less, by the accidental circumstance
that the author was unacquainted with the documents by which those which
he had within reach, and with which he was content, might have been
illustrated, supplemented, or discredited. The scholars and historians
of to-day, standing, as they do, in other respects on an equality with
their predecessors of the last few centuries, are only enabled to
surpass them by their possession of more abundant means of
information.[23] Heuristic is, in fact, easier to-day than it used to
be, although the honest Wagner has still good grounds for saying:

"Wie schwer sind nicht die Mittel zu erwerben,
Durch die man zu den Quellen steigt!"[24]

Let us endeavour to explain why the collection of documents, once so
laborious, is still no easy matter, in spite of the progress made in the
last century; and how this essential operation may, in the course of
continued progress, be still further simplified.

I. Those who first endeavoured to write history from the sources found
themselves in an embarrassing situation. Were the events they proposed
to relate recent, so that all the witnesses of them were not yet dead?
They had the resource of interviewing the witnesses who survived.
Thucydides, Froissart, and many others have followed this procedure.
When Mr. H. H. Bancroft, the historian of the Pacific Coast of
California, resolved to collect materials for the history of events many
of the actors in which were still alive, he mobilised a whole army of
reporters charged to extract conversations from them.[25] But when the
events to be related were ancient, so that no man then living could have
witnessed them, and no account of them had been preserved by oral
tradition, what then? Nothing was left but to collect documents of every
kind, principally written ones, relating to the distant past which was
to be studied. This was a difficult task at a time when libraries were
rare, archives secret, and documents scattered. About the year 1860, Mr.
Bancroft, in California, was in a situation analogous to that of the
earlier researchers in our part of the world. His plan was as follows:
He was rich; he cleared the market of all documents, printed or
manuscript; he negotiated with financially embarrassed families and
corporations for the purchase of their archives, or the permission to
have them copied by his paid agents. This done, he housed his collection
in premises built for the purpose, and classified i