Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/48

xxxviii During the forty years that have elapsed since the appearance of the first volume of McMaster's History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, the newspaper has become a familiar historical source, although its legitimacy as such does not even yet pass unquestioned. The historian has found much to commend in the use of periodical and even of ephemeral literature in his study of the past, but during this period he has attached an ever-increasing importance to the reliability of the material he uses. He knows that before everything else this materialmust be both authentic and authoritative; if the sources he uses are defective in either particular, the history that he writes rests on shifting sands and his work collapses with the first breath of criticism that discloses the weakness of its foundations. In the use of books and of documents of every kind it is comparatively easy to determine the authoritativeness of the statements made, but in the use of the newspaper this has seemed almost impossible. The responsibility for the tidings spread abroad can not be assigned to any single person, but must be divided among several large groups of individuals, and each group in its turn must be resolved into its constituent parts. Every issue of a great newspaper represents the work of scores, hundreds, possibly thousands of persons all over the world and it seems obviously impossible for the historian to investigate the truth of even a small proportion of the statements made by the press. He recognizes the manifest usefulness that the newspaper might have in his work, yet he hesitates to accept a form of material the authoritativeness of which has not been thoroughly established.

The historian has at hand a mass of official documents,—constitutions, charters, laws, treaties, court decisions, and similar material. He accepts its authoritativeness without question and recognizes that it is indispensable in writing a history of the state. Creeds, papal bulls, decisions of religious bodies must be accepted as authoritative sources in dealing with all questions of religious belief and of ecclesiastical organization.

But while the press touches every human interest, it has no standards by which its authoritativeness may be judged, it has no Magna Charta or Apostles' Creed to which appeal may be made,