COMPILING a book of sources and documents is generally
a thankless task, satisfying no one, least of all the editor.
He would fain extend his volume to a set. His students,
happily ignorant of the pains of rejection, wish he had made
the volume half its size; and colleagues invariably find fault
with his choice. However, it was time the American Revolu-
tion had a source-book of its own; and the present editor
admits that the pleasure of doing it has more than repaid him
for the trouble. For his students, he has no apology for in-
cluding large excerpts from debates, rather than constitutional
documents in the stricter sense. Toward his colleagues, who
will marvel that he dared to tread in the footsteps of Stubbs,
Gardiner, and Prothero, he will retort as did Artemus Ward
when he fell into poetry: 'Sich was not my intentions, tho
ef occashun requires I can jerk a poim ekal to any of them
Atlantic Munthly fellers.'

The plan of this book is to include (a) all the absolutely
essential documents, such as the Declaration of Independence
and the Federal Constitution, (b) the more important acts,
resolves, state constitutions, royal instructions, &c., not easily
obtainable elsewhere, (c) samples of the more human varieties
of source material, such as debates, letters, pamphlets, Indian
relations, and frontier petitions, which illustrate and often
influenced public opinion. A large part of the book is devoted
to the six years after the war, when the Revolution was
logically completed by the Federal Constitution. Military
and diplomatic subjects have been excluded, because, it is the
Revolution rather than the War of Independence that we are
trying to elucidate; and certain economic aspects of the
Revolution have been excluded because they are adequately
dealt with in Professor Callender Selections from the Economic
History of the United States. ¹

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