mens of their type. His Jesuit Relations comprise 73 volumes of French, Latin and Italian documents. His early western travels run to 32 volumes, and he brought out the definitive edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark. As America grows older, more and more it exhibits a tendency to turn back to the heroic age of its explorers and pioneers. In historical pageants, mural decorations, sculpture, poetry, and in all the aesthetic use of historical symbols may be seen the growing appre ciation by the nation of its remote past. By these editions which constitute the sources of the early history of Canada, the Middle West, the Missouri valley, and the Pacific Northwest, Dr. Thwaites made himself the editorial authority to whom the student must turn if he will study this great stage of American development. In the course of a little over a quarter of a century he wrote some fifteen books, edited and published about 168 other books, and wrote more than a hundred articles and addresses."

This is but a brief and incomplete record of his public and professional service. Of his personal qualities, they can speak best-and they are many in number-who experienced his generous aid to the beginner, his kindly and valuable counsel to all who sought it, his patient consideration for all who were in trouble or distress, his friendly attitude to associates and subordinates, and his social charm in the intimacy of home and neighborly circles.

HENRY E. LEGLER,
C. H. GOULD,

VICTOR H. PALTSITS.

Mr. BOWKER: I move that the memorial to Dr. Thwaites be adopted by a rising vote.

The motion was duly seconded and agreed to.

President Anderson announced that a committee had prepared a minute on the passing of three other honored members of the Association. The minute, or resolution, was read by the secretary as follows:

FRANK A. HUTCHINS

WILLIAM C. KIMBALL

JOSEPHUS NELSON LARNED WHEREAS, The list of library workers who have died during the past year contains the names of Frank A. Hutchins, William C. Kimball, and Josephus Nelson Larned, each a leader in a different field:

RESOLVED, That the American Library Association, in these resolutions, expresses its deep appreciation of their work and its sincere sorrow for their death.

Frank A. Hutchins, was a pioneer of aggressive extension of library service, who, with a keen appreciation of the power of good books and understanding of their universal usefulness, strove always to render the resources of the library available to many who had theretofore been considered beyond the reach of its service.

William C. Kimball, heart as well as head of the New Jersey Public Library Commission throughout the period of development, held various positions of activity or trust in the American Library Association, was modest, efficient, unremitting and unsparing in all his work, and a model and example of the possibilities of gratuitous, as distinguished from professional, service in the development of American libraries.

Josephus Nelson Larned, one of the small group which organized this Association and laid the foundation of its work, served the Association as its President in 1894, made many valuable contributions to library science. Wise in counsel, courteous and kindly in manner, author of many useful and inspiring books, the first citizen of his city, a scholarly gentleman, he honored the profession to which he gave the best years of his life. WALTER L. BROWN, E. C. RICHARDSON, M. S. DUDGEON,

Committee.

The resolution called for was unanimously adopted by a rising vote.

President ANDERSON: One of the tests of a nation's standard of civilization is its treatment of its archives, which constitute the record of its business at home and abroad. By this test the United States would not take high rank. But a bill has been introduced in Congress which, if passed, will take us out of the class of states which are careless of their public records. The distinguished gentleman who is to address us will explain the need of a national archive building here in Washington, and will doubtless give us illustrations of the difficulties encountered by a student of American history through the careless handling or scattering about of the manuscript records of the business of our government. It seemed to your Program committee that this was a subject in which our Association should have a deep interest; and that, while our influence may not be extensive or powerful, whatever we have should be brought to bear as effectively as possible in favor of the plan for a national archive building. It gives me great pleasure, therefore, to introduce to you Dr. J. FRANKLIN JAMESON, director of the department of historical research of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who has honored us by consenting to address us on this subject.

THE NEED OF A NATIONAL ARCHIVE BUILDING

England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Prussia, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Roumania, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Colombia-every one of these countries has a national archive, in which all or most of its older records and papers are stored. The presumption must be that there is some merit in the idea of a national archive building. Apparently the burden of proof is on anyone who says that the United States, not the poorest of these

countries and we fondly imagine not the least enterprising, ought not to have one. In reality, no one says this. The obstacle is not opposition, but negligence and inertia, only to be overcome by convincing wise men and influential societies of the need of a federal archive establishment and asking them to help forward the movement toward such a consummation.

