A great deal is also said of the evidence from his own diary of the “hollowness” and the “double dealing” of President Polk in his conduct toward Mexico. What is really proved by this evidence is that James K. Polk was not a cheap opportunist, waiting to be forced to act by situations created by others, but foresaw those situations and was ready to take advantage of them for the expansion of his country and the increase of its power.
To discover that James K. Polk was never taken by surprise, and that all his great political acts were purposed and planned for long in advance, does not degrade him, but exalts his character by proving its conscious strength. It lifts James K. Polk out of the Gladstone class and puts him at least on the borders of the Bismarck class of statesmanship.
Game Not Worth the Candle.
And of what earthly or heavenly importance is it to any human soul to know that the Pilgrims did not actually land in a body on Plymouth Rock on a certain day? Or that the old stone tower at Newport is not what Longfellow suggested, a relic of the Northmen, but merely Governor Arnold’s windmill?
Or that the Spanish settlers in America treated the Indians, on the whole, more humanely than did the English? Or that, if the Americans’ powder had not run out and they had been able to hold Bunker Hill, they would probably have been captured the next day?
With all their labor and kicking up of dust, and the personal notoriety they get by it, the “researchers” whom Mr. Haskell praises have not changed the main and abiding conceptions of our history at all. Their game seems hardly worth the candles consumed at it.
Truth is the first aim of the historian. History has been characterized as a pack of lies, generally agreed to by its makers.
“Anything but history,” said Horace Walpole, “for history must be false.”
The business of the scientific historian is to examine all witnesses, hear all the evidences, and get at the exact facts, even though they make ancient reputations tumble.
And yet we cannot but ask with Wordsworth: