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REVIEWS

The Development of the United States from Colonies to a World Power. By MAX FARRAND. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1918. xi, 354 PP.

The day has long passed when anxious elders cautioned the young European about to essay his fortunes in the new world not to go unarmed against the redskins who might attack him on the road from Philadelphia to Baltimore, or when a London clubman could clinch his argument for the Southern cause by placing a triumphant index-finger on the Isthmus of Panama in the atlas and asking with withering emphasis whether it was either wise or just to attempt to hold together lands which God had so manifestly designed to separate. The closer acquaintance between Europe and ourselves, begun a score of years ago, has been hurried into an intimacy by the events of the Great War. And as our fortunes have thus rapidly grown together, there has been an increasing desire both on Europe's part to obtain and on our part to furnish still more accurate knowledge of our political and social institutions and of the spirit of our democracy which has produced and preserved them.

A conspicuous result of this new curiosity on the part of the old world about the new is Professor Farrand's book on the development of our country from the earliest colonial days down to the Great War. The work is well done. The very achievement of condensing into a single volume of far fewer than a hundred thousand words the history of three centuries, without slighting any of the factors that were really vital in the evolution of our democracy and without giving the reader the impression of sketchiness or provisionalism in the text, is itself a task which only those who have undertaken it can appreciate. Professor Farrand is to be congratulated on the skill shown in the selection, the arrangement and the vivid presentation of his material.

The book is dedicated "To the Allies, in the Hope of a Better Understanding." But as it is written in English, and as England is the only one of the Allies with whom we have had chronic misunderstandings, it is virtually a contribution to the still closer entente between us and our kin across the sea. The treatment, therefore, of the relations between England and America attracts our special attention.

In the second chapter, entitled "Independence", the causes and outcome of the Revolution are treated in nineteen pages. It is a relief in reading these pages, whatever criticisms we have to make in detail, to find that Professor Farrand does not, like some of his fellow American historians, treat the war for independence as a piece of folly stirred up against a just king and parliament by a few scatter-brained zealots in the colonies. He brings out clearly the causes of misunderstanding on both sides of the ocean but rightly attributes the greater responsibility to the home Government" (page 39) and declares. that if the colonists had reached a stage in their development where they seemed to require a greater freedom of trade [and he might have added, of judicial and fiscal autonomy] than the British were willing to grant, they were justified in asserting their independence" (page 38). The author, we think, should have put more emphasis in this chapter on the habit of self-government which the colonists had formed through the generations of " salutary neglect" and less on the arguments they advanced. For he rightly intimates that the arguments were more in the nature of apologetics than of premises.

There are statements in this chapter which are misleading and a few that are even false. The stamp tax was not laid in 1765 "in spite of the protests and petitions of the colonists" (page 35)—that is, of any appreciable protest and petition. These came after the act, to the great surprise of the British Parliament and public. In mentioning the dispatch of the tea ships to the colonies, Professor Farrand says: "The colonists took this as an effort to bribe them into paying the tax " (page 41), as if there were any other motive entertained by the king. The author continues: "In practically all the colonies the cargoes of tea were kept from sale, by force of public opinion if possible, by threats if necessary, and sometimes by violence" (page 41). The layman (for whom the book is intended) would certainly be justified in supposing from this sentence that the tea was landed quite generally in the colonies, and that the attempts to sell it met with a variety of fortune, whereas tea was actually landed in only the one port of Charleston. A little further on the author says that the Continental Congress adopted the resolution of independence and that "this later was elaborated into the formal Declaration of Independence." The resolution was voted July 2, 1776 and the Declaration, which was adopted two days later, had already been "elaborated". Questions of judgment are not, of course, amenable to the same tribunal of criticism as questions of fact ; but when Professor Farrand declares that George Washington" cannot be regarded as a great general" (page 45) he is

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countering the judgment of many distinguished military critics as well as of Washington's opponent in the famous Jersey campaign; and when he says that the Declaration of Independence was felicitous in that its practical charges [against the king] appealed to the New Englanders and its theories appealed to the Virginia planters ", he seems to us to be sacrificing strict regard for fact to a rhetorical antithesis. In discussing the peace settlement of 1783, Professor Farrand says, Spain wanted the region between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi River, so as to control the entire Mississippi Valley" (page 49). It is possible, of course, that Spain did "want" all this region, for her desires at the close of the eighteenth century would be hard to limit; but so far as her actual expectations are concerned, they seem to have been limited to a control of the region south of the Ohio River. Finally, the bibliographical note at the end of the chapter might well contain a reference to some work, like that of Belcher or Sydney G. Fisher, that supports the Tory argument. We have dwelt at some length on this chapter (as a kind of test chapter in a book destined chiefly for English readers), not to be captious or unreasonable, but rather to show how very difficult it is, even with the aid of scholarship and toil, to convey uniformly correct impressions in condensed narrative.

