written by men with a claim to be regarded as serious historians subordinated everything to the historical narrative. To understand a people, to have a sympathetic comprehension of the spirit that is in them, to know what has made them what they are and what the future may have in store for them, to be able to grasp not alone their material development but the much more vital and elusive working of their mind, it is necessary as a foundation that one shall have a thorough knowledge of the history of that people; but history, using the word in its strictly technical sense, is too narrow and too concentrated. It remains for the historical psychologist to treat in his own way and as a special branch the subject in its widest relations. And the work of the literary entrepreneur was too superficial, too untrustworthy, too hasty, to be of value, although it served one useful purpose. It was an impressionist and brilliantly colored picture of the exaggerations of national character and usually a caricature; and caricature is not always malicious, for the supreme art of caricature is the perfect likeness with the accentuation of a salient feature.

If the impressions and observations and reflections of Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans, of women as well as men, after a few weeks, and sometimes only a few days, spent in a country the size of all Europe, with a population more than twice that of their own country and with political and social institutions foreign to them and needing

long and careful study to be understood, had any value, it was this: the foreigner found nothing the same as that to which he was accustomed, and he criticised or approved according to temperament or preconceived prejudice. The mind receives its most sensitive impression from things new, not from a reproduction of the old. The fact that every foreigner found in America something new -a new view of life, new social institutions, new methods of government - confirms perhaps more than anything else the conclusion reached by the writer through other sources of investigation, that America has given birth to a new race; that the term America to-day is something more than a mere geographical expression; that there has come into being an American Nation, for a nation is the product of not one but many things, and there must be certain well-defined elements to constitute nationality.

What those are shall be explained in their proper place. It is sufficient now to set down as an assertion capable of scientific demonstration a fact of the first importance.

My sole purpose being the ascertainment of this truth, it is only necessary briefly to explain the method pursued. In writing biography, in seeking for the causes that made this man great and another notorious, one does not begin when the character of his subject has been formed. If the true man is to be revealed, if we are to know him as he was,

and especially if we are to know the influences that moulded him and so profoundly affected him for good or evil, we must begin at the beginning and follow his life through his struggles, his temptations, his triumphs. In a word, I have attempted to write the biography of a people; and the more I considered how that best could be done the stronger became the conviction that I must begin with the incunabula of the race. In the history of early struggles is found the cradle.

Every other civilization of which we have any knowledge is so much older than that of America that we can take much for granted; manners, morals, customs have become stereotyped and we do not have to ask the reasons for them or how they came into existence; we accept them as matter of course, precisely as we take the other phenomena of life; so much are we accustomed to them that they no longer excite wonder. But with America it is different. The why and the wherefore is the constant question; the meaning of it all can only be understood by an intimate knowledge of the fundamental. Thus it becomes possible for an Englishman to write a book on France and a Frenchman on England,' and neither finds it necessary to go back to history in his search for the foundation on which national character is laid.

It is impossible to write a history, using that word not merely to describe the deeds of a nation, 1 Bodley: France; Boutmy: The English People.

but also its development and the formation of character, its physical and mental growth, and to bring into true relation all the various causes that make life, unless it is written as a consecutive whole. The proper function of the historian, the psychologist of history especially, as I conceive it, is from the summit of the present to look back with clear vision on the past, and with the advantage of unobscured view, free from the distraction of being an actor in the scene of life, behold the causes that produced results, observe the play of dædalian forces which once released gain from within themselves new impulses and form fresh centres of energy, and with the past and the present as a guide develop the future. The undulating wave of human action sets in motion agencies the consequences of which man can no more foresee at the time than he can follow each drop as it is hurled up from the depths and is dissipated in ether, not to be lost but to exert new power. Every human action forecasts futurity as inevitably as life forecasts death. History is acted in the present, but it is written in the past and read in the future.

I make no pretensions to original historical research. I have gone to the best and most accepted authorities for my information, carefully balancing conflicting statements and endeavoring to reconcile them by the preponderance of evidence. In the historical section everything has been purposely omitted that was not essential to a complete and, I

hope, lucid explanation of the origin and development of the American people. Such things as encumber the pages of historians, which it is the duty of the historian to relate,―quarrels between parties, petty conflicts, even conflicts on a grander scale, have been either omitted or dismissed with merely a reference; but those things that determine character, that distinguish the offspring of a race, that develop the mind, that prepare the ground for the acceptance of ideas which are to be so fruitful in results, have been treated at proper length. To students of American history it may seem as if I had simply repeated what is already well known; but to this criticism, if it shall be made, my answer is that it appeared to me to be essential to present certain historical facts in their just relation to psychological progress so as to show that the American people have not sprung from the air but are, similar to all other highly developed races, the product of evolution; in their case political and sociological.

It may perhaps be thought that disproportionate space has been given to the Puritan, but the more I have come to study the causes that produced this new race, the more I have been impressed with the imperfect knowledge possessed by Americans and if it is so among Americans in how much greater degree must it be among Europeans? — of the great and lasting influence exercised on American civilization and the formation of character by