Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/21

Rh the Senate, room has been found for all having conspicuous historical value—numerous enough to supply the needs of all but a few special students. In most letters the salutations and the endings, such as “Dear Sir,” “Very truly yours,” “With thanks,” etc., have been dropped out. In all other cases, except in the translations three dots indicate the omission of one or more sentences; when a paragraph of more than two or three sentences is omitted, the dots extend across the page. For the translations from the German letters a special rule has been adopted. As the passages chosen are rarely more than excerpts, taken from personal and private letters, they have been treated as such, and signs of omission have not often been used. Yet, in a few cases, dots have been inserted, lest the casual reader might otherwise assume that the excerpt was a whole letter.

In such works as James Madison's it may be very important to make the reproduction of the text literal, including abbreviations, misspellings, slips and errors of all sorts. But to do this in a collection of Webster's or Burke's or Gallatin's writings would be both injurious and absurd. As it is known, Carl Schurz, our American Burke, was one of the most careful and accurate of writers, and his mastery of English has perhaps never been and may never be surpassed by any German beginning to learn it after reaching manhood. Yet in what he wrote during the first twenty years of his life in the United States one occasionally meets with a construction, and especially the location of an adverb, that, if not German, is also not quite English. Although perhaps most readers would pass these unnoticed, the Editor feels that if he had undertaken to change them he would to that extent have favorably misrepresented what some persons might have considered essentially characteristic of the author.

In regard to spelling, to capitalization, to punctuation