But the plain or brute historical lie is more commonly
found in the pages of ephemeral journalism. Thus the other day, with
regard to the Budget, I saw some financial operation alluded to as
comparable with "the pulling out of Jews' teeth for money in the Middle
Ages." When did anyone in the Middle Ages pull out a Jew's teeth for
money? There is just one very doubtful story told about King John, and
that story is told without proof by one of John's worst enemies, in a
mass of other accusations many of which can be proved to be false.
Again, I turn to an Oxford History of the French Revolution, and I find
the remark that the massacres of September were organized by the men
from Marseilles. They were not organized by the men from Marseilles. The
men from Marseilles had nothing to do with them, and the fact has been
public property since the publication of Pollio and Marcel's monograph
twenty years ago.
What criterion can the ordinary reader choose when he is confronted by
difficulties of this sort? I will suggest to him one which seems to me
by far the most valuable. It is the reading of firsthand authorities. It
is all a matter of habit. When the original authorities upon which
history is based were difficult to get at, when few of those in foreign
tongues had been translated, and when those that had been published were
published in the most expensive form, the ordinary reader had to depend
upon an historian who would summarize for him the reading of another.
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