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public utterances to employ the phraseology of sham-scientific history, and talk of the 'trend of civilization,' imputing to 'movements,' 'tendencies,' and 'forces' the events which are actually due to the conscious will of individual men.

Much of the vogue of 'the inevitable' is attributable to the sloppy thinking of popular historians, who, instead of applying modern conceptions of causation to enforce human responsibility, as they rightly do, use them to to exclude both individual and collective with as operative causes from the sphere of politics. Even writers of the well-earned reputation of Sir John Seeley and Mr. C. H. Pearson have sometimes lent their authority to a view of history which sees it composed of great tidal movements of economic or racial forces making for a partition of the earth which shall give such and such dominion to Russia or to Anglo-Saxondom, or marking out for China or the Negroid races certain portions of the globe as their predestined heritage.

This view of history lends itself to dramatic treatment and literary men are apt to play with it. A good illustration is the description which Victor Hugo gives of the actual working of events in the French Revolution, in his book 'Ninety-three': –