ON THE PERILOUS STATE AND NEGLECT Extracts from an article published in the "Westminster Review," PUBLIC EXTREMES meet. The country was led to spend last year, RECORD A.D. 1849. Selections. £2,000,000, and for buildings connected with civil purposes above Part II. £1,000,000; but its financial administrators could not economize one per cent. on this outlay, or even a farthing, to rescue the National Records from jeopardy! The Financial Reform Association, at one of its meetings, very properly denounced this inconsistency. We should naturally look to find a sympathetic regard for the National Records stronger with a government and all its aristocratic interests, than with cotton-merchants and Manchester warehousemen; but strange as it may seem, the Financial Reform Association has been the only public body feeling itself sufficiently interested in the subject, to call public attention to the government neglect of it. In contrasting economical commissions and omissions, it was the chairman, we think, who showed, that whilst hundreds of thousands of pounds can be afforded annually for experimental abortions, such as the Retribution, the Sidon, and other steam-frigates, it was pretended that no sum could be spared to place the national muniments in a place of safety. And so it would appear that this matter, which might be supposed to engage the solicitude of nobility, landowners, lawyers, diplomatists, financiers, statisticians, and those it most nearly concerns, is likely at last to be settled by some disciple of the "Manchester School." The anomalies of management and instances of feebleness which are connected with the administration of the Public Records and State Papers for years past, are almost incredible. Since 1800, the PUBLIC Part II. nation has paid very little less than a million of pounds1 for the custody, printing, and administration of the Public Records, Official and State Papers. At the present time, they cost not less than £15,000 a-year, taking the buildings and makeshifts into account; and yet the great bulk of them are exposed to imminent perils of fire, in spite of the warnings of Mr. Braidwood, Superintendent of the Fire Brigade, who says, they are under risks to which "no merchant of ordinary prudence would subject his books of account." It is six years since this perilous state was brought specifically to the notice of Government, in all its respective departments-the Treasury, the Office of Woods, the Home Office; every year since, the ugly warning has been repeated in the dull ears of the House of Commons; and yet, what "no merchant of ordinary prudence" would suffer for an instant, the country endures with silent apathy. Imbecility seems, for half a century at least, to have paralyzed all attempts to obtain a safe building in which to deposit the public documents of this country. The utter helplessness of every one who affects to be concerned, is only paralleled by the impotent wailings of the Greek chorus. Every one professes his sense of the want, cants about it, and wrings his hands. Reports without end of the danger of the present buildings, are made to Parliament year after year;-periodically, the Treasury institutes an inquiry, and so of course does the Office of Woods ;-the Home Secretary is catechized, and promises to learn something. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is always hoping to find funds, and all the while the national Records remain in the state "to which no merchant of ordinary prudence would subject his books of account." The proverbial working of our Government is, that it follows, and rarely ventures to pilot the intelligence of the people. The apathy which it continues to show for the public documents, does but reflect the ignorance and indifference of the public itself on this subject. The spirit of the time, essentially selfish, cares as little for the past as it does for the future. Of history we are 1 In parliamentary grants to Record Commissions, salaries to officers, fees from the public, removals, and cost of Irish Commission up to 1839, the expenditure on the Public Records had been upwards of £878,100. Since 1839, the annual grant alone to the Public Record Office has been about £10,000, which, without incidentals, makes a total of £978, 100! RECORDS. A.D. 1849. negligent,' and though three large editions of Macaulay's " History PUBLIC of England" may be sold in as many months, it is the eloquence of the writer, and not the thing written about, that excites the public interest. Part II. Selections. of Lawyers, Chancellors of the Ex It is but a small fraction of the public who know the extent and value, and comprehend the singular completeness of the historical documents of this country. Our Public Records excite no interest, even in the functionaries whose acts they record, the departments whose proceedings they register; or the proprietors to whose property and rights they furnish the most authentic, perhaps the only title-deeds. Practically, what care my Lords Lyndhurst, Broug- Indifference ham, and Cottenham, to know that there are Records of the Court of Chancery, and the official proceedings of their prede- chequer, cessors, from the time of King John, without intermission, to the decree which the Lord Chancellor made yesterday? Who, among the common law judges, if we except Baron Parke, cares to know that every judgment passed in our Law Courts, has been in some way recorded for the last six hundred and fifty years? What heed my Lord Denman, and Chief Justice Wilde, or their learned brother Sir F. Pollock, of this fact?