It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.

“Take the egg, for example,” he said. “It contains in it all the elements necessary for the growth of a chicken—salt among the rest. That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.” And he concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example of the Japanese in this matter. “They,” he said laughingly, “only take salt when they want to die.”

At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty, and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we eat contain the salt required by the human body. “Not even the egg?” I asked. “No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw state they tend to lose their character cooked.” He admitted that that was an argument for eating things au naturel more than is the practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of salt is essential. “And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw, with or without salt. What comparison is there?”

“But,” said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about the Japanese), “are there not races who do not use salt?” “My dear sir,” said he, “the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute exactness in the mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of salt to eat with their food they die.”

After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians. Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice, the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.

But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be a commonplace thing like the use of salt.

Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random—men whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its requirements—whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism. They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly different form for each.

It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by judicious manipulation.

A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our air service. He was very confident that we were “simply out of it—that was all, simply out of it.” And he was full of facts on the subject. I don't like people who brim over with facts—who lead facts about, as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts. His conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the AbbÉ SieyÈs called “loose, unstitched minds.”

Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my references.

But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. “We were out of it—simply out of it.” Yet the truth is that while his facts were right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over the enemy's lines—as much as fifty miles over—and had come back with priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this time the most victorious element of our Army.

I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in “Othello.” Poor Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the catastrophe.

But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the knife discovered—also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches came on, and when he had got his “take” he left to transcribe it, having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.

You remember that Browning in “The Ring and the Book,” tells the story of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?

Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only different aspects of one truth. “Mostly,” he says, “matters of any consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself three times.” I fancy it is this discovery of the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that “a lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”; but he is wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) which is the most dangerous lie—for a fact seems so absolute, so incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts, their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:

“Did you tell him to tell them the facts?”

“Yes.”

“The whole facts?”

“No.”

“What facts?”

“Selected facts.”

It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his name.

If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.

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