It was an effective, though not a complete, answer that he made. He was able to show that at least one flagrant error in reprinting a letter was not his, but that of Reed’s grandson. He showed that many of the alleged garblings were not real, but arose from the fact that Washington’s original letters as sent out, and the copies which his secretaries transcribed into his letter-books, differed. Washington himself had revised the manuscript of his correspondence during the French war, making numerous erasures, interlineations, and corrections; and which could now be called the genuine text? As Sparks explained, the omissions over which Bigelow had grumbled were unavoidable because of the necessity of compressing material for thirty or forty volumes into twelve. But he did admit taking certain editorial liberties which would now be thought improper. “It would certainly be strange,” he wrote, “if an editor should undertake to prepare for the press a collection of manuscript letters, many of them hastily written, without a thought that they would ever be published, and should not at the same time regard it as a solemn duty to correct obvious slips of the pen, occasional inaccuracies of expression, and manifest faults of grammar....” The _Evening Post_ was anxious to do President Sparks justice. It admitted his industry and conscientious devotion, shown in the labor he had spent at the thirteen capitals of the original States, wherever else he could find Revolutionary papers, and in the public offices of London and Paris. It recognized that the demand for absolutely literal transcriptions was a new one in the field of scholarship. But to this demand the controversy gave a decided impetus.