The Study of History in the Light of Current Developments

I fancy it is a rather new idea to think of looking at current affairs in the light of history, at all events remote history. This point of view has not, I think, been common in England at any rate. Take people of about my own age-fifty-nine. When I was a child, growing up in London, I had the impression that history, so far as England was concerned, had really ended with the Battle of Waterloo. We had won the Battle of Waterloo, and getting out of history had been one of the rewards of our victory. One thought of history as being something rather unpleasant that happened to other people. As one grew up and became conscious of other countries, one became aware that the United States, for example, had been in history in the eighteen-sixties and that France had been in history in 1870. One knew that the Balkans were still in history, but then the Balkans were so backward: they would be still in history. But the English were manifestly out of it. It was true that in the eighteen-nineties and the first years of the present century, the French and the Southerners of the old South in the United States were conscious of being still in history, because they were conscious of unpleasant things that had happened to them in the recent past. But, on the whole, these two recently defeated peoples were exceptions in the Western world, and the attitude we then had towards history in England was, I think, the prevailing one. It was the attitude of most of continental Europe and North America. I think our expectation about our own future in the West was very accurately put by Gibbon, in a passage which he wrote, as far as I can make out, in 1781. You will find it at the end of his general observations on the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, with which he winds up The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Before he comes to the rest of his story he pauses to consider whether a catastrophe of this kind could overtake the modern Western world; and of course he concludes that this could not conceivably happen. As I have said, Gibbon was writing apparently in 1781, when England was, I think, at war with France and Spain and Holland, as well as with the Thirteen Colonies, and when the northern Powers, in their "armed neutrality" were what nowadays would be called "non-belligerents," unfriendly towards us. This might have seemed to be rather a critical time for this country; yet at this juncture Gibbon could write: