Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Uses of History: An Address Delivered Before the New York Historical Society on Its Eighty-Fifth Anniversary, Thursday, November 21, 1889
DO we not make unconscious confessions of the truth that our age is, in essentials, like its predeces sors and by no means perfect Why study Plato? Why find models Of eloquence in Demosthenes and Cicero? Or, coming down later, where do we search for models in art, in architecture, even to some extent in dress? Making all allowance for the childish folly that sometimes stamps a thing as necessarily superior because it is Old, or because it comes from the ends Of the earth, we must, if we study history candidly, deny ourselves, as a genera tion, the monopoly Of genius and triumphant mastery over the forces of nature. On the way to Chicago, the other day, I said to a man on the other side Of my dining-table, We get out more comfortably than did the first settlers in Chicago. Yes, said he, modestly, it took me twenty-one days to go to it the first time. I respected him, and I did not men tally compliment myself as a traveller any more. And just so, if this lauded nineteenth century calmly confers with some Of its predecessors, it will modify its estimate Of itself.
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