What Dr. Stubbs said many years ago about the difficulty of mastering the history of institutions applies with equal force to the mastery of present institutions, especially in actual operation. Perhaps, in a way, the student of government is more fortunately situated than the student of history, for he can use the laboratory method to some extent. He may attend primaries and caucuses, visit the State capital or the City Hall, take a place among the spectators in a police court watching the daily grind, or observe the selectman, perhaps a drug clerk, superintend the construction of a town highway. But in the class-room instruction in government and politics must perforce deal largely with abstractions. The historians, long ago recognizing the vice of unreality which attended them like a ghost that would not be downed, cast about for some new method that would give more firmness and life to their instruction. In their search they came upon the sources, and instead of listening always to the voice of Green or Stubbs, they stopped to hear the voices of the kings, monks, warriors and lawyers who helped to make the history of which Green and Stubbs wrote. The result, as all the world knows, has been marvelous. It has brought more vividness and solidity to historical instruction. It has done more. The very method itself, in the hands of skilled workers, has become a discipline of the highest value. Whoever doubts it should read Professor Fling’s article in the first issue of this magazine. Lawyers likewise have discovered the same difficulties which the teachers of history encountered, and, flinging away Blackstone and the text-books, they have sought refuge in the sources alone. Perhaps they have gone too far with the “case system”; in fact, a reaction seems imminent at this moment; but the commentators will never recover their former sway. Strange to say, teachers of government and politics have not yet made any widespread use of the methods that have been found so effective in the hands of other students of institutions, and yet in quantity, variety and interest the sources available for their work are practically unlimited. One of the most important groups of materials, the government publications, can be had for the asking; and our waste baskets are filled with the examples of another group, the fugitive literature of party politics. Acres of diamonds have been at our door, but our instruction in government and politics wears, in general, such a barren aspect that keen-sighted students are aware of its unreality and, slow-switted ones find no delight or profit in it. No word in our curriculum suggests such innocuous futility as “civics,” and yet we are preparing citizens for service in a democracy! But to turn from preachments to some practical advice, which, I take it, is what the editor wanted when he asked me to do this article. The source materials for government and politics fall readily into four groups.