It was a stipulation of the capitulation at Montreal in 1760 that all papers held by the French which were necessary for the prosecution of the government should be handed over by the French officials to the victors. These are now supposed to be at Ottawa.[1593]
The papers from the Public Record Office (London) from 1748 to 1763, and referring to Canada, occupy five volumes of the Parkman MSS., in the cabinet of the Mass. Historical Society.[1594]
The State of New York, in its Documentary Hist. of New York and its New York Col. Docs.; New Jersey, in its New Jersey Archives; and Pennsylvania in its Colonial Records and Pennsylvania Archives, have done much to help the student by printing their important documents of the eighteenth century.
In New England, Massachusetts has done nothing in printing; but a large part of her important papers are arranged and indexed, and a commission has been appointed, with an appropriation of $5,000 a year,[1595] to complete the arrangement, and render her documents accessible to the student, and carry out the plan recommended by the same commission,[1596] whose report (Jan., 1885) was printed by the legislature. It gives a synopsis of the mass of papers constituting the archives of Massachusetts. Dr. Geo. H. Moore, in Appendix 5 of his Final Notes on Witchcraft, details what legislative action has taken place in the past respecting the care of these archives.
The other New England States have better cared for their records of the provincial period; New Hampshire having printed her Provincial Papers, Rhode Island and Connecticut their Colonial Records.[1597]
Certain historical summaries—contemporary or nearly so—of the English colonies are necessary to the study of their conditions at the outbreak and during the progress of the war.
First, we have an early French view in George Marie Butel-Dumont’s Histoire et Commerce des Colonies Angloises dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, 1755. A portion of it was issued in London in a translation, as The Present State of North America, Part i.[1598]
The Summary of Douglass has been mentioned elsewhere,[1599] and it ends at too early a date to include the later years of the wars now under consideration.
The work of Edmund Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, though published in 1757, was not able to chronicle much of the effects of the war. It has passed through many editions.[1600]
M. Wynne’s General History of the British Empire in America, London, 1770,[1601] 2 vols., is in some parts a compilation not always skilfully done.