The writings of George Washington; being his correspondence, addresses, messages, and other papers, official and private, selected and published from the original manuscripts; with a life of the author, notes and illustrations. By Jared Sparks.

PART I.] INTRODUCTION. XV
It ought to be premised here, that, in preparing the
manuscripts for the press, I have been obliged sometimes to use a latitude of discretion, rendered unavoidable by the mode in which the papers have been preserved. They' are uniformly copied into volumes, and
this task appears to have been performed, except in the
revolutionary correspondence, by incompetent or very
careless transcribers. Gross blunders constantly occur,
which not unfrequently destroy the sense, and which
never could have existed in the original drafts. In these
cases I have of course considered it a duty, appertaining to the function of a faithful editor, to hazard such
corrections as the construction of the sentence manifestly warranted, or a cool judgment dictated. On some
Qccasions the writer himself, through haste or inadvertence, may have fallen into an awkward use of words,
faults of grammar, or inaccuracies of style, and when
such occur from this source, I have equally felt bound
to correct them. It would be an act of unpardonable
injustice to any author, after his death, to bring forth
compositions, and particularly letters, written with no
design to their publication, and commit them to the press
without previously subjecting them to a careful revision.
This exercise of an editor's duty, however, I have
thought it allowable to extend only to verbal and grammatical mistakes or inaccuracies, maintaining a scrupulous caution that the author's meaning and purpose
should thereby in no degree be changed or affected.
As this work is intended to be strictly a collection of
Washington's writings, it is deemed unadvisable to encumber it with notes and foreign matter, any farther
than is requisite to explain and properly illustrate the
text. The notes will for the most part be short, historical, and explanatory, touching only on particulars relevant
to the subject in hand. There will be an-Appendix at the