Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/92

 86 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

peara as the time of England's greatest glory. Edward III. was at the verj height of his renown. The enishing defeat of France at Crecy, in 1346, fol- lowed the next year by the taking of Calais, had raised him to the height of his fame. ... It is little wonder, then, that the Great Pestilence,. . . coming as it does between Crecy and Poitiers, and at the very time of the creation of the first Knights of the (barter, should seem to fall aside from the general narrative as though something apart from, and not consonant with, the natural course of events.

Consequently Hume and others ^^ dismissed the calamity in a few- lines," and even J. R. Green, who had a more intelligent grasp of his- torical sequences, ^^ deals with the great epidemic in a scanty notice only as a mere episode in his account of the agricultural changes in the four- teenth century." Will the historians of the days to come record the pres- ent era as one of glorious victories and splendidly dominant monarchs ; or will they know what those now engaged in battle can not fully know, that the masses on both sides had a common cause and a common enemy ?

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