national interest, which should never have been left to the states without any supervision by the national government. Although the existing illiteracy and its consequences were brought to the attention of the American people by the war, the whole people at once saw that the public interest in the prevention of illiteracy was not at all confined to war times. They saw that the prevention of illiteracy was even a greater object for the nation as a whole in normal peace times than in abnormal war times; so that the whole people is now prepared to support, and indeed to urge whatever appropriations Congress may think necessary, in order that the national government may bring effective aid to the