The Golden Ages of History

Abstract

IT is surely rather a mistake to use the term ’Golden Ages’ as if it had any generally accepted or scientific meaning. It is rather like so many of the current slang words about an airman's achievements. Something or somebody strikes the speaker as exceptionally good, and he uses the phrase to characterize fifty or a hundred years of history or a long and exciting flight. In this way Louis XIV managed to gild some hundred years of French history, Queen Victoria not quite so much, and Queen Elizabeth still less. There is thus a profound fallacy in comparing or using the same terms of Queen Elizabeth's reign and the hundreds of years of China's flowering under the Tang and other emperors. Readers will also be inclined to jib at the exalted position assigned to the last hundred years of European history, considering that it includes at least five periods of disastrous fighting, and that it has culminated in the present War, which leaves us in grave doubt as to how much of Mr. McCabe's quite justly lauded triumph of science will survive.

The Golden Ages of History

By Joseph McCabe. Pp. xi + 242. (London: Watts and Co., Ltd., 1940). 10s. 6d. net.