6 OLD AND NEW WAYS OF TREATING HISTORY 
So many cherished traditions have been rudely upset 
as to produce a widespread feeling of helplessness with 
regard to historical beliefs. When one is so often 
proved to be mistaken, can one ever feel sure of being 
right? Or must we fall back upon the remark, half 
humorous, half cynical, once made by Sainte-Beuve, 
that history is, in large part, a set of fables, which men 
agree to believe in? The great critic should have put 
his remark into the past tense. Men no longer agree 
to believe in fables. All historical statements are 
beginning to be sifted. But this winnowing of the 
false from the true, the perpetual testing of facts and 
opinions, is not weakening history but strengthening 
it. After a vast amount of such criticism, destructive 
as much of it is, our views of the past are not less but 
more trustworthy than before. 
The instances above cited may illustrate for us the 
first of the differences between the old and the new 
ways of treating history. The old-fashioned historian 
was usually satisfied with copying his predecessors, 
and thus an error once started became perpetuated ; 
but in our time no history written in such a way would 
command the respect of scholars. The modern histo- 
rian must go to the original sources of information, to 
the statutes, the diplomatic correspondence, the reports 
and general orders of commanding officers, the records 
of debates in councils and parliaments, ships’ log-books, 
political pamphlets, printed sermons, contemporary 
memoirs, private diaries and letters, newspapers, broad- 
sides, and placards, even perhaps to worm-eaten ac- 
count books and files of receipts. The historian has 
not found the true path until he has learned to ransack 
such records of the past with the same untiring zeal 
