he Ostend Manifesto?" To a mind not
previously instructed these two words "Ostend Manifesto", convey
absolutely no meaning. You turn to the standard encyclopaedias,
Appleton's, Johnson's Universal, and the Britannica, and you find an
account of Ostend, a little Belgian city, its locality, commerce, and
population, but absolutely nothing about an Ostend manifesto. But in J.
N. Larned's "History for Ready Reference", a useful book in five volumes,
arranged in alphabetical order, you get a clue. It refers you from
Ostend, under letter O, to Cuba, where you learn that this formidable
Ostend manifesto was nothing more nor less than a paper drawn up and
signed by Messrs. Buchanan, Mason, and Slidell, Ministers of the United
States to Great Britain, France, and Spain, respectively, when at the
watering-place of Ostend, in 1854, importing that the island of Cuba
ought to, and under certain circumstances, must belong to the United
States. Looking a little farther, as the manifesto is not published in
Larned, you find the text of the document itself in Cluskey's "Political
Text-Book", of 1860, and in some of the American newspapers of 1854. This
is a case of pursuing a once notorious, but more recently obscure topic,
through many works of reference until found.

In many searches for names of persons, it becomes highly important to
know before-hand where to look, and equally important where not to look,
for certain biographies. Thus, if you seek for the name of any living
character, it is necessary to know that it would be useless to look in
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, because the rule of compilation of that work
purposely confined its sketches of notable persons to those who were
already deceased when its volumes appeared. So you save the time of
hunting in at least one conspicuous work of reference, before you begin,
by simply knowing its plan.

In like manner, you should know that it is useless to search for two
classes of names in the "Dictionary of National Biography," the most
copious biographical dictionary of British personages ever published,
begun in 1885, under Leslie Stephen, and reaching its sixty-first volume,
and letter W in 1899, under the editorship of Sidney Lee. These two
classes of names are first, all persons not British, that is, not either
English, Scottish or Irish; and secondly, names of British persons now
living. This is because this great work, like the Britannica, purposely
confines itself to the na