akers did
in the creation of it? Is it not time that civic societies in every
section of this State should combine and work together for the creation
of a public sentiment which will support and uphold any institution that
will strive to perpetuate the record of the history of this great
commonwealth?

Though there has been no sustained or organized effort on the part of
the State, or of any community in the State, to recognize the duty of
collecting and preserving the priceless records of its historical
growth, yet, by the luck that often attends improvidence, we have the
nucleus of a library which goes far toward offsetting our culpable
indifference.

One of the great fires that swept San Francisco in its early stages just
missed the Bancroft Library, then at the corner of Merchant and
Montgomery streets. The later fire that burned the building on Market
Street, near Third, next door to the History Building, again barely
missed the Bancroft Library. And when it was moved to the building
especially constructed for it at Valencia and Mission streets, the great
conflagration of the 18th of April, 1906, just failed to reach it. In
this State it had remained for a private individual, by his life work,
to collect and preserve a library that to the State of California is
almost priceless in value. This magnificent library the State of
California has recently purchased and installed in the California
Building, at the State University, where its usefulness is being
developed by the Academy of Pacific Coast History, an association
organized in connection with the history work of the University. By a
series of happy accidents, then, we are in a position to start with as
great a nucleus of its historical data as any commonwealth ever had.
There remains the great work of cataloguing and publishing, rendering
available to the investigation of scholarship this mass of original
data, and the State should immediately provide the liberal fund
necessary for the mechanical and clerical administrative work.

While the State is completing the trust with reference to the material
it already has on hand, the all-destroying march of Time still goes
swiftly on, however. Manuscripts in foreign lands are fading and being
lost, parchments are becoming moth-eaten or mildewed, whole archives
without duplicate are at the mercy of a mob, or a revolution, or a
conflagration, and a generation of men and women still alive are quickly
passing away, c