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Updated: June 19, 2025
In short, he is not the retained attorney of the new faith, but its disinterested annalist, treating it simply as an historic change wrought in the texture of men's thought, promoted by such and such causes, attested by such and such effects, but independent of all partisan judgment and clamor either favorable or adverse. Still there is no doubt of the historian's own private bias.
No one, we think, can entertain any doubt of the historian's own strong conviction on this subject.
This knowledge of the end we must, therefore, put down as one of the most dangerous pitfalls which beset the writers of history. Then consider the difficulty in the "composition," to use an artist's word, of our historian's picture.
There was always the assumption of a common origin, an assumption sometimes notoriously at variance with fact; and, to repeat the historian's words, "if a family became extinct, its share returned to the common stock." In old Roman law, unclaimed inheritances escheated to the Gentiles.
From the historian's point of view, the Raskol is that same popular resistance to the introduction of Western novelties which under Peter the Great passed from its original aspect of an ecclesiastical and religious revolt into the further stage of a social and civil insurrection. In spite of himself, Peter the Great both inherited and aggravated the schism.
From his official position also he possessed unusually good opportunities of information and means of forming those judgments on affairs which are a feature of his chronicle. He has embodied many important documents in his narrative though sometimes not with the true historian's feeling of the importance of the exact language in such cases.
Some of us can well remember the window of his son's, the historian's, study, the light from which used every evening to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while "The Conquest of Mexico" was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable than those encountered by Cortes.
If we may venture to connect the works of the historian's leisure, according to the plan above suggested, this treatise forms a supplement to the Principe and the Discorsi. Both in his analysis of the successful tyrant and in his description of the powerful commonwealth he had insisted on the prime necessity of warfare, conducted by the people and their rulers in person.
To gain a real knowledge of historical truth, the historian's methods must be slower and more cautious, he must know his author intimately his habits of mind, his turns of style, his preferences, his gifts for seeing the real issue and always the background, and the ways of thinking that prevail in the background.
The number of the slain amounted to one hundred and sixty-two thousand, or, according to another account, three hundred thousand persons; and these incredible exaggerations suppose a real and effective loss sufficient to justify the historian's remark, that whole generations may be swept away by the madness of kings, in the space of a single hour.
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