ABSTRACT
Historians never formalized their rules of evidence as lawyers did, partly because those rules largely conformed to common sense, partly because no courts provided the sanctions to enforce them. Captured and imprisoned by the rulers of a system that demands absolute ideological conformity, Edgar Allan Poe's protagonist holds to his own values through extended interrogation, a trial, and a series of rigorous ideological lectures. Such key concepts as mercantilism, laissez faire, liberalism, Christianity, and socialism were tossed about in the same heedless and contradictory manner. As a result, it was possible to describe the American Revolution as provoked by the spread of laissez faire in the mother country. A cardinal principle of feudalism was "the very backbone of England's colonization". The relative mildness of complaints about Soviet practice was less troublesome than the unwillingness to draw inferences from it.
