LXII THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



if you present men and things in an unexpected light, you will take 

 the reader by surprise, and readers do not like that. They only seek 

 in a history the stupid things they know already. Try to instruct your 

 reader, and you will only humiliate and vex him. Don't try to enlight- 

 en him ; he will cry out that you are insulting his beliefs. Historians 

 copy one another, and thus spare themselves toil and escape being 

 thought conceited. Imitate them, and don't be original. An original 

 historian is an object of universal distrust, scorn and disgust. Do 

 you think," he added, "that I should have been considered and 

 honoured as I am if I had put any novelties into my historical works? 

 What are novelties? Impertinences." 



The satirist here has indulged in a little humorous exagg8ration, 

 but he sets in a strong light the truth, that to revise history, where 

 the prejudices, to say nothing of the interests, of men are concerned, is 

 hardly less difficult than to revise a theological creed. 



Not infrequently history is found to be corrupted in its very source. 

 If an original narrative is false or exaggeraetd it may easily happan 

 that the mistatements it contains will be repeated from age to age by 

 a series of uncritical writers, and thus pass into unquestioned, not to say, 

 unquestionable tradition. Count Frontenac, in a despatch to the 

 French Government gave a greatly exaggerated official report of the 

 Lachine massacre. Charlevoix took his word for numbers and details, 

 and Charlevoix's account has become classic. It is in all the popular 

 histories. But how do we know that Frontenac exaggerated ? Through 

 the careful researches of the late Hon. Mr. Justice Girouard in parish 

 registers. Not half the number reported by Frontenac as killed were 

 missing after the disaster. In this case there were motives for misre- 

 presentation. There was the ever-operative motive of trying to im- 

 press the French Government with the dangers to which the colony 

 was exposed, so as to get more liberal supplies in men, money and 

 material ; and there was a special motive on the part of Frontenac 

 who had just been sent back to Canada for his second term as Governor, 

 of showing how terrible a calamity had overtaken the colony in his 

 absence. Denonville, the retiring Governor, had just a few weeks before, 

 ordered the abandonment and destruction of Frontenac's favourite fort 

 of Cataraqui, and this did not help to put the two men, who already 

 differed greatly in temperament and principles, on better terms. 



Every student of Canadian history will remember Father Roche- 

 monteix's criticism of the Relations des Jésuites, a series of annals which, 

 on the whole, like the rest of the world, he highly esteemed. He said 

 in effect that they consisted of carefully selected incidents of a particular 

 character and significance, and did not, therefore, correctly reflect the 

 normal life of the country. What the good fathers had mainly in view 



