HISTORY VERSUS LEGEND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3100, 13 August 1913, Page 72

HISTORY VERSUS LEGEND.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —This ago is an age of criticism. It is not satisfied any longer to read history through the historian’s spectacles. It demands to see the grounds and data from which ho draws Ids conclusions. This is essentially different from the way of reading history during the last two centuries. An annalist or historian then satisfied people on the facts ho stated simply by saying that it was so; but to-day, in order to satisfy the reader, the Public Record Office and the .Stall* papers are diligently searched and annotated. The documents written at the time the events took place and when the actors lived arc gradually dissipating many false conclusions of the historians of the past. As regards theiStuarts, Charles 1 is shown, in levying “ship money,’’ and in the exercise of his prerogative, to have exercised rights his predecessors were in the habit of exercising. James 11 is shown to have been no weak and unworthy prince, but one of the most able admirals Britain can glory in, and his deposition is known to have boon no popular movement, but the action of a coterie, and a small one. of dissatisfied Court nobles; and all these are facts resting upon documents of their period. At the risings of the ’ls and ’45 none of this accurate knowledge of true history was known, or, if known, it was concealed. It was the object of those in power to keep up this useful ignorance. The people believed the Stuart race utterly bad let them go on believing it; and hence arose, in a great degree, the apathy of many, the aversion of slill more to the .Stuart cause.

ft speaks the proverbial volumes for the Stuarts that, in spite of vile calumny, they should have inspired a fervent loyalty that has never died and over and over again lias proved its readiness to sacrifice everything for the sake of its legitimate princes. What other dynasty but the Stuarts eau claim such a continuity of unselfish devotion, covering as it does four centuries? The loyalty shown to Mary Queen of Scots in the sixteenth century, the heroic Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, the pathetic devotion of the eighiecnth-cenjury Jacobites, culminating in (ho ’45 rebellion, the last great outburst of chivalry, and, in our own age, the little scattered group who cultivate the Jacobite sentiment, and tradition and pay allegiance to the Princess Mary of Bavaria as the heiress of the Stuart line! Liberty is indeed a fine cry, hut lovaltv is a finer; for the limit of liberty is license, while the limit of loyalty is love —I am, etc., Kawhia. C C. Bao.vai.l.