This remarkable utterance of his, if indeed he made it, was in itself an outcome of history. Such contempt for all things past, and such engaging frankness in expressing it were themselves the outcome of the social history of the United States in the 19th century. Yet the American, generally speaking, is by no means ignorant of history or uninfluenced by his knowledge of it. The Americans know more about our history than we know about theirs, though I hope that will soon be remedied.