leaving out (or the leaving over for presentation by other artists) of aspects which are not dealt with.  We see this when we compare even the best portraits.  They do not wholly agree; it is enough if they correspond.  For portraits may vary in expression, and yet each may be true.  The characteristic of what is alive and is intelligent and spiritual is that it may have many expressions, every one of which really harmonizes with every other.  It is because they can bring out expression in this fashion that we continue to set high store on the work of a Gibbon or a Mommsen.

The moral of this is twofold.  We must, to begin with, be content for the present to remain in the stage at which all that can be done is to collect and assemble facts and personal impressions with as great care as we can.  The whole truth we can not bring out or estimate until the later period, altho we may be sure enough of what we have before us to make us feel capable of doing justice of a rough kind, so far as necessary action is concerned.

And there is yet another deduction to be drawn.  It is at all events possible that the wider view of a generation later than this may be one in which Germany will be judged more gently than the Allies can judge her to-day.  We do not now look on the French Revolution as our forefathers looked on it.  We see, because recent historians have impressed it on us, that it was a violent uprising against, not Louis XVI., but a Louis XIV.  What France really made her great Revolution to bring about was the establishment of a Constitution.  Horrible deeds were perpetrated in the name of Liberty, but it was not due to any horrible national spirit that they were perpetrated.  France was responsible no doubt for the deeds of the men who acted in her name.  But she could hardly have controlled them even had she passionately desired to do so.  And she did not passionately desire to do so because, however little the mass of the people outside Paris may have wished to massacre the adherents of the old regime, the people as a whole welcomed deliverance from calamity, even at the price of violent action.

We judge the French nation wholly differently to-day from the way we judged it then, and it judges us differently.  Yet it would have been well had we not in the end of the eighteenth century taken an exaggerated view of the French state of mind.  We now realize that even so great a man as Burke mistook a fragment for the whole.  Much blood and treasure might have been spared, and Napoleon might never have come into existence, had we and others been less hasty.