t. Theoretically
there could not be a more rational procedure. But this rapid, American
method has only once been employed with sufficient resources and
sufficient consistency to ensure its success; at any other time, and in
any other place, it would have been out of the question. Nowhere else
have the circumstances been so favourable for it.

At the epoch of the Renaissance the documents of ancient and modern
history were scattered in innumerable private libraries and in
innumerable depositories of archives, almost all of them inaccessible,
not to mention those which lay hidden beneath the soil, their very
existence as yet unsuspected. It was at that time a physical
impossibility to procure a list of all the documents serving for the
elucidation of a question (for example, a list of all the manuscripts
still preserved of an ancient work); and if, by a miracle, such a list
was to be had, it was another impossibility to consult all these
documents except at the cost of journeys, expenses, and negotiations
without end. Consequences easy to foresee did, as a matter of fact,
ensue. Firstly, the difficulties of Heuristic being insurmountable, the
earliest scholars and historians--employing, as they did, not all the
documents, nor the best documents, but those documents on which they
could lay their hands--were nearly always ill-informed; and their works
are now without interest except so far as they are founded on documents
which have since been lost. Secondly, the first scholars and historians
to be relatively well-informed were those who, in virtue of their
profession, had access to rich storehouses of documents--librarians,
keepers of archives, monks, magistrates, whose order or whose
corporation possessed libraries or archives of considerable extent.[26]

It is true that collectors soon arose who, by money payments, or by more
questionable expedients, such as theft, formed, with more or less regard
for the interests of scientific study, "cabinets" of collections of
original documents, and of copies. But these European collectors, of
whom there has been a great number since the fifteenth century, differ
very noticeably from Mr. Bancroft. The Californian, in fact, only
collected documents relating to a particular subject (the history of
certain Pacific states), and his ambition was to make his collection
complete; most European collectors have acquired waifs and strays and
fragments of every description, forming, when com