Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/127

Rh the other. Without cultivation of the material and mechanical, which acts upon matter and produces wealth, man is a mere idler and dreamer, at his best little better than the Arabian nomad. Without cultivation of the moral sentiments, or attention to the calls of his inner and higher nature, he loses himself in gross materialism, and no answer is found in him to appeal to ideas, to heroism, or to exalted virtue.

Phases of the life of a people pass away, never to return. In the first settlement of a country the conditions of nature produce our customs, guide our industries, fix our ways of life. Later, modifications take place, fashioned on changing conditions. This process, long delayed through our isolation is now going on rapidly before our eyes.

In one of his "Ramblers" Dr. Johnson says, truly: "Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of human beings."

The study of our own history is chiefly valuable for its moral significance and influence. It fixes our attention upon the organization and structure of our society, and carries the influence of other times on into our own. It stirs up to activity the forces and agencies that build up character, that indicate duty, that prompt to action. These are the forces we want Busied only with our own times and the conditions they present, we fall into levity; we forget what we owe to our predecessors, and therefore do not know what we possess, nor realize its value. Only can we know what we have or where we are by study of the course through which our present position has been' attained. To live merely in the present, without regard to the past, is to be careless of the future. If a people do not know their own history it is the same as if they had no history. For, a Bacon says, in one of his pregnant sentences: "The truth of knowing and the truth of being is all one; the man is what he knoweth." It is not enough that this historical knowledge be possessed by the few. "The remnant" should not be only the custodians of such a heritage. We may hope that study of our Pacific