The attempt to expunge records is always indefensi[i.275]ble, besides being in itself irrational and absurd. It may cover up the details of wrong and folly; but it leaves an unlimited range to the most unfriendly conjecture. We are compelled to imagine what we ought to be allowed to know; and, in many particulars, our fancies may be worse than the facts. But later times, and public bodies of greater pretensions than "the inhabitants of Salem Village," have attempted, and succeeded in perpetrating, this outrage upon history. In trying to conceal their errors, men have sometimes destroyed the means of their vindication. This may be the case with the story that is to be told of "Salem Witchcraft." It has been the case in reference to wider fields of history. The Parliamentary journals and other public records of the period of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate were suppressed by the infatuated stupidity of the Government of the Restoration. They foolishly imagined that they were hiding the shame, while they were obscuring the glory, of their country. Every Englishman, every intelligent man, now knows, that, during that very period, all that has made England great was done. The seeds of her naval and maritime prosperity were planted: and she was pushed at once by wise measures of policy, internal and external; by legislation developing her resources and invigorating the power of her people; by a decisive and comprehensive diplomacy that commanded the respect of foreign courts, and secured to her a controlling influence upon the traffic of the world; by developments of her military genius under[i.276] the greatest of all the great generals of modern times; and by naval achievements that snatched into her hands the balancing trident of the seas,—to the place she still holds (how much longer she may hold it remains to be seen) as the leading power of the world. If she has to relinquish that position, it will only be to a power that is true to the spirit, and is not ashamed of the name, of a republic. The nation that fully develops the policy which pervaded the records of the English Commonwealth will be the leader of the world. The suppression of those records has not suppressed the spirit of popular liberty, or the progress of mankind in the path of reform, freedom, equal rights, and a true civilization. It has only cast a shadow, which can never wholly be dispelled, over what otherwise would have been the brightest page in the annals of a great people. We depend for our knowledge of the steps by which England then made a most wonderful stride to prosperity and power, not upon official and authoritative records, but upon the desultory and sometimes merely gossiping memoirs of particular persons, and such other miscellaneous materials as can be picked up. The only consequence of an attempt to extinguish the memory of republicans, radicals, reformers, and regicides has been, that the history of England's true glory can never be adequately written.