Read in this way, history may be sought with genuine pleasure. It is
only pedantry has made it dreary, only blindness has left it dull. The
story of man is the most wonderful ever conceived. It can be made the
most fascinating ever written.

With this idea firmly established in mind, we seek another line of
thought. The world grows smaller every day. Russia fights huge battles
five thousand miles from her capital. England governs India. Spain and
the United States contend for empire in the antipodes. Our rapidly
improving means of communication, electric trains, and, it may be,
flying machines, cables, and wireless telegraphy, link lands so close
together that no man lives to-day the subject of an isolated state.
Rather, indeed, do all the kingdoms seem to shrink, to become but
districts in one world-including commonwealth.

To tell the story of one nation by itself is thus no longer possible.
Great movements of the human race do not stop for imaginary boundary
lines thrown across a map. It was not the German students, nor the
Parisian mob, nor the Italian peasants who rebelled in 1848; it was the
"people of Europe" who arose against their oppressors. To read the
history of one's own country only is to get distorted views, to
exaggerate our own importance, to remain often in densest ignorance of
the real meaning of what we read. The ideas American school-boys get of
the Revolution are in many cases simply absurd, until they have been
modified by wider reading.

From this it becomes very evident that a good history now must be, not a
local, but a world history. The idea of such a work is not new. Diodorus
penned one two hundred years before Christ. But even then the tale took