Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/469



an illustration what one might shrink from saying in words; the argus-eyed censor may suppress many illustrations in whole or in part, and thus render the record incomplete or defective.

The illustration apparently carries in itself fewer guarantees of unimpeachable accuracy than do many other parts of the press, the very vividness of impression that it creates may be

its own undoing, and the tests of usefulness that must be applied to it are specially numerous and important in comparison with those demanded by other parts of the periodical.

But the illustration has for the historian certain very definite concrete advantages not shared by the body of the paper. The illustration is complete in itself ; it has no last paragraph that can be lopped off in an emergency or when space is otherwise needed, and since it has a limited space it can not run over on

the next page, be " continued in our next,” or be dismembered

for the sake of floating the advertising pages. Thus the illustrator can give his work a definiteness and exactness of form denied the copy writer whose work too often is amputated to meet

space requirements, to the ultimate confusion of the historian.

The illustration is often purposely faked, but it must not be forgotten that the illustration may become a corrector of erro

neous statements. Lord Palmerston, in opposing the Suez Canal, had affirmed that the sand of the desert would fill up the Canal

as fast as it was made, and this was believed. When the illustra tions of William Simpson, in 1869, together with the letters of W. H. Russell to The Times and of J. Fowler, a civil engineer , showed that the Canal was a success and that the sand of the

desert was a myth, public opinion changed.86 The illustration also serves as an ally of “ the higher criticism .”

At the end of the first Afghan War, Lord Ellenborough issued a proclamation stating that he had restored to India the so

called gates of Puttun Somnath, carried away by the Moham medans. When William

Simpson, nearly fifty years later, sat

down to sketch these famous gates, he at once realized that the ornament was purely Mohammedan, and in no sense Hindu ,

" not a vestige of the Hindu mythology was visible.” Subsequent examination of the wood under a microscope showed that it was 86 W . Simpson, Autobiography, pp. 204 - 205.