The
American Historical Review
THE EDITORIAL FUNCTION IN UNITED STATES HISTORY[1]
THE long line of my abler predecessors in office has given expression to many views and convictions. There are definitions of history, the application of historical principles, the interpretation of periods or of events, and experiment in forecasting the future in terms of the past. Scholar, publicist, and public servant have expressed their beliefs, outlined their hopes, and even intimated their disappointments in historical language. After such a series of treatments the field has been so well gleaned as to leave little yet to be garnered. If therefore I say a word for an historical agency on which almost no words have been spent, my apology must cover at once the poverty of the subject and the comparatively low rank of the agency. I refer to the editor of original sources of history, the ginning or picking machine which deals with the raw material, the first stage toward the warp and woof of historical writing.
Let us start with something definite. "Was it you", wrote an Englishman to Joseph Jefferson, the actor, "or was it your grandfather, who wrote the Declaration of Independence?" The inquirer and the question are always with us and one of the objects of writing and teaching history is to make both harmless, if not impossible. And the lowest round of the ladder of accomplishment is the editor. He assumes the existence of the anxious inquirer, he seeks to measure his wants, and he frames the answer on such a plane as to hit the average degree of ignorance. "Ignorance", wrote Emerson in his journal, "is but an appetite which God made us to gratify." The editor is a source of information and a measure of quantity suited to a dose. A physician selects his remedies on case practice, on a range of experience which has eliminated
- ↑ Presidential address read before the American Historical Association, at Philadelphia, December 27, 1917.
