Excerpt from Ridpath's History of the World, Vol. 4 of 5: Being an Account of the Principal Events in the Career of the Human Race From the Beginnings of Civilization to the Present Time; Comprising the Development of Social Institutions and the Story of All Nations, From Recent and Authentic Sources In still another particular the production of current history is greatly embarrassed and distracted. This is the necessity of the writer to constitute a part of that vast society, the movement of which he is expected to describe. He is himself borne along with the current. He must needs feel its fluctuations. Anon he finds himself in the middle of the stream, or borne at intervals into the whirling eddy near the shore, from which point of View universal nature seems to revolve around him. He is expected to share the Sympathies, the beliefs, the passions of the current age. He is ex pected to be swayed by the dominant preja dice, to think as his party thinks, to do as the majority do, to dream the prevailing dreams, to see the anticipated vision. He is expected to wear the form and fashion of the times; to be pleased with the current pleasure; to smile, to sigh, to weep, to sleep and wake, to go and come, to live and to die, even as do those with whom he is associated in the desti nies of life. This setting of the writer among the very facts, the tendency of which he is expected to discover and describe, is the most serious of all drawbacks to the accuracy and fidelity of his work. I can not hope that what I have written in this Fourth Volume, closely involved as it is with the movements of the current age, shall be wholly free from the coloring of prejudice and the mistakes arising from the personal equation. Doubt less there is in the following pages much obro matic and spherical aberration; but I cherish the hope that the reader will find much to have been faithfully delineated and lifted somewhat above the level of the political and partisan distortion which is unfortunately the prevail Ing v1ce of our times. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.