Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/163

 INTERPRETATION OF SAVAGE SOCIETY 149

more than three thousand years and even this remains shock- ingly imperfect and unreliable for more than two milleniums. We have a few, often highly fragmentary, literary histories cov- ering Greek and Roman times, also a good many inscriptions and some important archeological remains; but these leave us in the dark upon many vital matters. The sources for the Roman Empire are so very bad that Mommsen refused to attempt to write its history. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do the mediaeval annals and chronicles begin to be supplemented by miscellaneous documents which bring us more directly into contact with the life of the time.

"Yet the reader of history must often get the impression that the sources of our knowledge are, so to speak, of a uniform volume and depth, at least for the last two or three thousand years. When he beholds a voluminous account of the early Church, or of the Roman Empire, or observes Dahn's or Hodg- kin's many stately volumes on the Barbarian invasions, he is to be pardoned for assuming that the writers have spent years in painfully condensing and giving literary form to the abundant material which they have turned up in the course of their pro- longed researches. Too few suspect that it has been the business of the historian in the past not to condense but on the contrary skilfully to inflate his thin film of knowledge until the bubble should reach such proportions that its bright hues would attract the attention and elicit the admiration of even the most careless observer. One volume of Hodgkin's rather old fashioned Ttaly and her Invaders,' had the scanty material been judiciously com- pressed, might have held all that we can be said to even half- know about the matters to which the author has seen fit to devote eight volumes.

"But pray do not jump to the conclusion that the historical writer is a sinner above all men. In the first place, it should never be forgotten that he is by long tradition a man of letters, and that is not, after all, such a bad thing to be. In the second place he experiences the same strong temptation that everyone else does to accept, at their face value, the plausible statements