At one time I tried to write history.  I did not know enough to write it, but I knew from experience how hard it was to find an historian out, and I trusted I would not be found out.  I used to have this comfortable thought as I saw men struggling in the public arena.  I used to think to myself, “This is all very well and very interesting.  You probably assess yourself in such and such a way.  Those who are your partisans assess you thus and so.  Those who are your opponents urge a different verdict.  But it does not make very much difference, because after you are dead and gone some quiet historian will sit in a secluded room and tell mankind for the rest of time just what to think about you, and his verdict, not the verdict of your partisans and not the verdict of your opponents, will be the verdict of posterity.”  I say that I used to say that to myself.  It very largely was not so.  And yet it was true in this sense:  If the historian really speaks the judgment of the succeeding generation, then he really speaks the judgment also of the generations that succeed it, and his assessment, made without the passion of the time, made without partisan feeling in the matter—­in other circumstances, when the air is cool—­is the judgment of mankind upon your actions.

Now, is it not very important that we who shall constitute a portion of the jury should get our best judgments to work and base them upon Christian forbearance and Christian principles, upon the idea that it is impossible by sophistication to establish that a thing that is wrong is right?  And yet, while we are going to judge with the absolute standard of righteousness, we are going to judge with Christian feeling, being men of a like sort ourselves, suffering the same temptations, having the same weaknesses, knowing the same passions; and while we do not condemn, we are going to seek to say and to live the truth.  What I am hoping for is that these seventy years have just been a running start, and that now there will be a great rush of Christian principle upon the strongholds of evil and of wrong in the world.  Those strongholds are not as strong as they look.  Almost every vicious man is afraid of society, and if you once open the door where he is, he will run.  All you have to do is to fight, not with cannon but with light.

May I illustrate it in this way?  The Government of the United States has just succeeded in concluding a large number of treaties with the leading nations of the world, the sum and substance of which is this, that whenever any trouble arises the light shall shine on it for a year before anything is done; and my prediction is that after the light has shone on it for a year it will not be necessary to do anything; that after we know what happened, then we will know who was right and who was wrong.  I believe that light is the greatest sanitary influence in the world.  That, I suppose, is scientific commonplace, because if you want to make a place wholesome the best instrument