CHAPTER ONE

THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN RELATION TO WORLD CITIZENSHIP: BY G. P. GOOCH, LITT.D.

N speaking about citizenship in the year 1923, we must speak about world citizenship, and as a student and teacher of history I want this afternoon to try to suggest to you that the League of Nations is the consummation of the whole historic process; that it is a great deal more than a mere expedient rendered necessary by the Great War; indeed, that it is the logical, the natural and the rightful stage of the long process through which the human race has passed in attempting to organise the common life of man.

The key to the study of history is the unity of civilisation, and the key to the conception of world citizenship is also the unity of civilisation. Those of you who are teachers of history will, I am sure, be true to the principles of scholarship and also be true to the principles and demands of citizenship in its modern form by concentrating the attention of your pupils on this great conception of the unity of man. Civilisation is a co-operative achievement. The civilisation which we praise so highly is the

result of the co-operative efforts of men and women, known and unknown, through all the ages, belonging to all countries and all races and all creeds. It is the most wonderful thing that the world has ever seen, and it is the result of the common efforts of the human family. I do not think any history teacher is worth his salt unless he has that occupying the background of his mind. If you teach English history you know, and you must make your pupils realise, that you are only teaching a small part of the great story of the life of humanity.

This conception of the unity of civilisation is not a very old conception nor a very new one. The founders of civilisation, in the sense in which we use it to-day, were the Greeks, but they had no conception of the unity of the human family. They knew nothing about the civilisations which had preceded their own, and they did not know and did not want to know anything about the civilisations by which they were surrounded. You know that the word barbarians was a Greek word to express people whose language sounded like bar-bar and was unintelligible to the cultured Athenian. The first glimmering of a perception of the unity of civilisation came in with the Roman Empire. The Romans, in addition to launching into the world the conception of law, also brought into

the world the conception at any rate in an incipient form of the unity of civilised mankind, and by their conception of the law of nature and the law of nations they laid the foundation for the mental processes which we use to-day.

We know very well that the Roman Church was the heir-the spiritual if not the temporal heir of the Roman Empire, and the Middle Ages are to me more interesting for their contributions to what we will call a political theory than for almost any other reason. For a thousand years, roughly from St Augustine to Machiavelli, from the fifth century to the fifteenth, the conception of the unity of civilisation dominated Europe. They called Europe the Res publica Christiana, the Christian Commonwealth; and they regarded every member of the Christian Commonwealth as a member of a single family. The head of that family—the unseen, invisible head-was God, who was represented on earth by two great potentates, the Emperor, who was supreme in secular matters, and the Pope, who was supreme in spiritual matters.

There was no such thing as what we call nowadays sovereignty. It never occurred to anybody that the prince or the ruler of any given State was supreme. It never occurred to anybody in the Middle Ages that any one country was responsible for its doings to itself alone. The

Middle Ages, I repeat, created and believed in this great conception of the unity of civilised

mankind.

You will say, and say truly, that the conception was too narrow; that it was confined to Europe, and did not even embrace the whole of Europe because it excluded the Greek Church in the East; and that it was based on the community of religious belief instead of the common moral and spiritual foundations of human nature. Those objections are perfectly true, but they do not touch the value of this great contribution of medieval thought to the higher life of the world. They do not touch the value of the belief that mankind was one, and that every member and every State had recognised and confessed duties and obligations to all other States and to the community of which each State formed merely a part.

The difference between the medieval and the modern historian is immense. Modern historians, with few exceptions, are not only natives of their particular countries, but advocates. They are far less teachers and observers than advocates of a particular claim or a particular cause; and you can have-and do have-historians of the very front rank utterly ignorant of the underlying unity of civilised mankind. If you turn up any of the half-dozen historical hand-books