58 FISHER— MYTH-MAKING PROCESS IX [April is, 



This history of the Revolution from the whig point of view was 

 written almost as rapidly as the events occurred, not only in the whig 

 speeches, but in the Annual Register, an important publication of 

 that time, still in existence, which summed up the political and 

 diplomatic occurrences of the year both at home and abroad as they 

 affected England. After the Revolution was ended and people 

 began to think of writing an account of it, they found that it was 

 the easiest thing in the world to do. Just get down the volumes of 

 the Annual Register and there it all was for each of the seventeen 

 years of the long controversy; each year by itself clearly and co- 

 gently written; for the Annual Register had employed the great 

 whig orator Edmund Burke to write these summaries every year. 

 Burke was very careful with his dates, facts and statements so far 

 as he chose to go and the Register enjoyed a high reputation in that 

 respect. But the statements were all whig statements ; no others 

 were admitted ; no facts unfavorable to the whig line of policy were 

 admitted ; and every fact and statement was given the tinge and 

 leaning of the whig policy. 



Those summaries running for seventeen years in the Register 

 and the speeches of the whig orators were the material that the 

 early historians of the Revolution used. Gordon, who wrote the 

 first important and widely read history of the Revolution, copied 

 page after page of the Register verbatim and says so in his preface 

 to the first English edition. Those whig speeches and summaries 

 gave the tone, the point of view and the limitations, and fixed them 

 so rigidly that the great mass of evidence outside of those limita- 

 tions has always been rejected; and when now obtruded on the pub- 

 lic in even the mildest form, is received with staring and sometimes 

 indignant incredulity. 



I am certainly very glad that the whigs adopted the line of 

 policy that has been described. It was a great help to our cause ; 

 and it may have been good for the whig party or at any rate the 

 best they could do under the circumstances. But to make that mere 

 partisan position the basis and limitation for writing history is the 

 rankest absurdity that was ever heard of. Even as a political policy, 

 the whig plan was a mere dream that could never be carried out in 



