It acts
as a check upon the imaginative tendencies which even eminent
writers have not always been able, by themselves, to keep under
proper control. The certainty, nay the mere probability, that
you will be confronted with the witnesses on whose evidence you
profess to have relied--the 'sources' from which your story is
derived--will suggest the necessity of sobriety of statement and
the advisability of subordinating rhetoric to veracity. Had the
contemporary documents been available for an immediate appeal to
them by the reading public, we should long ago have rid ourselves
of some dangerous superstitions. We should have abandoned our
belief in the fictions that the Armada of 1588 was defeated by the
weather, and that the great Herbert of Torrington was a lubber,
a traitor, and a coward. It is not easy to calculate the benefit
that we should have secured, had the presentation of some important
events in the history of our national defence been as accurate as
it was effective. Enormous sums of money have been wasted in trying
to make our defensive arrangements square with a conception of
history based upon misunderstanding or misinterpretation of facts.
Pecuniary extravagance is bad enough; but there is a greater evil
still. We have been taught to cherish, and we have been reluctant
to abandon, a false standard of defence, though adherence to
such a standard can be shown to have brought the country within
measurable distance of grievous peril.
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