There are two duties incumbent upon any man who enters on the
business of writing: truth to the fact and a good spirit in the
treatment. In every department of literature, though so low as
hardly to deserve the name, truth to the fact is of importance to
the education and comfort of mankind, and so hard to preserve, that
the faithful trying to do so will lend some dignity to the man who
tries it. Our judgments are based upon two things: first, upon
the original preferences of our soul; but, second, upon the mass of
testimony to the nature of God, man, and the universe which reaches
us, in divers manners, from without. For the most part these
divers manners are reducible to one, all that we learn of past
times and much that we learn of our own reaching us through the
medium of books or papers, and even he who cannot read learning
from the same source at second-hand and by the report of him who
can. Thus the sum of the contemporary knowledge or ignorance of
good and evil is, in large measure, the handiwork of those who
write. Those who write have to see that each man's knowledge is,
as near as they can make it, answerable to the facts of life; that
he shall not suppose himself an angel or a monster; nor take this
world for a hell; nor be suffered to imagine that all rights are
concentred in his own caste or country, or all veracities in his
own parochial creed.
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