I9I2.] HISTORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 69 



ing condemnation and ignoring of the loyalists, and his omission of 

 everything that did not support the English whig theory, have made 

 his work more violently and narrowly one-sided than the partisan 

 pamphlets of the period of which he was writing. 



His early volumes dealing with the discovery of the continent 

 and the colonial period were much better than those relating to the 

 Revolution. He restored to remembrance many important points in 

 colonial history which, for want of an adequate account had been 

 forgotten. But in the Revolution he became merely a scholarly 

 Weems, carrying to exaggeration the worst features of Weems and 

 Botta. 



In his treatment of the Writs of Assistance, he declaims against 

 the decision of the Massachusetts court allowing them, as contrary 

 to the law and the constitution and cowardly subserviency to the 

 British Government. But the decision was perfectly sound law as 

 Judge Gray of the Supreme Court shows in his admirable investi- 

 gation of the subject; and until we recognize it as sound and inves- 

 tigate from that point of view, we shall never get any farther in the 

 history of the Revolution than mere demagogueism and declamation. 



In his volumes on the colonial period, Bancroft made in footnotes 

 a number of citations to the original evidence, and some when he 

 reached the Revolution. But those for the Revolution were very 

 inadequate ; and in subsequent editions, for his work had a wide cir- 

 culation, the citations for the Revolutionary part grew less and less 

 until in the end they disappear almost altogether, and he gives no 

 references for his innumerable quotations. His researches for mate- 

 rial both in this country and in Europe are described by his friends 

 as the most remarkable ever made. Documents and sources of in- 

 formation closed to all others were, we are assured, open to him. 

 But strange to say, we see no result of this in his published work. 

 Nor can any subsequent investigator profit by his labors ; the won- 

 drous and mysterious sources of information remain mysterious; 

 and many of his opinions are difficult to support with the evidence 

 which investigators are able to find. 



This practice of not giving the evidence in footnote citations has 

 been characteristic of all our histories and is indeed, quite necessary 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC. LI. 204 P., PRINTED MAY 22, I912. 



