ABSTRACT
The tests of evidence, in history as in courts, are principally ad hoc tests. Historians who evaluate press reports as a type of evidence must remember that much of the published matter is born in an atmosphere of ballyhoo. One of the ablest treatments of bias in relation to historical evidence is still that given in Herbert Spencer’s Study of Sociology. The newspaper as a form of evidence merits consideration immediately after the official document. Students of diplomacy are supposed to know that some foreign nations make treaties with secret clauses, as even the United States once in its early history did, so that the published version may be incomplete. A careful work written by a Catholic offers exhaustive evidence that in the general history of religious intolerance the Puritans and other Protestants of the colonies were far from being the worst offenders.
