Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from General Index of the Journals of Congress: From the First to Tenth Congress Inclusive, Being a Synoptical Subject Index of the Proceedings of Congress on All Public Business From 1789 to 1809, With References to the Debates, Documents, and Statutes Connected Therewith
Show me a practical improvement and that improvement I will do my best to realize.
This preliminary publication, comprising the index of the journals of the first ten Congresses, is made for the purpose of submitting to criticism and revision the plan, forms, and method designed for the entire work. I shall welcome suggestions, and even the most unsparing criticism; for the work I have undertaken, being almost entirely original in its design, is still subject to great im provement in its details.
To use this index profitably, or to criticise it intelligently, it is necessary that its purposes and mom should be fully understood.
The accumulated records of Congress are contained in about two thousand volumes of laws, documents, journals, and debates. These volumes contain the history of legislation since the organization of the government, and, therefore, information essential to guide legislation in the future. Each volume being separately indexed, on the most diverse and imperfect plans, it has become almost impossible to extract from them the full history of any subject on which information is sought.
What is obviously desirable is either separate general indexes of the laws, the documents, the debates, and the journals, or one comprehensive general index of the whole. It would require a very long time and the expenditure of a very large amount of money to accomplish either of these plans. As an alternative, I have conceived that a general index of the journals can be prepared in such form as to present a synopsis of the history of legislation on every subject, and make ao cessible information contained in the other publications of Congress.
The plan that I have adopted to fulfill this purpose is based on the fact that the journals con tain a brief record of everything done in Congress, and the plan is carried out by referring the enquirer to the debates, documents, and laws in which he can obtain the more detailed information that is not recorded in the journals.
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