[CHAPTER IX]
I. FALSEHOOD AIDS NO ONE’S TRUTH
James Oppenheim says:
“The greatest are the simplest—
They need be nothing else,
It is the rest who have to play parts,
To seem what they are not.”
War times and periods of great public agitation have always brought forth in every free country the most scurrilous and vicious denunciations and slanders of public men. Such vile vituperation of Washington, Lincoln and others in our stormy periods, if all printed would make many volumes that bear in numerous instances the logical appearance of authentic history. But when sifted down, each to its origin, it is always what some one, long since gone from the possibility of explanation, has said, or been supposed to say, who might have known or might have misunderstood.