Presidential Address

Abstract

When I remembered that I had to address the Society to-day I thought at first of choosing some subject remote from the troubles of the moment, something analogous to my former addresses on the development of historical studies in England. But it was not possible to do so. The events which are in progress now have too absorbing an interest to permit us to abstract ourselves from them, for which of us is not in some way or other intimately affected by them? Besides that, these events have for any historian not merely the interest which all of us share, but an interest of a very special kind. The historian sees in action before his eyes the abstractions he has been reading about in books all his life: the struggle of races, the conflict of opposing ideas, the operation of economic laws, the development of historical tendencies, and perceives what these phrases really mean when they are translated into facts. There has been no such open conflict of ideals since the wars of the French Revolution. There has been no such huge conflict of races since the time when the Teutonic peoples moved westward to overthrow Roman civilisation and plant their own in its place. One of Milton's similes for the Satanic host pictures their coming:‘A multitude like which the populous North Poured never from her frozen loins to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons Came like a deluge on the South, and spread Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.’