Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/19

 the facts as they occurred. You will remember how Lord Acton put his view in the introductory Epistle to the great 'Cambridge Modern History'—'Contributors must understand' he wrote, 'that nobody must be able to tell, without examining the list of authors, where the bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and whether it was Fairbairn or Gasquet, Liebermann or Harrison who took it up. &hellip; Our account of Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, German and Dutchman alike.' I may incidentally remark that the admirable 'Cambridge History' has not actually been written in any such fashion. Even were the authors' names deleted, it would require no great power of textual criticism to find out where Dr. Fairbairn 'took up the pen'. The chapter on Waterloo chanced to fall to my own care: I fear that I cannot conscientiously declare that it would be as satisfactory to the Dutchman as to the Frenchman—though I did my best according to my lights to arrive at the exact truth. In sober fact it is impossible to write history that every man, whatever his race, creed, or politics, can accept—unless indeed we are dealing with ages and problems so remote from our own that the personal element does not appear. Conceivably it may be possible to talk of Khammurabi or Rameses or some statesman of China of the seventh century without offending any man. It is not possible to do so with Pericles or Caesar—much less with Hildebrand or Calvin, Napoleon or Bismarck. The historian whose verdict on any one of those crucial personages is to be equally satisfactory to everybody, must perform a sort of tour de force of compromise and hedging, or confine himself to the bald statement of facts accomplished. The moment that he dares to draw a deduction or point