Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/425

Rh a minute study of the hitherto neglected records of town and country life, the contracts, deeds, marriage bonds, parish lists, folklore and song, in fact everything down to the names of villages and the houses of the Bauern. Nothing has escaped Lamprecht's attention; and the results of twenty years of such investigation are recorded in his ‘Deutsche Geschichte’ (in six volumes) already mentioned. The ‘common man,’ who Alexander v. Humboldt had declared in 1809 could never be anything but a minute particle of the material of history, becomes with the Leipzig historian a guiding force in society, the very corner-stone of the building.

According to this method ‘the making of history’ which the politicians so often conceive to be their role in life is a very misleading term. History is not made, but it unfolds itself as a resultant of the thousand and one forces of which our leaders are but the humble exponents. The great influences which give a people their character and determine the direction of their development arise from climatic and geographical conditions, race antecedents and the reaction on these of economic forces, which forces are themselves in large measure the resultants of the above-mentioned conditions. Economic advantage and industrial aptitude determine the character of a people, not the will of leaders or leading classes.

To be sure this is not altogether a new view of history. Voltaire, suggestive in so many lines of thought, boldly proclaimed such to be the true historical method. Buckle spent twenty years in the attempt to elevate history to the rank of a science, and certainly succeeded in calling attention to the neglected influences in ‘history-making’; but not in relegating governments to the positions of social machines, not in dethroning the long-worshipped heroes and martyrs of the past. Moreover, Buckle's work was in no way so intensive as that of the German Kulturhistoriker, and what Buckle attempted for English history, Karl Biedermann accomplished for Germany in his monumental ‘History of German Civilization in the Eighteenth Century.’ Biedermann was one of those liberal thinkers whose dream for the Vaterland was so rudely disturbed by the all-conquering Bismarck spirit in the early seventies. The influence of both Buckle and Biedermann was swallowed up by the idea-and hero-worship of Ranke and his followers. And this tendency was in full harmony with the prevailing political opinions. The same influence is found in England in the works of Freeman and Gardiner and Stubbs.

The appearance of the ‘Deutsche Geschichte’ was a challenge for opposition of which its author must have been conscious. German history writing, since 1860, as has been suggested, has been a constant imitation of the great Berlin professor, Ranke. And to understand