But this by no means exhausts the list of those who have co-operated with me in the work. There are two other classes of helpers to whom I am at least equally indebted. One class includes those who for months have spent their time in libraries and muniment rooms, making researches, copying documents, hunting up portraits, plans, and pictures, and verifying references on my behalf. To them, for the manner in which they have laboured, and for the numerous suggestions which they have laid before me, I cannot too deeply express my thanks. The other class, a very much larger one, includes the volunteer helpers. Among them are naval officers, British and foreign, and distinguished historical and technical authorities. My indebtedness to these will be found specially acknowledged in various places throughout the volumes, either in the footnotes, or in the introductions. I am desirous of here recording my peculiar obligations to Mr. R. B. Marston, who has unceasingly interested himself in the progress of the work, and has helped me in obtaining, or securing a sight of, many valuable documents and little-known pamphlets and books which, otherwise, must have escaped my notice.
Upon one other subject I must say a word, though I say it a little unwillingly. When it became known in the United States that my friends Captain Mahan and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt were to contribute to the book chapters dealing with our unhappy conflicts with America, a certain New York literary journal, which generally displays better taste, congratulated itself that at last English readers would be told the whole truth about those wars. It went on to insinuate with gratuitous offensiveness that, although Captain Mahan, being perhaps spoilt by British appreciation of his books, might hesitate to speak out, Mr. Roosevelt might be trusted to reflect American opinion in its most uncompromising form, and that I might live to be sorry for having secured the co-operation of that distinguished writer and administrator.
I regret this outburst, and I sincerely trust that the journal in question will, if only for the sake of international and personal comity, refrain from repeating it. Those among us who have studied the subject at all have known the truth about these wars for many a long year, and although we may not be uniformly proud of the parts which Great Britain has played as against the United States, we have no reason for desiring the suppression of any one of the facts. Like all the great characters of history, nations have
