Take, for instance, this case of the
little Dauphin, Louis XVII. It really does not matter to day whether the
boy got away or whether he died in prison. It does not prolong the line
of the Capetians--the heir to that is present in the Duke of Orleans. It
does not even affect our view of any other considerable part of
history--save possibly the policy of Louis XVIII--and it is of no direct
interest to our pockets or to our affections. Yet the masses of work
which have accumulated round that one doubt have solved twenty other
doubts. They have illuminated all the close of the Terror; they are
beginning to make us understand that most difficult piece of political
psychology, the reaction of Thermidor, and with it how Europeans lose
their balance and regain it in the course of their quasi-religious wars;
for all our wars have something in them of religion.
Three elements appear to enter into the judgment of history. First,
there is the testimony of human witnesses; next, there are the non-human
boundaries wherein the action took place, boundaries which, by all our
experience, impose fixed limits to action; thirdly, there is that
indefinable thing, that mystic power, which all nations deriving from
the theology of the Western Church have agreed to call, with the
schoolman, _common sense_; a general appreciation which transcends
particular appreciations and which can integrate the differentials of
evidence.
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