New Spalding Club > House of Gordon > Gordons under arms

atl HOUSE OF GORDON.
desire to help the searcher, one has avoided the irrational helpfulness
which leaves him nothing whatever to do for himself. The cross-
references in the text are largely supplemented by the additional identi-
fications supplied by the elaborate index, which is an inventory rather
than a mere conventional index, and includes the relatives of the officers
(who are of course arranged alphabetically in the text).
No one with the slightest experience of research can fail to under-
stand the enormous amount of work involved in the construction of the
careers of individual officers from varied and often contradictory data :
and how it has been accentuated by the elaborate network of cross-
references with which the book is equipped. These give us, as nothing
else could do, a consciousness of the contribution by one great family
alone to the task of extending our Dominions, a task that was pursued
inarticulately by these officers themselves. I have said that the Gordons
have been poor historians, but as a matter of fact, the fighting which
they helped to put in from the middle of the eighteenth century was little
understood by the country at large. There was no Seeley to define Ex-
pansion, there was no political doctrine of " Empire". Politicians and
soldiers alike were nearly as much puzzled as little Wilhelmine and old
Caspar on the field of Blenheim. Therefore the moss-grown memorials
of such men as the Croughly Gordons in the quiet kirkyard of Kirk-
michael, and the mere collection of dates which constitute the bio-
graphies of hundreds of officers in this book are symbolical of the quiet,
laborious processes which have made us what we are. In retrospect
and in the bulk it may all be "frightfully thrilling," as Hilda Wangel
would say, but the individual biography is often as dull as the individual
sections of an elaborate pattern, and as unconscious of its purpose in
the great design of which it is a part.
The consciousness of this gives a political as well as genealogical
interest to this book, and has sustained the makers of it. Its making too
was possible only in the Capital most indebted to the services of sailor
and soldier, for Gordons under Arms could not possibly have been
done except by a student resident, at least for long stretches at a time,
in London, where the main data alone are available. Even then, it could
not have been done in the same space except by a student of leisure
and immense enthusiasm. To have had to pay searchers' fees would
have made the publication, expensive as it now is, quite impossible: