It is right, no doubt, that professors should be "progressive" and "modern". So it ought to be gratifying to hear Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard say, in the contemporary classic tongue, that "we have been fed up on our ancestors." The expressive phrase in the mouth of the historian indicates he jauntiness which a Professor of History must show to prove that he has no old-fashioned ideas about "the dignity of history." Beautiful old Professor Torrey of the Cambridge of fifty years ago, who looked like an eighteenth century French Marquis, never dreamed of such felicities of speech. "We are all getting a little tired of these panegyrics," continues Professor Hart, "and this indiscriminate praise of everybody born before the year 1800. As to the men in the Revolution, there has grown up hero worship and almost a process of deification."

It is true, of course, that apotheosis and myth-making have long been going on, and for a long time were encouraged and practiced by our historians and biographers. "I say, don't you hate that damned Washington?" Rufus Choate is said to have said over a table at the Parker House. He meant the flat and rigid Byzantine enshrined Washington, the "faultless monster" of seventy years ago. A human, intelligent, and peccaole Washington has taken the place of that image. Professor Hart curiously mentions Washington's love of buying lottery tickets among his defects. At least one building in the Harvard Yard was built in part with the proceeds of a lottery. Schools, academies, colleges, roads, even churches, were so built. Washington merely followed the practice of his time. . . .

At the worst, no one of the famous "Fathers" can be so misunderstood in the present as he was by his opponents in his own time. History and biography, incorrect, partial, prejudiced as they may be, are the invisible and inutile Truth compared with the illusions and delusions, the frantically swallowed calumnies and legends and lies that are the average contemporary judgment, by his adversaries, of a public man. New documents, new lights are often accessible to posterity, which ought to be able to contemplate with a calmer eye those old animosities. Why shouldn't the men before 1800 be painted, as Cromwell wished to be, with all his warts and wrinkles?" The New York Times.