allowed to flourish without restraint. We have another, though much less preposterous, case in Treitschke.

A few more general observations must precede analysis of his first paper.

In the first place, the Germans have always taken their historians seriously. Of course it is in the nature of the case impossible to demonstrate such a generalization, but it seems to be true that, in proportion to their merits, German historians, for the last century and a half, have enjoyed relatively higher prestige than any other type of German scholars. If we analyze the writings of such a man as Justus Möser (1720-94), for instance, we are not left in doubt that he was a thinker of superior talents and merits; yet we are not likely to find the evidence on which wholly to justify the rating which his opinions enjoyed as expressions of wisdom derived from history. Roscher calls him "the father of the historical school of jurisprudence" and "at the same time the greatest German national economist of the eighteenth century." During his lifetime and down past the middle of the nineteenth century this or some similar estimate of Möser crops out very frequently in the literature of German social science. He is often referred to in the same tone of awe-stricken reverence with which many German writers of the first half of the nineteenth century alluded to Goetheas though his opinion on any subject from A to Z in the cyclopedia settled the matter. Möser was a man with very pronounced opinions upon subjects about which his historical pursuits furnished him with little or no basis for judgment. Yet the fact that he entertained judgments on those subjects seemed to get for those judgments the benefit of historical sanction. He figures in a certain stratum of German literature therefore as a sort of Sir Oracle on all sorts of social matters. In this respect he is a good illustration of a marked German tendency. The German historian is more of a factor in the calculation of Germans than any other scholar of proportional merit. The theory on which we may account for this is that even scholars, and after them, of course, the general public, tend to assume that because a man is ostensibly studying past experience therefore his opinion on any subject must necessaCf. Roscher, Gesch d. National-Oekonomik in Deutschland, p. 500.

rily be a digest of past experience. Historians in all countries enjoy excessive benefits from this presumption; and we point to this fact without desiring to detract from the appreciation which proper appraisal of any historian's work authorizes. The fact is that this naïve presumption is as far from the truth as it would be to assume that because a man is a patent lawyer, he must necessarily be an authority upon admiralty practice. The German historian has had a more respectful hearing on a wider range of subjects than any other German scholar (always meaning in proportion to his claim to a hearing on the basis of critical knowledge of the subject in question).

In the second place, Treitschke is a vivid illustration of the actual aloofness of the academic type from the main current of affairs,' and its inability to sense proportions between the considerations which interest it and the factors which are decisive in a given social situation. We need not raise the question whether this weakness is more or less evident in the German academic type than in that of other nations; or whether it was more conspicuous a generation ago in Germany than it is now. The foible is real enough in the academic type always and everywhere, and the present case will be most instructive to us if we let it tell its full story without breaking its force by saying to ourselves that we are not as other men are. The live issue raised by Schmoller and his friends was whether the Germans could do more than they had done and were doing toward bringing their social conditions into more effective harmony with up-to-date insight into justice. Treitschke was right in his intuition and his logic that all such questions must be treated by men who are able to think, in connection with long looks backward and forward, and with broad surveys of the field of interests affected by the present alternatives. His typically academic mistake was first, in not being able to distinguish between historical experience which might be instructive about the real issue, and speculative questions of historical philosophy which turned attention only to pedantic trifles; and second, in his consequent inability to hit upon the proportion in which these considerations

In spite of the frequent connection to which we have referred in the case of the Cameralists, and later German social scientists, between academic and public functions.

were timely in a case of actual social crisis. The consequence was that, in everything but motive, Treitschke's argument was as pitiable an exhibit of untimeliness and disproportionateness as Nero's fiddling while Rome was burning. There was an importunate situation to be met in real life, and Schmoller was trying to find out what the Germans could do about it. Treitschke's best was a pedantic attempt to shift the issue to a debating-society wrangle over the pros and cons of the philosophical conceit of the equality of man! No doubt right or wrong thinking on this subject has a bearing upon all other social thinking and acting; but there are always relativities of importance in social factors; and the urgent question was equality or no equality can the German nation afford to let the present state of competition in the labor market have the whole say about the sort of air German laborers shall breathe, and the food they shall eat, and the houses they shall live in, and the hours they shall work, and the scale of their wages?

