When years have rolled by, and passions have cooled, the different
motives and feelings of the persons concerned become known to all, and
mankind is enabled to look upon public acts from every side. Not so the
actors; they are not only in ignorance of facts, the knowledge of which
is necessary to their judging rightly, but falsehoods dressed .in the
garb of facts are studiously brought forward to deceive them, and men
thus groping in darkness are forced to form opinions, and to act upon
them.
Public men are like soldiers fighting in a narrow valley: they see
nothing but what is close around them, and that imperfectly, as
everything is in motion. The historian is as the general, who stands
elevated on the high ground, and, with telescope in hand, sees plainly
all the different movements of the troops. He would be an inconsiderate
general, who would expect that his officers in action should have had
as clear an idea of what was going on, as he himself had been able to
obtain.
There was no murder perpetrated during the French Revolution, under the
pretext of a judicial sentence, which has created more general disgust
than has that of Marie Antoinette.
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