HISTORICAIv RESEARCH — JAMESON. 187 



Reports, Aids, axd Guides. 



If no such helps had hitherto been constructed and we had carte blanche, 

 our natural course might be to attempt the preparation, on a systematic plan 

 and a grandiose scale, of a comprehensive and minute survey of all the orig- 

 inal materials, printed and unprinted, for the history of the United States. 

 (The materials for the history of other countries, we may assume, will be 

 better cared for by them.) But we have not carte blanche. Many finding- 

 lists, many archive-reports, already exist in print. Governments and histor- 

 ical societies have furnished guidance to certain sorts of historical material, 

 and stand ready to furnish still more. The department should, on the nega- 

 tive side, avoid duplication and competition; on the positive side, it should 

 seek and promote cooperation. It may very well cherish the ambition to 

 supply what is still lacking of the grandiose scheme, to accomplish by its 

 own means and efforts the great general survey, minus such parts of it as 

 have already been achieved or are likely soon to be achieved by others. But 

 a task so defined is, from the nature of the case, composed of distinct por- 

 tions, which may be planned separately and taken up in the order of their 

 importance. The ideal outlines of a perfect general survey may be kept 

 always in mind; we need never lose from sight the relations borne to it by 

 the particular fragment with which we are at the time engaged, but we are 

 released from the necessity of pursuing an inconveniently logical order, and 

 can undertake our partial guides as they are most pressingly needed or as 

 thev are most conveniently approached. 



To speak first of unprinted materials, it is plain that there are three stages 

 in the process of mediation between them and the historical scholars who 

 may wish to use them: First, the preparation of general descriptions of 

 them, as they lie in masses in their respective repositories ; secondly, the 

 preparation of calendars or itemized lists of them, usually in a chronological 

 order; thirdly, the editing and putting into print of those which are most 

 important. While the superior value of some materials may properly bring 

 them into the stage of calendaring or printing long before all the general 

 descriptions of the first-named order have been completed, it remains in 

 general true that in the earlier years of our work the compilation of general 

 descriptions of archive-material is logically entitled to the leading place. 



Among reports or guides of this sort, the most obvious desideratum was 

 that of a guide to the archives of the Government at Washington ; and 

 such a volume was prepared and issued under my predecessor. Professor 

 McLaughlin. In this great field of the national archives, which our local 

 circumstances press upon our attention with peculiar force, the calendar stage 

 may for certain classes of material be appropriately reached soon. Of the 

 archives of the States, a dozen have been reported upon with a fair degree of 

 completeness by the Public Archives Commission of the American Historical 



