Page:Ramakrishna - His Life and Sayings.djvu/44

26 iscences of great statesmen which would seem to render this Dialogic infection impossible or harmless. We can only guess what it must have been in times when neither 'shorthand nor printing existed, when writing and reading were the privilege of a small class, and when very often two or three generations had passed away before the idea of recording certain facts and certain sayings occurred to a chronicler or a historiographer. It is extraordinary that so many historians should have completely neglected this Dialogic Process through which everything must pass before it reaches even the first recorder, forgetting that it could never have been absent. How many difficulties would have been solved, how many contradictions explained, nay how many miracles would become perfectly natural and intel- ligible, if historians would only learn this one lesson, that we do not and cannot know of any historical event that has not previously passed through this Dialogic Process.

Let us take so recent an event as the telegram sent from Ems, where I am writing. It was meant to tell the world of the supposed insult which Benedetti had offered to the King of Prussia. That telegram marks one of the most decisive events in modern history, it has really helped to change the whole face of Europe. What do we know of it, even after Bismarck's own confessions, beyond what he thought and spoke in his own mind, beyond what he said to my friend Abeken, who wrote it out and sent it off, beyond what the people in Germany and in France thought of it, said of it, made of it, whether as justifying or condemning the war that sprang out of it. Shall we ever know the fpstssima