So again, with assault, sex offenses, and even murder; there may be
surrounding circumstances which greatly condition the moral quality of
the actual act. But lying is specific, exact, scientific. Its capacity
for precise determination, indeed, makes its presence or non-presence
the only accurate gauge of other immoral acts. Murder, for example, is
nowhere regarded as immoral save it involve some repudiation of a social
compact, of a tacit promise to refrain from it--in brief, some deceit,
some perfidy, some lie. One may kill freely when the pact is formally
broken, as in war. One may kill equally freely when it is broken by the
victim, as in an assault by a highwayman. But one may not kill so long
as it is not broken, and one may not break it to clear the way. Some
form of lie is at the bottom of all other recognized crimes, from
seduction to embezzlement. Curiously enough, this master immorality of
them all is not prohibited by the Ten Commandments, nor is it penalized,
in its pure form, by the code of any civilized nation. Only savages have
laws against lying _per se_.

XIII

HISTORY

It is the misfortune of humanity that its history is chiefly written by
third-rate men. The first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record and
philosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to him, is an adventure, not
a syllogism or an autopsy. Thus the writing of history is left to
college professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-heads. Few historians,
great or small, have shown any capacity for the affairs they presume to
describe and interpret. Gibbon was an inglorious failure as a member of
Parliament. Thycydides made such a mess of his military (or, rather,
naval) command that he was exiled from Athens for twenty years and
finally assassinated. Flavius Josephus, serving as governor of Galilee,
lost the whole province to the Romans, and had to flee for his life.
Momssen, elected to the Prussian Landtag, flirted with the Socialists.
How much better we would understand the habits and nature of man if
there were more historians like Julius Caesar, or even like Niccolo
Machiavelli! Remembering the sharp and devastating character of their
rough notes, think what marvelous histories Bismarck, Washington and
Frederick the Great might have written! Such men are privy to the facts;
the usual historians have to depend on deductions, rumors, guesses.
Again, such men know how to tell the truth, however unpleasant; they
are wholly fre