Many have handed
down to us events, for the production of which they have given us but their
own conjectures. There has been often indeed such a distance between the
events themselves and the lives of those who have recorded them, that the
different means and motives belonging to them have been lost through time.
On the present occasion, however, we shall have the peculiar satisfaction
of knowing that we communicate the truth, or that those, which we unfold,
are the true causes and means. For the most remote of all the human
springs, which can be traced as having any bearing upon the great event in
question, will fall within the period of three centuries, and the most
powerful of them within the last twenty years. These circumstances indeed
have had their share in inducing me to engage in the present history. Had I
measured it by the importance of the subject, I had been deterred: but
believing that most readers love the truth, and that it ought to be the
object of all writers to promote it, and believing moreover, that I was in
possession of more facts on this subject than any other person, I thought I
was peculiarly called upon to undertake it.
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