Whatever the eventual results, I think his intentions were clear enough i.e. to remove the songs to a safer haven where they would be better served than they would in their natural habitat which he regarded as not only doomed, but degenerate. His ideas on survival confirms this, that he was effectively harvesting songs long overdue from people who were barely capable of singing them, much less appreciating their true value. That he was mistaken in this is by the by; he thought he was right - that in so doing he was creating a new era of our national folk heritage, rather than some volkish fantasy based on an autocratic misinterpretation that to Sharp was absolute fact.