now discuss, but I venture to say that a large number of those who read this can recall similar impressions. May not the student of the future be saved such damaging experiences? Is there not some way of better preparing the college student for the study of history without leaving him in total ignorance of all that has contributed to make the people what they are at the time which he studies? The high school work in general history is not all the preparation that he needs.
We recognize that the study of history in the university must be in greater detail and of shorter periods than in the high school or preparatory course. As soon as we begin to study closely, and penetrate to the moving forces of history, we find that we must know all about the origin of a people if we would clearly understand that people. By origin I mean genesis in so far as we are able to trace it by any means within our power. If men are evolved by slow processes from the lower forms of life I surely do not intend to say that the historian must trace all men back to a speck of protoplasm. We may be content to let the biologist occupy the whole field from protoplasm to man; but as history is the study of man, let us begin with man where we first find him.
Even if history be considered as the study of governments, wars, and social development of men, we must not take an arbitrary starting point. It would not seem quite the proper thing to commence the study of arithmetic with percentage, or of science with astronomical calculations, yet in the study of the social development of a people our history books begin at a point where there is already a well developed social organism, and it is considered sufficient if we follow it on to the present. We think we have penetrated sufficiently far into the mythical, misty and doubtful, if we say that Romulus founded Rome, and then proceed to investigate the wars with the Etruscans, Sabines and Latins, and merely leave Romulus poised in the ether of the past, like the turtle in space upon which Atlas stands to hold the world. There is far more sense than is discovered at first thought in the apparently foolish question of the negro in the audience
