The Anglo Saxon could not fight without the law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Red coats under Pitcairn almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is nothing on which so little reliance can be placed as facts, especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees according to his prejudices, and is stone blind to whatever he did not expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such poor observers, for the most part of what goes on under their eyes.[89] It is hardly necessary at this late day to insist that no writer is justified in building his narrative of events on unverified tradition. He must try to penetrate to the truth that lies behind the legend (which in some cases will differ very widely from the legend itself). It is no easy task at best to perform a successful piece of historical research, and the questions on which final agreements have been reached are not numerous. Accordingly, if the law should be so construed as to enforce banishment from the schools of any book which can be proved incorrect in some of its alleged facts without regard to their importance, no textbooks will be left in the schools, for none are impeccable. True, the Cashman law would condemn only for falsifying the history of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, leaving four other foreign wars in which our country has engaged, and the great Civil War, to be treated without other restraint than that contained in the last clause of section 1, denouncing propaganda in favor of any foreign government. But under that sole provision it might still prove embarrassing for a writer to tell the truth about the Mexican War and possibly the others also, for the term propaganda--as the whole world has learned lately--is a most elastic one. Presumably, the propaganda test applies as well to other phases of history as to the military phases, wherefore an author of a textbook is apt, under a strict construction of this law, to be hauled into court on the charge of propaganda if he should consider it his duty to say a single thing in commendation of any other nation. For, will there not always be found, in any school district, five citizens whose views collide with those of the author; and if so, what is to prevent a case being called? Surely a word in favor of France would be resented by some; a word in favor of