Living in History
indelible record on its pages; and other men receive these pages as their best inheritance, their avenue to understanding, their key to life.
Therefore it is unwise to gibe at history because we do not chance to know it. It pleases us to gibe at anything we do not know, but the process is not enlightening. In the second year of the war, the English "Nation" commented approvingly on the words of an English novelist who strove to make clear that the only things which count for any of us, individually or collectively, are the unrecorded minutiæ of our lives. "History," said this purveyor of fiction, "is concerned with the rather absurd and theatrical doings of a few people, which, after all, have never altered the fact that we do all of us live on from day to day, and only want to be let alone."
"These words," observed the "Nation" heavily, "have a singular truth and force at the present time. The peo-
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