Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/9

 PREFACE In preparing this outline of the whole history of man from the earliest beginnings of civilization down to the present those topics have been chosen which have the greatest interest for us today those which help us most in understanding our own time. Occa- sionally it has been necessary to include certain historical facts of no great importance in themselves merely to establish the sequence or because they are deemed matters of " common knowl- edge" which the student should know because they are often alluded to. Happily these iatteV cases are few v The presentation of a satisfactory review of gerferal history in a single volume becomes increasingly difficult. The^older manuals gave scanty attention to anything preceding the Qreeks and were well-nigh through their task when they reached the year 1870. But the long narrative of the past has been lengthened out at both ends. Recent discoveries of archaeologists have altered funda- mentally our conception of man's progress and made vivid and real the long, long ages during which civilization was slowly ac- cumulating before it reached that high degree of refinement which we find among the ancient Egyptians. The so-called "pre- historic" period and the story of the ancient Orient are now full of absorbing interest and can no longer be dismissed in a few introductory pages. On the other hand our own times have assumed a significance which they did not possess for us prior to the year 1914. The shock of finding the world at war and the multitude of perplexing problems which the war has revealed have led us to realize how ill-understood are the conditions in modern Europe and in the Orient. The story of the World War must therefore be told with some account of its causes and of the questions still awaiting adjustment. Furthermore, it is obviously no longer possible to leave out some account of the Far East in an outline of European