Excerpt from Historical Society of Southern California, Vol. 10: 1915-1916

It is my pleasant task to bring to your attention and urge upon your consideration a branch of human study - department of know ledge - which While not highly conducive to material ends, is yet most highly practical in its nature and admirably suited to widen, deepen and project the life. The subject is History.

And first of all, let us endeavor, Wit-h such care as we may in a few moments, to reach a just conception of history: for on the answer to the oft-recurring question, what is history? Obviously depend its real importance and value.

The original Greek conception of historic was that of research, or investigation. Not the rigidly scientific method of research employed by historical critics today, but an investigation into and a setting forth of the great deeds Of illustrious men, Often with distinct bias. Show me, Savage Landor makes one Of his heroes say, how great projects were executed, great advantages gained, and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and the states men who stood foremost, that I may bend to them in reverence. Let the books of the treasury lie closed as religiously as the Sibyl's. Leave weights and measures in the market place; commerce in the harbor; the arts in the lights they love; philosophy in the shade. Place History on her rightful throne, and at the Sides of her Eloquence and War.1 The Greeks did not regard history as the simple narration Of what had happened in the past, but rather (to use the words of Professor H. Morse Stephens) as a certain arrange ment of a narrative of events so as to bring out certain ideas. Some of the most conspicuous merits of Herodotus, as his simplicity and credulous good faith, would today, I fear, go far to condemn a writer in the eyes of historical criticism. It would be a doubtful compliment to a diligent historian to tell him he is a capital story teller. SO Thucydides, the first of the philosophic historians, owes his brilliancy not so much to an accurate and impartial account of the age of which he wrote as to the faultlessly constructed speeches he put into his characters' mouths, but which in truth they never delivered.

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