Morris Tribune

Thousands who have lived many years less than three score and ten have long since come to the conclusion that the current history of their own times is a big bundle of fiction. To such and hosts of others the trenchant and daring speech made the other day by Wendell Phillips to the Phi-Beta-Kappa men of Harvard University, will be regarded as unquestionably true: "History is, for the most part, an idle amusement, the day-dream of pedants and triflers. The details of events, the actors' motives and their relation to each other are buried with them. How impossible to learn the exact truth of what took place yesterday under your next neighbor's roof. Yet we complacently argue and speculate about matters a thousand miles off and a thousand years ago as if we knew them. When I was a scholar here, my favorite study was history. The world and affairs have shown me that one-half of history is loose conjecture, and much of the rest is the writer's opinion. But most men see facts not with their eyes, but with their prejudices. Any one familiar with courts will testify how rare it is for an honest man to give a perfectly correct account of a transaction. We are tempted to see facts as we think they ought to be, or wish they were."