Now, the rules for safe preservation and custody are simple things, matters of proved experience, a number of which are set out in a small book recently published in England, and at more length in the well-known Continental treatise;[36] and though the standard of archive-keeping by local authorities is at present very uneven, we may, for the shortening of this article, dismiss that side of the question with pious hopes. Assuming, then, that the documents of our own time, when they come to the state of archives, will be preserved in suitable places and under proper rules of custody, assuming further that we are able to drill archivists into leaving their charges as far as possible in the physical order and state in which they find them (so as to preserve the old association of document with document), we have to face as our chief danger a threat not so much to the authenticity of the record as to its impartiality—the most important of all its qualities and one which, once damaged, cannot be restored. Interference with impartiality may occur at two points: in the first place it may occur, as indeed it has sometimes done in the past, at or near the time of the document's making; the administrator who makes it may himself have an eye on posterity. We shall have to recur to this again, but for the moment let us turn to the second, which is the more serious because it brings us up against the great modern record problem, bulk: impartiality may be—rather, is—impugned when we come to the selection of documents for preservation.
[36] C. Johnson: The Care of Documents (S.P.C.K. Helps for Students of History); and Muller, Feith, and Fruin: Manuel pour le Classement des Archives.
The obvious remedy for this is not to select—to preserve everything; but this is in practice an equally obvious impossibility: the instance already quoted of the accumulation of our war records[37] would no doubt supply apt illustration, but the custodian of county records is faced on his small scale with exactly the same difficulty: we are all confronted, in fact, with this main problem—how are we to reconcile our desire to preserve in our records certain qualities which have accompanied in the past an uncontrolled accumulation with the necessity of our own day for restriction? Up to now, in face of this problem, and in face of the system of selection, or destruction, which is actually in use, no one (not even the Royal Commission, which has obviously devoted much attention to the subject) has really gone further than to tell the selectors that they must be very careful. But can they? Let us take a case of public records, an imaginary class of, say, 200,000 pieces to be dealt with in a limited space of time by a limited number of people who have probably other work waiting to be done: how can they possibly say (since they have not the time to make a detailed comparison) that all the information contained in certain documents which they propose to condemn is to be found elsewhere? Or, taking another criterion, how can they say that certain documents are going to be without interest for the future? There are classes of documents in the Public Record Office now frequently used and highly valued which little more than fifty years ago might well have been destroyed as having no interest for any branch of human study then known.
[37] Records so vast that in its last report (1919) the Royal Commission has found it necessary to alter its original (1914) recommendations regarding the provision of new repository accommodation.
At this point the natural thing is to seek the advice of the historian, who is indeed, being an enthusiast, anxious to give it. Now, the historian may fairly claim to have done much for records in the past. He is mainly responsible for the recognition of public records as things valuable and to be kept carefully for other reasons than that of mere antiquity; and he has done something in England (one always hopes that he will do more presently) for local and private collections. But he cannot predict the needs of future research workers (who may not be historians at all) any more than he was able to predict in the time of the old Record Commission the needs of our own day: witness the indexes, quite useless to an economic historian, of the very important Chancery Rolls of King John, published about 1830. Even if we grant that he may make a better guess than other men, we are met by a still graver objection in the fact that we cannot rule out at least the possibility (since he is human and an historian) of his having a predilection for the evidence which will establish a certain view or emphasise a certain line of inquiry. The use of an historian, or of any other person who uses records for research purposes, as a selector seems to me incompatible with the preservation of their characteristic impartiality: there will be a possibility—and the mere possibility is enough—of suppressio veri, if not of suggestio falsi; and what should have been a record, preserved by circumstances which do not affect its value as evidence, will become no more than the narrative or at most the pièce justificative of a specialist; you might as well allow a botanist to produce a hybrid in order to prove not its possibility but its existence as a natural form.
But if we cannot use the historian for our purposes we may perhaps call in the trained archivist. I am afraid that here again we shall find no help. The archivist may take an interest in any of the subjects upon which his collections furnish evidence; but such interests have nothing to do with (indeed they sometimes impede) the duties that are his of safeguarding, arranging, and making accessible and of basing himself for all these duties on the internal structure of the classes of documents in his charge: with the possible exception of the last there is nothing in these qualifications to make him more fit than the historian for the work of selection—and destruction.
Is there, then, no possible way—we will not say of dealing with our present accumulations; they, it may be, on account of their sheer bulk must be dealt with by such ad hoc methods as the circumstances admit of; and into those methods it is not our province here to enter—but merely for our guidance in the future, is there no chance of reconciling the requirements of ourselves and posterity (so far as these can be foreseen) with the intrinsic interests of the records themselves—the external with the internal—or rather perhaps of finding some method of treatment which will give to our records a reasonable bulk while preserving their important characteristics, and at the same time will at least not sacrifice unduly the interests of the research-worker? Perhaps an indication of such a possibility is to be found in the words "our present accumulations" which we used above. How would it be if we set ourselves in the future to prevent accumulations?
A certain amount of contemporary destruction of the more obviously ephemeral papers—notes from one department of an office to another saying, "Passed to you, please," and perhaps documents of a more advanced type—does, of course, in our own days sometimes take place in large offices. And there are not wanting indications that a perception of the need of something more, especially in regard to public offices, has been growing since the Act of 1877, provided that the Master of the Rolls might make rules respecting the disposal by destruction or otherwise of documents which are deposited in or can be removed to the Public Record Office (note the lack of any distinction between the two classes) and which are not of sufficient public value to justify their preservation in the Public Record Office. Such an indication is seen in the desire expressed by the late Royal Commission on Public Records[38] for the substitution in Government offices of destruction and preservation of documents according to well-considered principles for destruction founded on arbitrary, varying opinions; and for the relief of the Public Record Office Repository from a cumbersome mass of useless or unnecessary documents. But no one, so far as I am aware, has yet summed up and balanced, for the benefit of all records and record-keepers, whether public or private, the merits and demerits of the various systems of destruction, either in the light of the intrinsic character of records themselves or in that of the experience gained from a study of our ancestors' methods. And the accumulations of documents, many of which are subsequently judged not to be material, continue.
[38] First report, p. 41; cp.: second report, p. 71, etc.
Now we may assume, indeed we know, that from the earliest times not only selections of subjects for representation in permanent records but also actual destruction of documents has been practised by the administrators who have left us their collections. Only—and here is the distinction—since the question of bulk did not trouble them as it does us, they were able to act solely on the ground that the record in question was not required for their current administrative purposes. Note that in this their impartiality was not affected by the external considerations of either this world or the next, neither by any interest in the history-writing of the future, nor by the exigencies of floor-space in the present. Any subsequent destruction, direct or indirect, by our ancestors was quite a different matter: such destruction has invariably been the subject ultimately of adverse criticism, though no doubt the person responsible saw no particular harm in it. For example, take the case of the burning of the Exchequer tallies in 1834. The position of contemporaries is probably represented tolerably by that of Charles Dickens, who criticised the proceeding on the ground not only that it burned down the Houses of Parliament, but also that it was a wanton waste of firewood which might have been given to the poor: yet already we, not a hundred years after, are regretting it. On the other hand, though historians are in the habit of saying vaguely that much which was of incalculable value must have been lost, they refer always to the losses due to various forms of carelessness. I have never heard anyone venture to criticise the Chancery, for example, because it did not preserve full copies of non-returnable writs or the Exchequer because certain draft accounts were destroyed.