Who would not lift their voices against falsehood?

[This is from my letter to the Editor of the Journal de Paris, August 29, 1787. If we don’t get the events of today accurate, how accurate would our history be for posterity’s sake?]

When young, I was passionately fond of reading books of history and travels. Since the commencement of the late revolution which separated us from Great Britain, our country too, has been thought worthy to employ the pens of historians and travellers. I cannot paint to you, Sir, the agonies which these have cost me, in obliging me to renounce these favorite branches of reading, and in discovering to me at length, that my whole life has been employed in nourishing my mind with fables and falsehoods. For thus I reason. If the histories of d'Auberteuil and of Longchamps, and the travels of the Abbé Robin can be published in the face of the world, and can be read and believed by those who are cotemporary with the events they pretend to relate, how may we expect that future ages shall be better informed? Will those rise from their graves to bear witness to the truth, who would not, while living, lift their voices against falsehood? If contemporary histories are thus false, what will future compilations be? And what are all those of preceding times?