Book Description

Excerpt from Historical Record of the City of Savannah "History," said that eminent writer, Lord Bolingbroke, "is philosophy teaching by example." If this assertion be true, either philosophy has been very select in her examples or history not very judicious in her selectious or her teachings. Historians, until very recently, have only found illustrations of life and of fact, and examples for teaching philosophy, Law, and morals, among Kings and Nobles, Warriors and Statesmen. The People, the foundation of the social fabric, with their interests and rights, their thoughts and feelings, their personal toils and domestic life, have only figured in general history as machines for Kings to use or weapons for warriors to employ - the one not caring how soon the machine wore out, the other quite as reckless of the waste of weapons. The pomp of royalty, the problems of philosophers, the shifts and subterfuges of statesmen, and the butcheries of warriors fill the panorama of the world's life as it moves along the pages of the historian. Even here the assertion, as the majority of historians exemplify it, contradicts the facts and teachings of all ages - that the history of the world, as the history of life, is made up of little things. After all that has been written of the eminent and mighty men of ancient and modern times, how little do we know of the inner, personal, and domestic life of communities and nations. Pompeii has revealed more to awaken thought and excite curiosity and disgust than all the histories of Rome from Remus to Pio Nono. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.