history--save possibly the policy of Louis XVIII--and it is of no direct
interest to our pockets or to our affections. Yet the masses of work
which have accumulated round that one doubt have solved twenty other
doubts. They have illuminated all the close of the Terror; they are
beginning to make us understand that most difficult piece of political
psychology, the reaction of Thermidor, and with it how Europeans lose
their balance and regain it in the course of their quasi-religious wars;
for all our wars have something in them of religion.

Three elements appear to enter into the judgment of history. First,
there is the testimony of human witnesses; next, there are the non-human
boundaries wherein the action took place, boundaries which, by all our
experience, impose fixed limits to action; thirdly, there is that
indefinable thing, that mystic power, which all nations deriving from
the theology of the Western Church have agreed to call, with the
schoolman, _common sense_; a general appreciation which transcends
particular appreciations and which can integrate the differentials of
evidence. Of this last it is quite impossible to afford a test or to
construct a measure; its presence in an argument is none the less as
readily felt as fresh air in a room; without it nothing is convincing
however laboured, with it, even though it rely upon slight evidence, one
has the feeling of walking on a firm road. But it must be "common
sense"--it must be of the sort, that is, which is common to man various
and general, and it is in this perhaps that history suffers most from
the charlatanism and ritual common to all great matters.

Men will have pomp and mystery surrounding important things, and
therefore the historians must, consciously or unconsciously, tend to
strut, to quote solemn authorities in support, and to make out the
vulgar unworthy of their confidence. Hence, by the way, the plague of