origins which Europe has been assisting at through over a hundred years
of revolution and of change.

It sounds cynical, but it is perfectly true, that much the largest
factor in the historical conception of men is assertion. It is literally
true that when men (with the exception of a very small proportion of
scholars who are also intelligent) consider the past, the picture on which
they dwell is a picture conveyed to them wholly by authority and by
unquestioned authority. There was never a time when the original sources
of history were more easily to be consulted by the plain man; but whether
because of their very number, or because the habit is not yet formed, or
because there are traditions of imaginary difficulty surrounding such
reading, original sources were perhaps never less familiar to fairly
educated opinion than they are today; and therefore no type of book gives
more pleasure when one comes across it than those little cheap books, now
becoming fairly numerous, in which the original sources, and the
original sources alone, are put before the reader. Mr. Rait has already
done such work in connection with Mary Queen of Scots, and Mr. Archer
did it admirably in connection with the Third Crusade.

But apart from the importance of consulting original sources--which is
like hearing the very witnesses themselves in court--there is a factor
in historical judgment which by some unhappy accident is peculiarly
lacking in the professional historian. It is a factor to which no
particular name can be attached, though it may be called a department of
common sense. But it is a mental power or attitude easily recognizable
in those who possess it, and perhaps atrophied by the very atmosphere of
the study. It goes with the open air with a general knowledge of men and
with that rapid recognition of the way in which things "fit in" which is
necessarily developed by active life.