To know men you must behold their actions.  In society we hear them talk; they show their words and hide their deeds; but in history the veil is drawn aside, and they are judged by their deeds.  Their sayings even help us to understand them; for comparing what they say and what they do, we see not only what they are but what they would appear; the more they disguise themselves the more thoroughly they stand revealed.

Unluckily this study has its dangers, its drawbacks of several kinds.  It is difficult to adopt a point of view which will enable one to judge one’s fellow-creatures fairly.  It is one of the chief defects of history to paint men’s evil deeds rather than their good ones; it is revolutions and catastrophes that make history interesting; so long as a nation grows and prospers quietly in the tranquillity of a peaceful government, history says nothing; she only begins to speak of nations when, no longer able to be self-sufficing, they interfere with their neighbours’ business, or allow their neighbours to interfere with their own; history only makes them famous when they are on the downward path; all our histories begin where they ought to end.  We have very accurate accounts of declining nations; what we lack is the history of those nations which are multiplying; they are so happy and so good that history has nothing to tell us of them; and we see indeed in our own times that the most successful governments are least talked of.  We only hear what is bad; the good is scarcely mentioned.  Only the wicked become famous, the good are forgotten or laughed to scorn, and thus history, like philosophy, is for ever slandering mankind.

Moreover, it is inevitable that the facts described in history should not give an exact picture of what really happened; they are transformed in the brain of the historian, they are moulded by his interests and coloured by his prejudices.  Who can place the reader precisely in a position to see the event as it really happened?  Ignorance or partiality disguises everything.  What a different impression may be given merely by expanding or contracting the circumstances of the case without altering a single historical incident.  The same object may be seen from several points of view, and it will hardly seem the same thing, yet there has been no change except in the eye that beholds it.  Do you indeed do honour to truth when what you tell me is a genuine fact, but you make it appear something quite different?  A tree more or less, a rock to the right or to the left, a cloud of dust raised by the wind, how often have these decided the result of a battle without any one knowing it?  Does that prevent history from telling you the cause of defeat or victory with as much assurance as if she had been on the spot?  But what are the facts to me, while I am ignorant of their causes, and what lessons can I draw from an event, whose true cause is unknown to me?  The historian indeed gives me a reason, but he invents it; and criticism itself, of which we hear so much, is only the art of guessing, the art of choosing from among several lies, the lie that is most like truth.