Treitschke was as far from the strategic center of the conflict as von Holst was in his Constitutional History of the United States when he reached the assault upon Sumner by Brooks in the Senate. Instead of taking up the big problems of the extent to which Sumner and Brooks respectively represented opposite forms of social momentum, von Holst ignores that vital matter and occupies a series of pages with ponderous weighing of the trifling question whether "Bully Brooks" was a gentleman!1

It was in these trifles of academic pedantry that Treitschke had whatever advantages he had over Schmoller in the debate. Schmoller was certainly too anxious to generalize history into sanction for immediately appropriate action. His moral perceptions were more accurate than the historical formulas by means of which he attempted to commend them. With Treitschke the relation was reversed. His historical generalizations were safer than Schmoller's, but they were arbitrarily associated with the moral questions presented by the existing social situation. Treitschke was a paleontologist discoursing on the anatomy of extinct species, while Schmoller was trying to be a good Samaritan administering first aid to injured fellow-citizens.

IV, 318-33.

Treitschke would seem to have had his eyes open when he said:

A profound revolution, such as Germany has experienced only once, in the days of Luther, has burst upon our popular life. With one bold leap we have passed from the meagerness of provincial civil life into the large circumstances of the national state. We have released the enormous economic forces of this nation for free competition; and while we have just begun to understand what money economy is, we are already surprised by the economic form of the future-credit economy-with an abundance of new structures.

So far he sees the tremendous change in actual conditions, but he cannot be just to the activities that have been stimulated by the change. He goes on:

This sudden convulsing of all the old order, and the frightful misery with which peoples always have to pay the price of transition to new economic forms, have lured modern socialism from its French home into our territory. So far, no really new fruitful idea has sprung from the German Socialdemokratie. It has given us nothing which had not already been refuted by word and deed in France. But the leaders of socialism' command such a spendid type of confidence as has never before been found in German party life. They declare that black is white and white is black with such obstinate assurance that the innocent bystander involuntarily asks himself whether he is not perhaps laboring under some sort of an illusion. As experienced demagogues they know the temper of the masses, the yearning of the common man for a fixed, indubitable authority which shall overawe him. They know it will be possible to take from the people their belief in a better future only when the prospect of a fat present can be made immediately promising. Consequently they picture that naked nonsense, the lazy and sated vagabond life of the future in such definite outlines, with such brilliant colors, as though no doubt about the matter were possible.2

It would be a blunder as unpardonable as Treitschke's if we were to take a single case as proof of anything. We may be content with saying that Treitschke's case at this point is a sample of the sort of evidence which might be piled up as high as the biographies of all the historians would reach, tending to show that the experience of specialists in the study of history is no more assurance than the experience of any other specialist, of balanced judgment about the meaning of contemporary events. This perception was one of the important factors in the development of sociology. Men who

I.e., Schmoller and the Verein!

2 Note that Treitschke was saying this by innuendo of the paper of Schmoller which we have just epitomized!

had been trained in historical technique discovered that this technique alone as surely warped the judgment of scholars as training in language alone gives a bent to the mind which does not necessarily insure trustworthy procedure in the experimental sciences. The universal tendency of historians is to overestimate the instructive value of past experience as compared with present experience. They sometimes reason with the tacit assumption that experience came to a definitive close before the contemporary conflicts of forces began. They imply that past experience has settled all the problems of life for all time, and that it is not only superfluous but impertinent to formulate, as problems of a distinct character, the crises confronted by living men. They are inclined to assume that past experience has yielded precepts competent to control the present. This is equivalent to the notion that the schoolboy's last year's problems in fractions could settle his this year's problems in cube root.

Toward the close of his eminent career, Professor von Holst gave an exhibition of this foible. He discoursed in most impassioned manner, and in pontifical tone, upon the thesis that annexation of the Sandwich Islands by the United States would be the beginning of the end of the Republic. In reality, however, his historical studies had never touched closely upon those specific state relations which were and are to be pivotal between the peoples bordering the Pacific. He was, therefore, almost as amateurish on the subject as the average American college graduate. The point is that he was nevertheless listened to because he was a historian.

These typical preconceptions, which may be found so often in the deliverances of historians about the actual human situation of their own time, falsify the past as well as the present. They fail fully to visualize the lusty conflict of human interests, in the exercise of human equipments, which was always the reality in the past, instead of the mere impersonal play of cosmic or logical forces. They fail still more to see that this same conflict is going on today between men whose interests are still developing. They consequently fail to see that moral judgments and battles for the enforcement of moral judgments today must turn more on the