Page:Annual Report of the American Historical Association.pdf/137

132 find an explanation for this change in those present-day conditions that are determining the trend of historical scholarship generally, and, more particularly, that are bringing about, in England and tho United States, a marked revival of interest in colonial policy. And reviews of this sort, from time to time, in other fields of study would be equally instructive.

But the critical reviewer, being primarily interested in the main drift and tendency of historical thinking, finds his best opportunity in the appearance of books that depart from conventional methods of investigation or interpretation. Books of real originality, such as the "Ancient City" or the "Holy Roman Empire;" books that are less original than they profess to be, such as a well-known recent history of Rome; books, like those of Lamprecht or Taine, which reflect the influence of contemporary scientific thought; books that shock us by inviting the historian to learn something about man as well as about his past; great undertakings, such as the "Cambridge Modern History" or Prof. Channing's "History of the United States"—books of this sort we need to have critically reviewed, particularly in an age of specialization like the present, in order to clarify our ideas of historical method and of tho purpose and trend of historical scholarship.

I have mentioned the "Cambridge Modern History," and I return to it because it seems to me that the present method of reviewing has proved strikingly inadequate in dealing with this work. The reviewer, confronted with a single ponderous tome, appalled by the necessity of dispatching it in three or four pages, has felt tho hopelessness of the task. And yet this great undertaking might, under a different method, have inspired reviews of distinct value. Nearly every reviewer, for example, has felt bound to make a few obvious remarks about the advantages and disadvantages of the cooperative method; and by the time the "Cambridge Mediaeval History" is finished I don't doubt we shall know perfectly that the cooperative history is strong in respect to accuracy of detail and variety of treatment, but weak in respect to unity and coherence. Now, cooperative work is a marked feature of our time, but it is not peculiar to it; and I am confident that our knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of such work would lose nothing in accuracy, while it would gain much in coherence, if some one competent to the task should undertake a critical estimate of the principal cooperative histories of recent years from the point of view of the history of cooperative scholarship in general. This would not preclude an extended critical review of each volume of the "Cambridge Modern History." The preface informs us that the plan of the work contemplated devoting each volume to some distinct movement or to some period possessing a certain unity in itself. The reviewer might well take his cue from