—and yet our courts are always insisting upon the solemnity of their recorded proceedings. There is no greater sympathy for financial Records. We venture to assert that neither Lord Monteagle, Mr. Goulburn, nor Sir Charles Wood, either know that there are ledger-books of the national expenditure, which Chancellors of the Exchequer have regulated, unrivalled even for their very physical magnificence, and complete as a series, since the days of Henry II., or that they would suffer a moment's pang of conscience to hear that the parchments had been cut up into measures for Herr Stulz, or that they had eaten them as jellies, stewed by the artist Gunter. And my Lord Palmerston, who makes treaties so patly, is he aware of the fact that our Record Offices possess the very chirograph between Henry I. and Robert, Earl of Flanders, the most ancient of our diplomatic documents; or that there exists Pope Adrian's privilege to Henry II. to conquer Ireland; or the treaties with Robert Bruce, or the veritable treaty of the Cloth of Gold, 1 At last, after a gestation of fifteen years, the Government has brought out the first volume of our National Historians, and halts in proceeding Foreign Sec retaries, &c. PUBLIC A. D. 1849. Monastic Public Record Office Act passed in 1838. illuminated with the portrait of the handsome hook-nosed Francis I., and sanctified by the gold seal, chased by the cunning Benvenuto Cellini himself? Can the Master-General of the Ordnance, who by a theoretical figment, is supposed to direct the formation of the present Ordnance Surveys, say that he has ever been interested enough to look at the survey of William the Conqueror-the Domesday-book, which Americans, at least, go to the (Westminster) Chapter-House to inspect?—a more perfect survey in its way, though made eight centuries ago, than anything we are even now forming in London. The brother of the Prime Minister, the Duke of Bedford, inherits the Abbey of Woburn and its monastic rights, privileges and hereditaments; and there are Public Records, detailing with the utmost minuteness the value of this and all the church property which "Old Harry" seized, and all the stages of its seizure; the preliminary surveys to learn its value; perhaps the very surrender of the Monks of Woburn; the annual value and detail of the possessions of the monastery whilst the Crown held it; the very particulars of the grant on which the letters patent to Lord John Russell were founded; the enrolment of the letters patent themselves; but neither his Grace of Bedford, the Duke and lay-impropriator, nor his brother, the Prime Minister and the historian, is moved, even by mere sentiment, to stir a step to have these documents safely housed! Messrs. Brown, Smith, and Tomkins, buy and sell manors and advowsons, Waltons and Stokes, and Combes cum Tythings, without knowing or caring that there are records of the actual transfers of the same properties between the holders of them, since the days of King John! There is no sympathy for these things, even with those who might fairly be presumed to have a direct interest in the preservation of them, or with the public at large. But this dulness does not lessen the truth of what Bishop Nicholson said in 1714, that "Our stores of Public Records are justly reckoned to excel in age, beauty, correctness, and authority, whatever the choicest archives abroad can boast of the like sort." It is ten years since an Act was passed creating a Public Record Office. The theory of that Act was, to put under the superintendence of the Master of the Rolls, all legal Records whatever, and into his actual custody all Records which exceeded twenty RECORDS. A.D. 1849. Part II. years in age. Every year the several Courts-Queen's Bench- PUBLIC Common Pleas Exchequer and Chancery-thus formally pass over into the Public Record Office, all the Records whose age exceeds twenty years. But in addition to these annual transfers of legal documents, there constantly are transfers of many others which are of the character of state papers. Thus the Admiralty has handed over some hundred barge-loads of its Records. The Treasury has carted away many van-loads of half-putrid ledgers and minute-books to the Public Record Office. Papers of various commissions have been sent to be sorted. The Registrar of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, has asked to be relieved of his vastly accumulating documents. Lately, it has been resolved that the State Paper Office shall be a branch of the Public Record Office; so that already this department is one, not for the charge of legal Records only, but of all public and state documents of every kind. It will become, so to speak-when Government is wise enough to provide a proper building-a national strong-box, and these circumstances alone constitute ample reason against further delay, if Depositories the scandalous state of the present several temporary places of de- tered. posit, did not make the necessity for a safe building urgent, beyond human patience. The documents in actual charge of the Public Record Office, are still scattered in six depositories in as many parts of London; --an inconvenience especially noticed by the Commons' Committee on the Record Commission in 1836. The Tower of London contains the early Chancery Records from the time of John, and the Admiralty Records. One portion is placed in the Wakefield Tower, " contiguous to a steam-engine in daily operation," as witnessed and reported against by the Commons' Committee in 1836. Another portion is piled and packed up most ingeniously in very cramped space in the large square four-turreted keep of the old fortress, called the White Tower. There is barely room for a moderate-sized person to pass between the racks. The recent influx of Admiralty Records, brought from the Dockyard at Deptford, whence they were expelled to make room for constructing another dock!-another sign of the public economy, which prefers to build frigates to providing a safe Record Office-has choked up and completely hidden the little chapel in this keep, called Cæsar's Chapel. still scat Cæsar's |