Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1913-03-21

accumulates upon them to an extent that
| Is destructive and Injurious.
In many cases they are stacked In
piles in the corridors or entryways of
/ government buildings. exposed to such
| danger of fire as comes from smoking,
| and exposed, of course. to more or less
| careless plumber by passersby; that has
| happened in good many cases.
Canada Affords Object Lesson.
1.-The case of Canada is an instructive
one regarding this matter of building.
They had an archivist and division of
! archives, an 'archive branch under one
/ of the departments from 1870 down, but
not much was ever turned over to the
archivist from the various departments
| until they began the construction of their
new building. They now have at Ottawa
| a system of concentration almost as con-
| siderable as that in London. The Domln-
! ion archives has fine building; not a
| very large one. naturally, but perfectly
| fireproof and in large space of land, at
some distance from the departments to
| be sure.
'Since the construction of that all the
| departments have turned over everything
! that they have down to 1857. when the
present government of the Dominion be-
gan, and some of them down as late as
! 1885, SO that Canada also shows very
| high degree of concentration.
| I'm Paris and in Berlin and in St Pc
sersburg the concentration is not SO
| great. There the system is that while
you have one chief archive, in Paris
| the archives nationales, you have also
| the archives of the departments, not as
we have, each bureau keeping it's own
papers, so that there are a hundred de-
postories, but a general archive of the
department of foreign affairs, a general
| archive of the department of the colonies
| a general archive Of the department Of
marine; but the general tendency is from
| time to time to send the older portions of
| them, one part after another, to the ar
chives nationales. so that. for instance,
| the ministry of the colonies, which is in
rather a crowded situation, lately sent
most of the papers respecting the earlier
colonial history to the national archives
building. In Berlin and st. Petersburg
| somewhat the same is true"
Care of Archives Urged.
Incorporated as a part of the House
committee hearings on the subject is a
magazine article by Rosa Pendleton
Chiles, entitled 1.-THE National Archives
Are They in Peril?' In this it is said:
| 1.-The scattered material, without uni
| form system of arrangement, at once i'm
presses the searcher among government
papers. The bewildering mass of mate
rial handled in these diverse ways in
| creases the danger of loss and hampers
officials in the expeditions management
| of the work.
I'm the Treasury Department there are
| said to be 100 miles of chewing and 1t Is
estimated that in this department alone
there are enough papers to fill the Lii
brary of Congress twice. Since 1896 the
department has been renting buildings for
| the storage of its records, which accumu-
late at the rate of 5000 cubic feet yearly.
| The files Of the War Department, excel
| lently cared for by the way, occupy
nearly a hundred rooms in the State,
War and Navy building and more than
10000 square feet of floor space in the
Army and Navy Medical Museum, Ford s
Theater building. and two buildings on
18th and G streets. The volume may be
| judged by the weight.
. There are said to be more than a
thousand tons of the records of the volun-
! teer forces alone. The records of the
general land Office, if placed end to end
| in wall six feet high. would reach from
| Washington to New York.
Tons of Material.
1.-The post Office building, the pension
office, the patent ONCE. and, for that mat
! ter, all the government buildings at
Washington contain may tons of ma
terial. The storing and filing of SO much
| matter is necessarily a serious problem
| Buildings become overcrowded, new ones
| are rented, attics and Easements are fill
/ ed, and time is lost in finding papers that
| involve great affairs. In the moving of
| files from one building to another losses
| occur and papers on a single subject are
separated.
1.-The territorial archives may be taken
as an example Of this. portion these
| papers is in the State Department an
| other portion in the Department of the
| Interior, while third is believed to have
| been lost in being moved from one de-
i partment to the other. The papers of the
! indian office are also believed to have
| suffered great loss in their transfer from
| the War Department to the Department
/, of the Interior. Sometimes papers are
| temporarily transferred for particular
purposes from one office to another and
never returned. This happened to a con-
| siderable mass of material sent from the
| War Department to the Capitol many
! years ago."