are connected with the police. A family drama, an act of rebellion, will only be mentioned if the police have appeared on the scene.
Three hundred and fifty million Europeans love or hate one another, work, or live on their incomes; but, apart from literature, theatre, or sport, their lives remain ignored by newspapers if Governments have not intervened in some way or other. It is even so with history. We know the least details of the life of a king or of a parliament; all good and bad speeches pronounced by the politicians have been preserved. "Speeches that have never had the least influence on the vote of a single member," as an old parliamentarian said. Royal visits, good or bad humour of politicians, jokes or intrigues, are all carefully recorded for posterity. But we have the greatest difficulty to reconstitute a city of the Middle Ages, to understand the mechanism of that immense commerce that was carried on between Hanseatic cities, or to know how the city of Rouen built its cathedral. If a scholar spends his life in studying these questions, his works remain unknown, and parliamentary histories—that is to say, the defective ones, as they only treat of one side of social life—multiply, are circulated, are taught in schools.
And we do not even perceive the prodigious work accomplished every day by spontaneous groups of men, which constitutes the chief work of our century.
We therefore propose to point out some of these
