DEPARTMENT OF HISTORICAIv RESEARCH. 121- 



modern period, contribute much less than they did to the volume of Profes- 

 sor Andrews and Miss Davenport for the colonial and revolutionary time.- 

 The bulk of the work would lie in the four collections of material, or sec- 

 tions of the Public Record Office, named above. 



I desire to be permitted to secure for this work in 1910 the services of two 

 gentlemen, expert respectively in the history of the diplomatic relations be- 

 tween Great Britain and America and in our naval and military history, Prof.- 

 Frederic L. Paxson, of the University of Michigan, and Dr. Charles O. Paul- 

 lin, of Washington, formerly of the Navy Department. Three months of 

 the former's time and five months of the latter's would be available. In that 

 time it should be possible for them, working in concert, to collect the data for 

 an adequate manual of the kind referred to, and of the same general charac- 

 ter as Professor Andrews's Public Record Office volume. The material lies,, 

 more largely than is the case for the period before 1783, in continuous de- 

 posits of related official material, more easily described than, for instance, 

 the more casual accumulations of the British Museum. 



Secondly, I should wish in 1910 to make some preparations toward a simi- 

 lar book for the archives of Canada. I believe that country to have the next 

 most important archives, for our purposes, to those to which we have al- 

 ready sent expeditions — England, Spain, France, Mexico, Rome, and Ger- 

 many. First of all, there are the materials collected by the archives office of 

 the Dominion at Ottawa. For nearly forty years, under very energetic ad- 

 ministration, that office has been making itself an enormous repository of 

 copies from the British and French archives, and students from the United 

 States have been resorting to it for consultation of British and French papers 

 relating to our colonial period. This portion of the collection has been so 

 largely covered by calendars published in the annual reports of the Archive 

 Branch, and a full description of it would so largely duplicate our London 

 and Paris volumes, that in a future "Guide to the materials for United States 

 history in Canadian archives" the section devoted to it would be a minor 

 affair, the preparation of which would not be troublesome. But the archives 

 have always contained a certain amount of what may be called material in- 

 digenous to Canada, not copied from London, and also not usually repre- 

 sented by copies in London. A few years ago the amount of this was enor- 

 mously increased by administrative orders which transferred to the custody 

 of the Archivist and Keeper of the Records the earlier or non-current por- 

 tions of the papers of the several executive departments. These, which had 

 up to that time remained, after the custom prevalent in Washington, in the 

 charge and buildings of the several offices of federal administration, have 

 now become parts of the general archives of the Dominion, gathered or to 

 be gathered into its excellent new archive-building at Ottawa. Mostly in- 

 accessible hitherto, they have hardly been touched by historical scholars from 

 the United States, yet are reported to be rich in material for their uses. 



