The appearance of the first four volumes of Selections from the Smuts Papers, covering the period 1886–1919, completes the second part of a four-fold publication plan which began some fifteen years ago. The first part was completed when Smuts—The Sanguine Years, 1870–1919 by Sir Keith Hancock was published in 1962. The whole programme will have been concluded when the second volume of the biography appears and is followed by further volumes of private papers covering the last thirty years of Smuts's life. Meanwhile a fifth undertaking, which is basic to all the others, has been all but accomplished–the establishment of a great Collection of Smuts Papers.

The story of the origins and course of these projects has been told in the Creighton Lecture in History entitled The Smuts Papers, which was delivered by Professor Hancock in 1955 and published by the Athlone Press (1956). Here only a brief account of it need be given.

Shortly after the death of General Smuts the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press sought to publish an authoritative biography of the late Chancellor of Cambridge University and invited Professor Hancock to write it. He accepted after he had had discussions with Mrs Smuts and with Mr J. C. Smuts, General Smuts's son and literary executor, and had made a first examination of his papers, then rather precariously housed in the Doornkloof farm-house where the Smuts family had lived since 1909.