Although the use of the technique of “converging probabilities” frequently issues into judgments that are humanist, i.e. judgments about men, Belloc used his method in the earlier years to establish historical truths that are only incidentally concerned with human personality. In these impersonal studies about battles, roads, rivers, etc., Belloc pointed up his polemic against the German Idealist school that refused to deal with _things_. _The Stane Street_, written in 1913, is possibly the most brilliant success he achieved in this kind of historical investigation. Although the book was severely written, with little of the high rhetoric associated with much of Belloc’s history, there are two passages that reveal Belloc’s attack against historical idealism. Let me not be misunderstood; the repeated view that Britain was a sparsely inhabited and only partially Romanised province, is one which no one today with a care for historical truth will maintain. It arose in that hypothetical and North German school of history which prefers to accumulate facts rather than co-ordinate evidence; which delights to give guesswork an equal rank with record, and invariably to oppose that guesswork against the tradition of civilization ... there has grown up a deplorable academic habit which will build most readily upon the very absence of proof, and one must refute such falsehood before one can proceed to truth ... _the mere lack of evidence is used for the purposes of confident negation_ ... it is the peculiar disease of our time in this province of inquiry. For instance, we know nothing of London between the time when Imperial Rome still taxed and administered Britain and the seventh century, when, with the return of the Catholic Church, writing and record returned. Wherefore a whole school has risen which will solemnly maintain the fantastical theory that London in the interval did—what? why, ceased to exist! No one who has had the good fortune to escape from the influence of the Universities will be ready to believe that they make themselves responsible for so amazing a statement. It is none the less true. Because we do not know what happened to London between one fixed date ... and another ... therefore it has been solemnly put forward under academic authority that London in the interval disappeared! It is folly, of course. It is as clear an abandonment of common sense as it would be to deny the existence of our homes during the hours when we happen to be absent from them.[44]