The points in Professor Farrand's exposition on which we should dwell with special commendation, if space permitted, are the emphasis which he places upon the influence of the frontier and the western land policy on our development as a democracy, the clear account of the colonial trade laws, the recognition of the epochal significance of the War of 1812, the comparison (pages 83 et seq.) of the situation of our maritime commerce in 1793 and 1914, the excellent summary (chapters xiv, xv) of the relation of our business interests to politics in the period from the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Strangely enough, those pages which we should expect, from the author's special qualification and training, to be best done, namely, those on the federal Constitution, are among the most disappointing in the book. He says (page 71) that "the most difficult problem which the convention had to solve was connected with the executive ". The most " perplexing", we should say, but not so "difficult " as the matter of the great compromise. He says, on the next page, that the members of the electoral college were to be "chosen by the legislature of each state"; but the Constitution reads (article ii, section 1, paragraph 2): "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of elect

ors.

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If the electoral college "came indirectly from the Papal College" (page 72), Professor Farrand might have traced the more immediate descent from the electoral practice in Maryland. The Federal judiciary, according to Professor Farrand, was given jurisdiction "in cases affecting foreigners" (page 73); "aliens" would have been a better word. The language of the Constitution (article iii, section 2, paragraph 1) is "foreign states, citizens or subjects". A foreign" citizen or subject " is not exactly equivalent to a "foreigner". And in a book written for foreign citizens and subjects, language on these points should be especially clear. In describing the process of initiating an amendment to the federal Constitution, Professor Farrand says: by a two-thirds vote of Congress, or by a special convention (page 73). In these days when amendments on two subjects are pending, he might have added the few words, " called on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the States", and he might also have said that all the amendments have actually been initiated by the vote in Congress. Considering the recent interest roused by the question of the economic influences at work in determining the nature of the Constitution, echoes of which must have reached many educated Europeans, Professor Farrand might well have given more than a halfpage (page 75) to the doctrine of the "Beard School". Mention should have been made, too, in the bibliographical note, of Hannis Taylor's book on the Constitution.

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There are times when Professor Farrand sacrifices space by introducing vague and meaningless locutions, like "owing to peculiar conditions in America", or "by a curious combination of circumstances ". There are times, also, when he is so allusive as to require for the understanding of his sentences a knowledge of American history which would render the perusal of his book supererogatory (pages 242, 243, 264). The inevitable slips in dates have crept into the book, as well as some slight errors of fact. To note a few only: War broke out in Europe in 1792, not 1793 (page 81); Thomas Jefferson became Vice President in 1797, not because "the Democratic Republicans were sufficiently strong to obtain the second largest vote" (page 96), but because the Adams Federalists knifed Pinckney; Spain gave Louisiana back to France by the treaty of 1800, not 1802 (page 101); the French and British retaliatory policy from 1806 onward did not mean "the annihilation of [America's] carrying trade" (page 107), as the statistics in Pitkin show, and as the author himself proves on a later page (page 112); Webster did not "attack" Hayne in 1830, but replied to the attack which Hayne had made on the eastern states (page

168); the Ordinance of Nullification declared both the tariff of 1828 and that of 1832 void (page 169); it has been shown by Garrison in his Westward Extension that it is not certain whether Clay lost more votes than he gained by his hedging on the Texas question (page 198); five other states (not six) joined South Carolina "before the end of January, 1861 (page 223); Grant was not elected because "Johnson was so thoroughly discredited" (page 239); the Republican Party originated as a protest against the extension of slavery, not as "a revolt against the complaisance of the established order" (page 283).

Professor Farrand has, as we have said, accomplished with success the difficult task of condensing our history for three centuries into a convenient and interesting volume for the educated lay reader at home and abroad. But there is no shadow of justification in his book for the extravagant claims set forth in the announcement of the publishers on the paper cover. "A new interpretation of American history", "an entirely new conception of our development", which "vitalizes our history as it has seldom been vitalized before ;""an entire revaluation of American history that will be talked of for years to come”— these are some of the fulsome phrases which, however they may make the vendor rejoice, cannot but make the judicious reader and the honest author grieve. There is nothing in Professor Farrand's volume that is not familiar to the student of American history, nothing that is not to be found in our newer historical sets, like The American Nation and The Riverside American History, nothing that is particularly new in interpretation or conception or vitalization or valuation. It is ridiculous to take peacock feathers to deck out a perfectly good turkey. But this meretricious screed on the cover is, of course, no fault of the book or of the author.

DAVID S. MUZZEY.

By

The Diplomatic Background of the War, 1870–1914. CHARLES SEYMOUR. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1916.XV, 311 pp.

Since 1914, many writers have undertaken to describe the more recent historical movements that culminated in the German War. Of the books written for this purpose, Professor Seymour's is, for the general reader, one of the best planned and best balanced. Only fortyeight pages are devoted to the Bismarckian period and only forty-three to the critical five weeks from the Serajevo murder to the outbreak of the war. The bulk of the volume deals with the period from 1890 to

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