To read history with profit, history must be true, or at any rate the
reader must have a power of discerning what is true in the midst of much
that may be false. I will bargain, for instance, that in the summer of
1899 the great mass of men, and especially the great mass of men who had
passed through the universities, were under the impression that armies
had left England for the purpose of conquest in distant countries with
invariable success: that that success had been unique, unsupported and
always decisive, and that the wealth of the country after each success
had increased, not diminished. In other words, had history been studied
even by the tiny minority who have education today in England, Sir
William Butler would have counted more than the Joels, and the late Mr.
Barnato (as he called himself); the South African War would not have
taken place in a society which knew its past.
Again, you may pick almost any phrase referring to the Middle Ages out
of any newspaper--if you are a man read in the Middle Ages--and you will
find in it not only a definite historical falsehood with regard to the
fact referred to, or the analogy drawn, but also a false philosophy.
For instance, the other day I read this phrase with regard to the burial
of a certain gentleman of my neighbourhood in Sussex: "We are surely
past the phase of mediaeval thought in which it was imagined that a few
words spoken over the lifeless clay would determine the fate of the soul
for all eternity.
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