st face on things for himself as he sets his case before the
government and the world; subordinates must be let off leniently; you
must live with them, and it impairs comfort to have them sullen. To make
a statement unpleasant to a superior might be construed as
insubordination. The public welfare makes it imperative to tell a
flattering tale. The temptation is constant to tell not quite the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth. There are important suppressions of
fact in the official records, none more so, perhaps, than as regards
Chancellorsville.[17]

If you happen to be dealing with a historical matter, where the
testimony comes from a more or less remote past, and the evidence is
scrappy and defective, you must be still more careful.

The great English historian, the late S.R. Gardiner, in his
examination of the evidence on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, wrote as
follows about the difficulties of dealing with historical evidence:

It seems strange to find a writer so regardless of what is, in these
days, considered the first canon of historical inquiry, that evidence
worth having must be almost entirely the evidence of contemporaries who
are in a position to know something about that which they assert. It is
true that this canon must not be received pedantically. Tradition is
worth something, at all events when it is not too far removed from its
source. If a man whose character for truthfulness stands high, tells me
that his father, also believed to be truthful, seriously informed him
that he had seen a certain thing happen, I should be much more likely to
believe that it was so than if a person, whom I knew to be untruthful,
informed me that he had himself witnessed something at the present day.
The historian is not bound, as the lawyer is, to reject hearsay
evidence, because it is his business to ascertain the truth of
individual assertions, whilst the lawyer has to think of the bearing of
the evidence not merely on the case of the prisoner in the dock, but on
an unrestricted number of possible prisoners, many of whom would be
unjustly condemned if hearsay evidence were admitted. The historian is,
however, bound to remember that evidence grows weaker with each link of
the chain. The injunction, "Always leave a story better than you found
it," is in accordance with the facts of human nature. Each reporter
inevitably accentuates the side of the narrative which strikes his
fancy, and drops some other part which int