Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/353

It is sufficiently clear, from what appears above, that Mr. Bancroft's public justification of himself for publishing under his own name all the work done in the library is the fact that he reserved the right to alter all manuscripts and make what changes he saw fit. This made him managing editor, however, not author. The comparatively few additions he made to the manuscripts can not justify such a claim. That the revision of Mrs. Victor's work consisted in the main of nothing more than leaving out parts appears from two cases already cited, one in connection with the History of Colorado, Nevada, and Wyoming, the other with the History of Oregon, as well as from the direct statements of those who supervised library work. As we have seen he demanded that his writers turn out a certain number of pages a day "all ready for the printer," so he could have had little occasion to revise their work. The writers who Mr. Bancroft said in 1878 wrote with very little change from him were of course Oak and Nemos. Now Oak wrote seven and a half volumes of the history, and Nemos and Mrs. Victor five each, while Bancroft wrote four—a total of at least twenty-two volumes out of the twenty-eight to the authorship of which no serious claim could be made on the ground of altered manuscripts. Moreover, Savage says in his autobiography that, while Bancroft made additions and amendments to the three volumes which he wrote, in some of his pages only a word or two was changed and that others remained intact. What rewriting was occasionally done on the remaining volumes, was apparently done as often by other persons as by Mr. Bancroft. His relation toward the work was therefore exactly the same as that of a managing editor toward the matter printed in a newspaper. The latter could never claim the authorship of the articles