APPENDIX A LIX 



exceptions, a most partial view both of the causes of the war and of the 

 events that marked its course. To-day conditions have changed, and 

 American historians are presenting a very different, and far juster, pic- 

 ture of the same series of events. Great Britain now appears rather as 

 the patient and indulgent parent, erring in judgment at times, but never 

 sinning past forgiveness, and usually willing to repair her faults as fast 

 as they were pointed out. This more liberal and equitable spirit in 

 which history has lately been written has doubtless acted upon public 

 opinion, but a previous change in public opinion, a growing and deep- 

 ening consciousness of the difficulties which the problems of government 

 present, and of the defects in every form of government, has probably 

 not been without influence on the historians themselves. 



Allowance must be made for the difficulties attaching to the ob- 

 servation of facts. Pious Aeneas, when he was giving to Queen Dido the 

 tragic particulars of the sack of Troy, was able to say "quorum magna 

 pars fui," but it is impossible even for a man who is a great part of events 

 to see everything. When you are engaged in street fighting, your at- 

 tention is apt to be much occupied with the matter in hand; and if you 

 happen to have your aged parent on your back, and to be making what 

 speed you can from a scene of carnage, the opportunities for observation 

 are not much improved. Still the pious hero made a thrilling narrative 

 of it, too thrilling indeed for Dido's peace of mind. Like Desdemona, 

 she loved him for the dangers he had passed, but unhappily he had busi- 

 ness elsewhere. A fragment of Euripides that some one has preserved, 

 says that Ares is favorable to falsehoods ; and truly there has been a ter- 

 rible amount of lying, or at least misrepresentation, about battles. 

 After Borodino the Russian general reported that he had inflicted ter- 

 rific loss on the French; putting on the soft pedal he added: "La nôtre 

 a été sensible." 



"In war," one of the leading English weeklies lately observed "all 

 the strongest passions of man unite to pervert or obliterate the truth." 

 It assigns the palm for lying, however, to the painters of battle scenes; 

 perhaps because they deliberately, and not under the influence of any 

 excitement, paint into their pictures details that they know had no ex- 

 istence in reality. Examples of this indeed are not far to seek. But 

 in much less exciting and more restricted affairs than battles observa- 

 tion is far from being so simple or so sure a thing as is commonly sup- 

 posed. Eye witnesses differ in their testimony often in perfectly good 

 faith : — everything depends on what catches one's attention. We go to 

 see a conjurer, and lo! things without number are taken out of hats that 

 never were in hats, and terrible acts of destruction are wrought on 

 watches and other precious articles, which nevertheless emerge scath- 

 less from their trying adventures. All this is what our captured senses 



