VII
“IF” IN HISTORY
A few years ago an interesting book was published under the editorship of J. C. Squire. It consisted of a series of studies by distinguished historians and men of letters on some crucial events of history as they might have been.[1] The conception behind the book was brilliant; properly executed, it could have displayed many insights into the dynamics of the historical process. Unfortunately the performance was extremely disappointing. Most of the essays were flights of imagination rather than attempts at scientific reconstruction. Among others, Guedalla speculates on what would have happened if the Moors had won in Spain; H. A. L. Fisher on “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America;” G. K. Chesterton on the marriage of Don John of Austria to Mary Queen of Scots; Nicholson on Byron as King of Greece; Belloc on the successful escape of Louis XVI. from revolutionary Paris; Van Loon on continued Dutch rule of New Amsterdam; Winston Churchill on the consequences of a victory by Lee at Gettysburg.
Under what circumstances can a scientifically credible rather than an imaginatively credible answer be given to questions of this sort? In order to work out the answer, we shall consider a series of hypothetical situations concerning which we believe credible results can be won. We shall then examine the procedure of these essayists who admits the legitimacy of “if” questions but apparently only as an exercise in imagination, controlled not by historic fact but by the same kind of inherent plausibility exhibited in a well-told story. But prior to this, we must deal with the position that denies it is scientifically meaningful to ask “if” questions.
Some philosophers of history, but no practising historians, have held that the pattern of historical events is an intricate crisscross of what is technically called “internally related” happenings. Two happenings are internally related if the occurrence of the first necessitates the occurrence of the other, and vice versa. Consequently any change in one will of necessity be followed by a change in the other. The relation of necessity
- ↑ If: or, History Rewritten, New York, 1931.
