especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain.
Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm of
hatred. But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking from
the horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis in
the belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, are
partners in a common work and essential one to another, above all,
perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make a
sudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible. Many of these
instruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out. Many of
the most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept in
the background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press.

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the most
indisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science,
and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercourse
between different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering and
strengthening and illuminating human life. The more prominence,
therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teaching
of history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind,
will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or less
full and distinct, of the progress of the world. For some hundreds of
years, culminating in the three or four centuries A.D., the dominant
feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually
subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the
picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and
nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined
figures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing of
other religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures become
predominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which is
given, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history.