The evolution of national archives has in most cases a definite and regular natural history. At first, each government office preserves its own papers. By and by the space available for such documents becomes crowded. The oldest of them, seldom referred to, are sent away, to attics or cellars or vacant rooms in the same or other buildings, it matters little where, in order to make room for the transaction of current business. By and by historians arise. They insist that these dead files are full of historical information, that they are a valuable national asset, that it is shameful to neglect them. At the same time, administrators discover that, whenever administration depends upon the careful study of previous experience, it is inconvenient to have the papers recording that experience scattered through many unsuitable repositories, neglected and unarranged. Then begins a movement for a national archive building, a determination to erect a structure ideally adapted for the storage of documents and their preservation in accessible order and to gather into that one fit place the records which hitherto have lain neglected in a multitude of unfit places. Before the passage of the Public Records Act of 1838, and the consequent erection of the Public Record Office in London, the records of the British government were stored in some sixty different places in that city, some of them atrociously unfit. The building of that admirable repository and its successive enlargements have led to the concentration, under one roof, of the records of nearly all branches of the British administration down to within thirty or forty years of the present time.

The British instance represents a very high degree of concentration. In some other countries, where individual executive departments had long since solidified their respective archives and given them a scientific organization, these collections, instead of being merged in the national archives, have been allowed to maintain a separate existence. Thus in Paris, alongside the Archives Nationales, we find the very important separate establishments of the Archives of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, of War, and of Marine, while at Berlin and Vienna, outside the Staatsarchive, the war departments have independent archives of great importance. Most European ministries, however, retain in their own hands only the papers of recent date.

In any grading of archives by the extent to which concentration has been carried, Great Britain and Canada would stand at the highest end of the scale, while the United States would represent the lowest and simplest stage of development. Here in the national capital it has been the practice, from the beginning, that each bureau or division of an executive department should keep its own records and the papers which flow into it in the course of administrative business. Only one department has undertaken to concentrate its archives, the War Department, nearly all whose records and papers have been combined into one collection, under the custody of the adjutant-general. As for federal archives outside Washington, such as the records and papers of custom houses and army posts, no effort has been made to concentrate them. They remain where they always have been, if indeed they remain at all. While every European government has now adopted the policy of transferring from its embassy or legation here in Washington to its home archives all but the last few years' accumulation of papers, our policy, or more correctly, our practice, has been to leave all the archives of embassies, legations, and consulates where they are

-with effects which can easily be estimated in view of another of our "policies," that of not having permanent homes for our legations in foreign parts.

In Washington the results of what may be called the bureau system of archive management have been exceedingly unhappy. In the first place, it has produced an excessive number of systems of management. To keep a bureau's papers in an order that he who devised it has thought suitable to its business may not seem to be an evil. But the business of bureaus changes, and bureaus are divided and consolidated and extinguished and shifted from department to department, and the result is sometimes an awkward mixture of systems, some of which were amateurish when devised, many of which have become antiquated since that time. But a greater evil than that of having thirty or forty different filing-systems is that of having more than a hundred different repositories. This would not be so great an evil if we had always one variety of papers, and the whole of that variety, in one place; but this is wonderfully far from being the case. Let us take for instance those papers which relate to the history of the government of territories before their admission as states of the Union. The administration of the territories was in the hands of the Department of State till 1873, after that in those of the Department of the Interior. There is no portion of the archival papers of the federal government which is more sought for by historical investigators than these, for the energetic western historical societies find them a copious source of knowledge for the earlier periods. But papers of this sort cannot be found in Washington without special guidance. Many, perhaps most, territorial papers of date anterior to 1873 are at the State Department, but some of them are in the Bureau of Indexes and Archives, some in the Bureau of Rolls and Library, and no man can discern or declare how the line of classification is drawn. Of later papers,

many are in the files of the Secretary of the Interior. For years there was an informal dispute between the two departments as to the transference of certain masses of territorial papers in 1873, the Department of State maintaining that they had been transferred, the Interior Department, more correctly, that they had not. Many territorial papers, of great historical importance, are in the files of the Senate and House of Representatives. Some have been transferred from the latter to the Library of Congress. Others are in the Stygian darkness of the General Land Office files, others in those of the Treasury Department, in those of the Indian Office, in those of the inspectorgeneral of the United States army, or in the enormous archives of the adjutantgeneral.

But dispersion is not the only, or the worst, evil that has flowed from the present system, or want of system, whereby each bureau is in the main left to keep its own papers. It is 125 years since some of these bureaus and divisions were founded. In much less than 125 years a bureau will accumulate enough records and papers to occupy more than all the space originally assigned to it. Those least needed are packed away, in attics and in cellars, over porticoes and under stairs, in closets and in abandoned doorways, till a building is so full that it will hold no more, if any proper space is to be reserved for the work of officials and clerks. Then warehouses, in almost no case fireproof, are rented to contain the overflow. The Treasury Department has to rent an additional warehouse every five or ten years, merely to hold the fresh accumulation of its papers. Not a mile from this spot, for instance, there is a warehouse in which papers of the Treas ury Department have simply been dumped on the floor-boxes, bundles, books, loose papers-till the pile reaches well toward the ceiling; and no man knows what it contains, or could find in it any given book or paper. For quarters of this sort,

in buildings usually unsafe and always unsuitable, the government pays each year, counting only the space devoted to storage of records and papers, rentals aggregating between $40,000 and $50,000, more than the interest it would pay on a million. For that sum an excellent archive building could be erected, capable of housing not only all these papers which departments have stored outside their walls, but also all the dead files which occupy space and impede business within the departmental buildings themselves.

