Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/214

190 the question, why and how it came to be? In this respect the Bancroft History of Oregon seems to be quite deficient. The facts are there in abundance, but the philosophical concatenation, without which history is comparatively barren, is still to be supplied. I am aware of the contention, by some, that it is no part of the historian's duty to indulge in philosophical disquisition, but to give the plain unvarnished facts, leaving the reader to construct the theory for himself—a task the average reader seldom attempts to perform. Even a false theory is better than none at all, for it stimulates to inquiry and involves the reader in meshes perhaps disquieting to his state of mind, and from which, if wrong, he needs must extricate himself.

The writer freely admits that there is more about slavery in the following pages than is at present fashionable, but if there is to be a lesson in them, the side-lights of the situation at that time must also be given. And he feels sure that, properly understood, the short, peaceable, and comparatively uneventful period in which the Oregon pioneers were deliberating under aegis of squatter sovereignty furnishes a first-class balance in which to weigh them, and also to estimate the character and influence of their social and political environment. One friend, permitted to scan some of these pages, was inclined to doubt the propriety of "threshing over the old straw" and reviving a subject that is really obsolete; that slavery is dead past resurrection, the rebellion an old "chestnut," the aforetime rebels in their graves, their children happy in the general and equal fraternity, and the race question left for solution by the Southern people, who are most competent to deal with it. He might have added another fact, viz., that Northern magnanimity is so abundant that the whole vocabulary, once applicable, is undergoing amelioration, whereby the contestants in the fierce and bloody conflict are put upon equal terms, ethically, and that, at the rate the forgiving and forgetting spirit is now growing, the time is not far ahead when there will be no admissible causative reason for the great combat but the expediency of a