detailed acknowledgments of the editors’ many obligations will be found in a note forming part of a later volume.
The practice of identifying the more important articles with their authors by means of initials has been followed in these new volumes to an even greater extent than in the Ninth Edition, although it has not seemed desirable for living writers to sign the biographies of living persons. In a few cases important articles are deliberately left unsigned, for anonymity was necessitated by the fact that only on that condition could the editors induce certain highly-placed writers to undertake subjects which they had made peculiarly their own and yet could not treat with the detachment which is essential to objective discussion if their personalities were formally associated with what they said. In enlisting the writers of both the signed and the unsigned articles, the editors had to overcome many reluctances, due often to the difficulty in which a new writer is placed when invited to complete another man’s work. The editors fully recognize that in this respect, as in others, their labours in the matter of securing the best writers have been lightened by the honour in which the Encyclopedia Britannica is held. Unchallenged throughout the changes of more than a century, that work stands as the classical embodiment of the highest scholarship and research. Contributors, as well as editors, are proud to associate their efforts with the traditions of an enterprise which confers some ray of its lustre upon the least among its servants.
London, May 1902.
