e
circumstances, that he should fail to be educated politically, or that
he should ever lose the keenest interest in every movement of the State.
It is to this political activity that we may possibly look for one of
the reasons which conduced to that extraordinary longevity which the
constitution of Venice displayed.

Each of the Government offices, many as they were, possessed its own
collection of papers. These are either still in loose sheets, just as
they left the office, or bound in volumes. They are indicated by the
name of the Government department, the subject dealt with, and the date.
The pages are of three kinds; first, there are the files or _filze_, the
original minutes of the Board, written down in actual Council by the
secretaries, and with the _filze_ are the dispatches or other documents
upon which the Council took measures. In many of the more important
departments, such as the Senate, the Ten, or the College, these _filze_
were epitomized; the substance of each day's business was written out in
large volumes known as _Registri_; each entry was signed by the
secretary who had made the digest, and was accepted as authentic for all
purposes of reference. These registers are, in many cases, of the
greatest value where the files have been destroyed or lost. They were
more constantly in use, and therefore more carefully preserved; and now
they frequently form our sole authority for certain periods. As a rule
the registers are very full and good; they contain all that is of
importance in the files; but in making research upon any point it is
never safe to ignore the files where they exist. In some cases the
secretaries made a further digest of the registers in volumes known as
Rubrics, which contain in brief the headings of all materials to be
found in the registers. As the registers sometimes supply the place of
lost files, so the rubrics are occasionally our only authority where
registers and files are both missing. The rubrics are often of the
highest value. As an instance, we may cite the twenty volumes of rubrics
to the dispatches from England between the years 1603 and 1748. The
method of research, therefore, where all three kinds of documents exists
is this, to examine first the rubrics, then the registers, and then the
files. But the infinite subdivisions of the Government offices in Venice
render the task of research somewhat bewildering; and a student cannot
be certain that he has exhausted all the