EUROPEAN HISTORY A collection of extracts from the sources chosen with the BY JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN CQ)UMBIA UNIVERSITY AND CHARLES A BEARD ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF POLITICS IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PREFACE However carefully and judiciously a historical manual may be prepared, it is impossible in its brief, compact statements of the fundamental facts to give a lively sense of the reality of the events, conditions, and motives with which it deals. The student is only too likely to learn and repeat the words of the book as mere formulas which fail to stimulate real thought and interest. In order to meet this difficulty and give the text-book its proper background and atmosphere the student must be brought here and there within reach of the living springs of our knowledge and see the very words of those who, writing when the past was present, can carry us back to themselves and make their times our own. These two volumes have, accordingly, been prepared to accompany chapter by chapter and section by section our Development of Modern Europe. The task of selection involved more complications and difficulties than one who has not attempted it would suspect. We cannot claim in every case to have discovered the most pertinent and illuminating extract to meet a particular need; but we trust that all that we have included will prove to have some interest, and that a great deal is not only of first-rate importance but is also vivid and impressive. We have borrowed to some extent from the second volume of Robinson's Readings in European History, since we could not afford to omit a number of |