There were plenty of captures by privateers in the Revolutionary Wars;
if I remember rightly, many many hundreds, all discreetly hidden from
the common or garden reader until party politics necessitated their
resurrection a hundred years after the event, but they have nothing
whatsoever to do with modern circumstances.

Both statements are true then, and yet one can be truthfully applied
today, while the other cannot.

How is the plain reader to distinguish between two historical truths,
one of which is a useful modern analogy, the other of which is a
ludicrously misleading one?

The reader, it would seem, has no criterion by which to distinguish what
has been withheld from him and what has been emphasized; he may, from
his knowledge of the historian's character or bias, stand upon his
guard, but he can do little more.

There is another difficulty. It is less subtle and less common, but it
exists. I mean brute lying. You do not often get the lie direct in
official history; it would be too dangerous a game to play in the face
of the critics, though some historians, and notably the French historian
Taine, have played it boldly enough, and have stated dogmatically, as
historical happenings, things that never happened and that they knew
never happened. But the plain or brute historical lie is more commonly
found in the pages of ephemeral journalism. Thus the other day, with
regard to the Budget, I saw some financial operation alluded to as
comparable with "the pulling out of Jews' teeth for money in the Middle
Ages." When did anyone in the Middle Ages pull out a Jew's teeth for
money? There is just one very doubtful story told about King John, and