The book is, however, a legal treatise, and so good a treatise that the legal reader is sensitive even to minor defects. In the present state of the English literature dealing with Roman procedure, Mr. Greenidge's volume will be found indispensable by students who do not use the German literature with ease.

M. S.

The Lower South in American History. By WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1902. — xi, 271 pp. Mr. Brown's collection of essays confirms the conviction now becoming general that the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction can never be properly written until the conditions of life in the South shall have been set forth by students qualified not only by scientific training but also by a personal contact or an inherited sympathy with Southern society. The post-bellum generation of Southerners, now just in their prime, must shoulder the responsibility of putting their section in a proper light on the record of history. Their immediate predecessors were too much under the sway of passion; their successors will be as remote as the Northerners themselves from any real insight into the civilization of the old South.

Mr. Brown's little volume shows precisely what is needed, and places under deep obligation all searchers for the most useful standpoint from which to view the most dramatic period of our national history. In the title essays, which, with that on Yancey, "The Orator of Secession," constitute the bulk of the volume, he deals with the Cotton States, the genesis and character of their social system, the extraordinary triumphs of their political aims and the final catastrophe which they brought upon themselves and their associates. It is in the description of the social system of these states that the author most conspicuously manifests his peculiar qualification for his task. Himself a native of Alabama, he pictures the conditions in that typical state with that insight which is the despair of one not to the manner born. On the political side of his story, his generalizations are accurate and forceful. He shows how it was the policy of the Lower South that triumphed on the great issues of the tariff, internal improvements, national finance and territorial expansion, until the question of slavery proved its ruin. Virginia dominated the earliest period of our life under the constitution, it was her offspring to the southward that were supreme in the middle period. The causes and effects of this fact, and of the contrast of ideals between the Lower South and New England which

culminated in the Civil War, have never been better presented in like compass than by Mr. Brown. Both his facts and his philosophy are truthful. Let this passage suffice for demonstration :

thirty-five years of freedom have proved, what Lincoln seems to have understood, that the real cause of all the trouble was not slavery, but the presence of Africans in the South in large numbers. The leaders of Southern thought in the forties and fifties were trying to do just what the leading men of the South are trying to do now, viz.: to discover some way or ways by which a society made up of whites and blacks in almost equal proportions can keep pace with a society made up of whites only. Their plan was to keep the blacks at the bottom, the whites on top. It did not succeed very well, but it succeeded better than the plan adopted in Reconstruction times of putting the blacks on top and the whites at the bottom [page 94].

And again :

Slavery had to do with the seizure of Texas and the attempts upon Cuba. But we may not attribute to that alone this single act in the long drama which began before the first slave landed in Virginia and ended in 1898. The true cause of it was that old land hunger which half the world has not satisfied [page 77].

While there is a good deal of hazard in the assertion that the drama of expansion "ended in 1898," there is no ground whatever to question Mr. Brown's explanation of the phenomena to which he refers; and it is refreshing to find in his work evidence that what may be called the Von Holst era of American historiography is passing.

Besides the essays on Southern conditions before the war, there are two dealing with post-bellum problems, "The Ku-Klux Movement" and "Shifting the White Man's Burden." The former is a well-informed and interesting summary of the earliest attempt to suppress the negro vote, and the latter discusses with much insight and acumen the disfranchising legislation of recent years. The fruitfulness of this study is suggested at once by its formulation of the real essence of "the Southern question": "The main thing is not what to do for the negro, but what to do for the white man living among negroes" (p. 250). The spirit revealed by this statement should be sufficient to attract the attention of all thoughtful Americans to Mr. Brown's book. And those who take up the volume will find not only a sane and sympathetic discussion of a most complex historical and political problem, but also a form and facility of expression that place the essays well up among the higher grades of "mere literature." WM. A. DUNNING.

American Municipal Progress. Chapters in Municipal Sociology. By CHARLES ZUEBLIN, Professor of Sociology in the University of Chicago. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1902. — 380 pp.

It has been the opinion of some writers on American municipal government that the American people have been so taken up with the reorganization of their municipal institutions as to have little time and less inclination to devote themselves to the problems of a functional character which the development of urban conditions has brought into prominence. Professor Zueblin seems to have written this book with the intention of showing how baseless this opinion is, and there can be no doubt that he has succeeded in what he has set himself to do. This book is almost encyclopedic in its wealth of illustration as to what American municipalities have done during the past few years towards the solution of problems connected with transportation, public works, sanitation, public schools, public libraries and buildings, parks and boulevards and public recreation.

