APPLIED TO HISTORY 235 



legal and historical evidence, so that a person who is 

 practised in the Courts will probably be a good judge of 

 history, and what could not be proved in the law-courts 

 is probably unsound historically. The only point, so far 

 as I can see, at which there can be any possibility of/ 

 contact is in the investigation of facts as they cornel \ 

 before a jury. The judge explains the law : if A. B. 

 did such and such acts then he comes under the law 

 of murder or libel or whatever else it may be : it is 

 for the jury to find whether he did them or not. But 

 it seems to me that, as compared with the questions 

 raised in history, legal questions are of extraordinary 

 simplicity. In a legal case, what has happened is usually 

 admitted. A murder has been done : an article has been 

 published. There is no doubt about the facts, and no 

 doubt about the person accused of being responsible for 

 them. In some cases the problem is to connect the party 

 accused with the facts by links of the particular cogency 

 which the law requires. At other times the agency of the 

 accused is admitted, and the sole question is to estimate 

 the degree of his responsibility or the existence in his 

 mind of malice. In other words, the points which the 

 law starts with have to be proved and established by the 

 historian : and the latter will be at different times more 

 and less exacting than the lawyer. The law would run 

 the risk of letting off a guilty man rather than of 

 condemning an innocent one : history cares only to / 

 establish the truth by any means in its power ; in this I 

 sense it is relentless. The one deals with isolated * 

 facts and definite persons : the other may range in- 

 definitely over a field in which acts and agents are all 

 alike uncertain. 



II. I have endeavoured to indicate as clearly as I can 

 the form of the historical statement and the historical 



