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I appreciate the opportunity you have given me to take some part in the proceedings of your annual meeting. If I had been asked to confine my remarks to the praise and encouragement of historical research, I should find no topic more congenial or better worth while.

The superstructures of our twentieth century civilization are taking on many unexpected forms, and their towers and pinnacles are already more lofty by far than could have been imagined a century ago. Yet all these venturings and projections that absorb the minds of the race of men that lives and aspires as we begin the fourth century of our experience on these American shores must rest upon human foundations laid in the toilsome, humdrum past. Concerning this substructure of our history, by far too little is commonly understood.

The historians are constantly engaged in the rewriting of chapters in what have been considered the principal themes and concerns of historical narrative, or analysis, or criticism. However one may regard the results of such attempts at revaluation of great events or epochs, or of the careers and influence of particular rulers and leaders, there is much to commend in the so-called scientific methods with which students are now made acquainted. Governments are opening long closed archives for the writers of political history in modern periods. The explorer, the archæologist, and the expert in comparative philology are giving us a fresh insight into the life of antique 