Page:Hubert Howe Bancroft His Work and His Method.djvu/15

172 The supplemental volumes, we are told, are the work of Ban- croft's own hands, and these are not altogether void of style. A good example is the brief description of the California pioneers, found in Literary Industries (40).

Other examples tend to eradicate whatever good impressions one might have received. Referring to his removal to New Madrid ; "After three years of ague and earthquake agitations in that un- certain bottom sand-blown land of opossums and puckering persim- mons, fearing lest the very flesh would be shaken from our bones, we all packed ourselves back, and began once more where we left off," etc. (78).

About ten years after the publication of The Native Races, the well-known America of Winsor began to appear, designated as history by a new method. Many of the features claimed for this monumental work were quite surely anticipated by Bancroft, who compares his method to that of Mr. Winsor to the disparagement of the latter, concluding, "but it is the same system of my own, though on a somewhat different plan, in my opinion not nearly so good a one, and one that will not produce the same results." But whereas Winsor "always maintained that a historical student to accomplish anything of value must handle all the books and papers with his own hands," Bancroft had the mass of his work brought to his table in a nearly or quite completed state, and through a double or treble refinement found it necessary to handle only the few books, etc., deemed valuable by clerks; whereas Winsor engaged competent men to write what they were specially qualified to write, Bancroft hired unknown clerks and reporters, wisely withholding from their works names which could carry little or no authority ; whereas, finally, Winsor himself was the foremost student of American history, admittedly capable of writing a critical essay on all the topics treated by his collaborators, Bancroft was a plain business man who had never entered college and who erroneously conceived that a vast library could be reduced to a finished history by an elaborate machinery and mere division of labor. It would be manifestly unfair to compare the Works of Bancroft with the Cambridge Modern History, which under the inspiration and general plans of Lord Acton and a board of three able scholars has recently been brought to completion by "a veritable host of eminent scholars drawn from every portion of the world."

Bancroft truly, completed a stupendous labor: I am far from minimizing its value and importance, - the more I look into it the more I am compelled to respect the audacity that conceived it and the pertinacity that brought it to completion. The author, in col-