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280 place. The member of the family sufficed. However marked a curiosity over a public character might exist, it did not extend to his writings. An early experiment (1810) of printing Hamilton's financial papers failed. With the current questions interest ceased, and newspaper discussion rarely dipped into past American history. Precedents and comparisons were drawn from Greece and Rome, not from colonial Britain. In the small number of instances where elaborate defense was deemed proper, it was the leading actor who performed the task—as in Monroe's defense of his French mission and in Edmund Randolph's Vindication. A pamphlet would cover the emergency; and it was prepared by an interested party. Yet in the first years the editor appears in a modest but efficient form, dealing with original sources and with some comprehension of the function he was to fulfil.

The earliest example is Ebenezer Hazard and his Historical Collections, printed by the author—a euphemism then as now for printed at a loss—in 1792. Wait's State Papers (1815) were a forerunner of Force's Archives. As to the publication in 1819 of the Acts and Proceedings of the Convention of 1787 by John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state, as related in his Memoirs, he enlists the heartfelt sympathy of everyone who has dealt with original material as arranged by ambitious but badly equipped adventurers in history, or by pious hands directed by filial apprehension. These early essays in printing sources were guided by the proper spirit. Without undue reverence for the written word, they followed the text without modification in language or in intention. Why should this attitude have undergone a change which for half a century persisted in mutilating the text and giving excuse for every vagary of statement?

And it was a Massachusetts woman who pointed out the way. Secretly Eliza Susan Quincy compiled a memoir of her grandfather Josiah Quincy, the patriot, and when she had completed the task, she induced her father, Josiah Quincy, to put his name on the titlepage and thus assume responsibility for the dark deed. How she doctored the text, altering, omitting, and mutilating as seemed to her proper and best, has only recently become known. I will not say that she violated all the commandments of good editing, but she was remarkably successful in sinning against the great majority. This volume appeared in 1825, and the first volume of Sparks's Washington followed nine years later, so perfect an imitation of all