Let us

These are general statements. mention specific instances. The librarian who is "doing" the sights of Washington may be interested to know, as he gazes at the beautiful proportions of the Treasury Building, that in its attic story several miles of wooden shelving contain old Treasury papers, closely packed together and dry as tinder, which up to the present time have not succumbed to spontaneous combustion under our August sun. If he pauses for a moment to look with pleasure at the sunken fountain at the north end of the Treasury, it may augment his pride in the ingenuity of his government to know that a portion of its Treasury archives is stored in chambers constructed around the substructure of the fountain. If by mistake he goes to the old building of the Corcoran Art Gallery instead of the new, he will be compensated by the unusual sight, in the basement, of a body of governmental records so stored that in a dry season they can be consulted by any person wearing rubber overshoes, while in a wet season they are accessible by means of some old shutters laid on the basement floor. At the General Land Office (really the worst case of all) he may see a body of archives representing the titles to four hundred million acres of formerly public but now private lands, stored in a place not, I think, as fit for

the purpose as the average librarian's

coal-cellar-certainly not as fit as mine. If he goes into the Pension Office building, he will find the rich and interesting

archives of the Indian Office stored in the court-yard. As he looks at the small dome that surmounts the House wing of the Capitol, he may reflect with pleasure that the old files of the House of Representatives are stored, in open boxes, in a manner not unlike that formerly followed by country lawyers, in the stifling heat of the space between roof and ceiling of the dome.

Danger of destruction by fire is constant under such circumstances. It is surprising that fires have not been more frequent. But they have occurred several times in former years, and only last summer a fire in the building of the Geological Survey burned up papers which it had cost $100,000 to produce. There are half a dozen places in Washington where, if an extensive fire should break out, it might in a few hours, by burning up the documents with which claims against the government are defended, cause the government to lose several times the cost of a good national archive building.

Probably there is no repository for government papers in Washington, except the Division of Manuscripts in the Library of Congress, which is strictly fireproof in the fullest sense; but danger from fire is not the only peril to which archives are now exposed. Some of the places where they are stored are damp. In others there is local dampness from steam pipes and leaky roofs. In many there is injury from dust and dirt, in nearly all the grossest overcrowding. As to search and use, it is sometimes impossible, usually difficult. So dark are many repositories that when Messrs. Van Tyne and Leland were preparing their Guide to the Archives of the Government in Washington, an electric searchlight was a necessary part of their equipment. Armed with this, they could read the labels on the bundles or the legends on the backs of bound volumes, whenever these had not rotted off from dampness or excessive dryness. By way of contrast to the literary search-rooms

in the Public Record Office in London or the Archives Nationales in Paris, in which fifty or a hundred historical scholars can work amid conditions resembling those which you, ladies and gentlemen, offer to readers in your libraries, the courageous student of this country's his tory is fortunate if, after the volume or bundle has been dragged from its darksome lair, an obliging clerk-and nearly all government clerks in Washington are obliging-clears upon some heavily burdened desk or table a space two feet square which the student can use for the study of his documents.

To me, and to many of those who hear me, the main reason for interesting ourselves in the problems of a national archive building is that present conditions interpose almost intolerable obstacles to the progress of history. We may reasonably expect that this should also seem to legislators a serious matter. An enlightened government, a government whose success depends on the intelligence of public opinion, cannot afford to be indifferent to the advancement of historical knowledge. The government of the United States should do far more for it than it does. It would be a perfectly justifiable expenditure if on this ground alone, merely as the first step toward a proper cultivation of the national history, our government should spend $1,000,000 or $1,500,000 in erecting a perfect archive building, in which the historian could find and use his materials. But as the actual world goes, we are to expect business considerations to have greater weight than the interests of history. Very well. Put the matter on that ground. Is it good business for a government to spend $50,000 a year for rental of bad quarters, when for the same sum capitalized it could build magnificent quarters with much greater capacity? Is it good business for a government that can borrow at three per cent to pay rentals of ten per cent? It certainly is not thought so when the question is one of building local post-offices.