Naturally Professor Zueblin's book is taken up almost exclusively with what American cities have done rather than with the question of how they have done it. Questions of administration arouse little or no interest in the mind of our author. He is satisfied with telling us that Chicago has elevated railway tracks, and that Boston has built a subway, caring little whether the elevation of the tracks has been the result of the activity of the city of Chicago as a local corporation or whether the Boston subway has been the result of state interference. Indeed one cannot but feel that the usefulness of the book before us has been in some measure diminished by the contempt which its author feels for mere methods. For while it is highly desirable for us to know what has been done, it is also useful for us to obtain a knowledge of the best methods of accomplishing desirable results.

The only instance in which our author departs from his usual policy is with regard to the question of the public ownership and direct operation by the municipalities of water works, gas works and kindred enterprises. This last chapter, entitled "Public Control, Ownership and Operation," is an earnest plea for direct municipal operation in this direction.

Notwithstanding its excellence, Professor Zueblin's book, probably rather because of the limitations of space than because of lack of knowledge on the part of its author, is not by any means exhaustive in its treatment of the various subjects under consideration. Thus

the treatment of the water question does not give us as full an idea as we might wish to have of the various methods which have been devised for the prevention of water waste. It is also difficult to approve of the author's defense of his omission to consider questions of police and charities. Further, the classification adopted by the author can in some cases hardly be justified. His placing the fire department among "Public Works," which is done for no ostensible reason, is as unjustifiable as his failure to devote any attention whatever to the police.

But apart from these minor defects Professor Zueblin has given us an excellent book, which ought greatly to encourage those who are struggling to obtain the ideal city. For he proves conclusively the truth of what may be said to be the most significant passage in the book, viz., that "if we consider the experience of the chief cities of to-day, we can choose from their successful municipal undertakings examples which would enable us to construct a composite city; and while unsatisfactory as an ultimate goal, it might furnish a convenient working ideal for the contemporary city. If we were even to ignore the richer municipal experience of European cities, we could still construct a high ideal by observing the chief accomplishments of American cities." Professor Zueblin has done much in his book which will enable us to construct this "high ideal."

F. J. GOODNOW.

Government or Human Evolution: Individualism and Collectivism. By EDMOND KELLY. New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1901. -xv, 608 pp.

The first volume of Mr. Kelly's important study of the part played by conscious human effort in the evolution of man was reviewed in these pages in December, 1900. The work was greeted as the most suggestive that had been added to the literature of political science in many years. Exception was taken, however, to the author's conception of nature as a realm standing below and apart from the realm of the artificial and the spiritual. In the present volume Mr. Kelly refers to the criticism, and explains that he does not wish to be understood as admitting any discontinuity between nature and art, both of which are included in the cosmic order, but only to avoid a possible ambiguity in the word "natural," which we so often use in antithesis to "artificial." My criticism was intended to go a little deeper than this question of words, and to affirm that, in the realm

of animal nature, a sacrifice of the individual to the type, which Mr. Kelly, like Tennyson, holds to be characteristic, is not without significant exceptions, and that in this occasional reconciliation of individual welfare with racial survival, which becomes more frequent as we ascend the scale to man, and from savage to civilized man, we discover in the nature which precedes reason and art a substantial basis on which human art now builds. I do not imagine, however, that I disagree with Mr. Kelly in fundamental conceptions.

race.

Be this as it may, I am in full accord with him on the practical question of the means whereby man, now arrived at self-consciousness, can by effort secure individual welfare, without injury to the That means is Justice, and Mr. Kelly is absolutely right in his conception of justice, which he has explained and illuminated more successfully than any other recent author. The essence of justice, as writers in all ages have agreed, is found in some kind or degree of equality. But what equality? How much equality? English-speaking peoples, following Roman notions to a large extent, have always conceived of justice as including equality before the law. In America, and more recently in parts of Europe, the notion of justice has been broadened to include political equality. Mr. Kelly, like the social democrats, goes further, but unlike them, he goes deep down into the laws of life for his fundamental principles. In its rudest form natural selection involves a merciless extinction of the unfit. In its larger and more complicated processes, evolution, including human effort, shapes an environment in which many are fit. Mr. Kelly identifies justice with an artificial equality which, in a large measure, offsets the ruder inequalities of unartificial nature. His definition of justice is, an "effort to eliminate from our social conditions the effects of the inequalities of nature upon the happiness and advancement of man."

It is obvious that justice so conceived is a limitation of liberty by external or objective equality, equality of condition or opportunity. Yet justice calls for an ever widening liberty. Justice limits liberty only in taking from those who have liberty to abuse, and who abuse it, and giving to those who have little and can profit by more. enlarges liberty in the aggregate.

It

In

These fundamental notions Mr. Kelly worked out as principles in his former volume, Government or Human Evolution: Justice. this second volume we find him grappling with the great concrete problem of the age: How is justice to be attained?