whole best worth saying when so little could be said of
all that one would have liked to say. As these are
matters about which no two experts would agree, it will
not be strange if I am taxed with sins of omission and
disproportion. I hope, however, that such shortcomings
will not seem very grave to any one who has ever tried
to write a brief account of any large and complicated
matter. There are, in the main, two ways of condensing
history. One is to reduce the manifoldness of the facts
to a more or less abstract formula, and dwell at length
on the "interpretation," treating the facts briefly as so
much illustrative material. The other way is to select
from the manifold concrete facts those which seem to
be most representative and most pregnant, and to dwell
on those at some length, leaving the minor phenomena
unnoticed. In general, I have preferred the latter
method.

Of the numberless writers whom I have drawn on for
help, I owe most, probably, to the various editors of the
great modern collections which are enumerated in the
bibliographic note at the end of the volume. Of the
many historians whose works have been accessible, I owe
most to Goedeke, Scherer, Koenig, Francke, Meyer (for
the nineteenth century), Hettner (for the eighteenth),
and Vogt and Koch. The work of Vogt, in particular,
has been laid under contribution more often than the
footnotes--intentionally sparse--would indicate. While
I have tried to deal independently with my subject, so

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