I. There are, first, the autobiographies, memoirs and writings of statesmen, lawyers, legislators, judges, street-cleaning commissioners, police superintendents, and other persons who have actually conducted some branch of our government. These books, it is true, are often written to glorify the authors; but the solemn presentation of the unvarnished truth was not always the purpose of the medieval monk whose chronicle is studied with such zeal as a source. What could be more charming or illuminating than Senator Hoar’s memoirs, Sherman’s recollections, Blaine’s story of his service in Congress, or Benton’s view of things? Were there space at my disposal I could fill this magazine with the topics on which I have secured informing notes from Hoar’s work. There are wit, and humor, and reality on almost every page. I suspect, and whisper it here under breath, that a student who reads it will know more about the Federal Government than one who devotes his time to memorizing the sacred Constitution, so prayerfully drafted by the Fathers. II. In the second group I would place the government publications, State and Federal and municipal. Now I am aware that this calls up in the minds of many readers visions of the long rows of repulsive volumes which cumber our library shelves, and I know that government reports all look alike to careless observers. They are not, however. Even the “Congressional Record” has pages glistening with information on the inner workings of Congress and the play of interests in lawmaking. It takes some courage for the busy teacher to start on that formidable monument to the capacity of the Government Printing Office, but, as Professor Reinsch has pointed out in the preface to his splendid collection of materials on the Federal Government, the process of studying the sources while irksome at the beginning soon has the exhilarating effect on the mind that brisk physical exercise has on the body. Only one who has turned from a vest-pocket manual of predigested “civics” to the apparently cold and barren waste of the “Congressional Record” can know the exhilaration of the experiment. In the debates of the conventions in which our State Constitutions are framed we can find materials which will illuminate every part of our commonwealth government. Then there are the executive messages and inaugurals--voluminous and forbidding, but even a few hours over them with pen in hand and a plentiful supply of page markers will yield fruit never dreamed of by the teacher who has exhausted his ingenuity on inventing a table that will show graphically what powers are coordinate, exclusive, and reserved in our constitutional system! Then there are the departmental reports; I have a shelf full for the years 1908-09, just in front of my working table. They give a lot of precise information on the state of the civil service, the organization of the army and navy, the work of the Bureau of Corporations, the