Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/352



F HISTORY is to perform properly its function as an agency of instruction, it must be careful to record human events fairly and with accuracy, otherwise the lessons which it asks posterity to draw from the past are sure to be misleading. Now the most reliable sources of information concerning all that has happened in the public life of past generations are of course the contemporary records, the writings of those who had a hand in the events themselves and the public documents which set new historical landmarks. The makers of history are the men most competent to write about it; they are the ones best qualified to interpret their own experience.

These writings are the piers upon which the historian builds his long bridge of narrative, and the historical structure can be no stronger than its foundations. American history is well supplied with them, for it spans a period of only three centuries—three modern centuries in which men have written much concerning the outstanding events of their own day. Due allowance must of course be made for human shortcomings even in the records left to us by the wisest and most open-minded of writers. But the fact remains that contemporary materials afford the only sure basis on which to build our knowledge of what has gone before. The history of America, accordingly, may be best studied in the chronicles of early explorers, in the narratives of those who first made their homes on this side of the Atlantic, in the colonial charters and later State laws, in the messages and decrees of presidents, the treaties with foreign nations, the decisions of courts, the correspondence of public men, or, to put it broadly, in the great mass of official and unofficial writings which constitute the public literature of the New World.