One of the most hopeful features connected with the gathering was the essentially conservative position taken by the representatives of organized labor. The deep undercurrent of the convention cannot be better expressed than in the closing words of the address of Henry White, Secretary of the United Garment Workers of America, who said, "The mere fact alone of such a gathering as this shows that the age of reason is dawning, and when men reason everything is possible." Yale University.

MAURICE H. ROBINSON.

Select Charters and other Documents illustrative of American History, 1606-1775, edited with notes by William MacDonald, Professor of History and Political Science in Bowdoin College. York: The Macmillan Co., 1899-12mo, ix, 401 pp.

New

In this volume are brought together eighty documents on American history prior to the Revolution: each one of these is introduced by a brief explanatory note, and a short but select bibliography. The selections, while by no means limited to charters, for the "other documents" occupy at least half the space, have been made with reference to the legal and constitutional rather than the political, religious, social, or economic sides of our colonial history. Within the limits of its field the selections are comprehensive, and include the most important documents in the stock material of this period. The book is well adapted to class-room use, for which it is primarily designed. It is a companion volume to the author's Select Documents, 1776-1861.

Although no topical arrangement of the documents is made, their order being strictly chronological, they fall naturally though not sharply into two groups. The first group begins with the first charter of Virginia, which is followed by the subsequent charters for this, and charters, grants and patents for the other colonies, and by such documents as the Mayflower Compact, the Ordinance for Virginia, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, etc. A fairly complete collection is thus brought together for a comparative study and a constructive account of the beginnings of colonial organization and government.

The second group is of necessity less satisfactory, for the field which it covers is a larger one, and individual judgment must have fuller play in the selection of material. This group, beginning with the Navigation Acts, as expressions of England's commercial policy, and to which at least the creation of the Board of Trade

might well have been added, includes those measures taken on both sides of the Atlantic which led, on paper, to the Revolutionary War— the Molasses Act, Writ of Assistance, the Sugar, Stamp, Quartering, Declaratory, and Revenue Acts, the act establishing Customs Commissioners, etc., on the one side, and the retaliatory measures, resolutions, and declarations on the other. In view of our traditional interpretation of these measures, fuller editing would have been welcome. History may be as completely (and much more convincingly) misrepresented by an ill-balanced selection of documents as by a partisan narrative. Sins of commission cannot be charged against the present volume, but it may be questioned if it reveals any real interchange of services between the colonies and the mother country, that the colonists ever acquiesced even in theory in the policy represented by England's commercial legislation, or that they to any degree benefited by it. The relationship of dependencies to the mother country could be more clearly indicated in connection with Nos. 45, 47, 51, 54; (extracts from the treaties of Ryswick, Utrecht, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Paris) and especially under the last would be the appropriate place to point out the benefit to the colonies of the expulsion of the French from Canada, and the results this made possible in their future policy toward England. Economic documents are needed to really interpret this period, and in a collection like this their place must be supplied by the editor's notes. In fairness it must be said, however, that the bibliographies, if followed, will lead to much supplementary material.

Attempts at colonial federation previous to the Stamp Act Congress are represented only by the New England Confederation and the Albany Plan of Union. There is no material to illustrate the inception or operation of the committee systems, which not only served an important part in working up and conducting the Revolution, but proved the capacity of the people for developing a new type of self-government, and gave them experience in it. In brief it may be said that the excellent reasons for publishing such a collection of documents would have amply justified Professor MacDonald in including a few more selections in it.

Yale University.

EDWARD D. COLLINS.

RECENT LITERATURE.

Professor Alfred H. Lloyd's "Philosophy of History" (Ann Arbor, 1899), embodies a course of lectures now printed for the use of students. The author follows what he terms the "intensive method." "Determine what time is, what an event in time is, what causation and individuality and progress are, and what society is, and universal history is bound to stand before you." The book abounds in philosophical exercises; what little history there is in it is bad. Any person who respects the laborious investigations by which the facts of history have been ascertained must be shocked at the light way in which these facts are shuffled here to fit a system, and must wonder what the use of such a system can be.

In his La Grèce Antique, Entretiens sur les Origines et les Croyances (Paris, Schleicher Frères), Professor André Lefèvre tries to fix the origins and characters of the various Greek gods, and their relations with the divinities of the ancient empires of the East. He follows Müller to some extent in his atmospheric and solar explanations of myths and finds a number of intricate philological relationships between the gods of India, Assyria, Egypt and Greece.

One must regret that the attention given to the sociological phenomena has been so scanty, for the few passages in which the author treats of customs, morals, etc., rather than of divine names and relationships makes us wish that he had followed this style of treatment to a greater extent. He believes, for instance, that the early Greeks no longer realized the significance of their funeral and sacrificial customs, that these had fallen into the unquestioned, stereotyped stage, or were being rationalized. The dog-monsters, etc., of the Homeric cult and cosmology take one back, he thinks, to the earliest days of domestication of animals.

The author takes a somewhat melancholy view of the culture and morals of the early times, but greatly admires the Hellenic life-philosophy of resignation and common sense.

The book is almost devoid of references, and is conversational and popular rather than strictly scientific, and abounds in spirited. interpretations of striking scenes and passages, especially from the Iliad and Odyssey and from the Homeric Hymns.

Mr. E. J. Smith's, "The New Trades Combination Movement: its Principles, Methods, and Progress" (Rivingtons, London, 1890), consists of a series of articles originally published in

the Economic Review, together with an introduction by the Rev. J. Carter and a chapter on cost-taking by Mr. W. A. Addinsell, a chartered accountant of Birmingham. The New Trades Combination was originated by Mr. Smith as a cure for the ills of cut-throat competition. It was originally confined to the metal bedstead trade, in which Mr. Smith is interested, but has gradually spread and now includes several other important trades, such as the electrical fittings trade, the fender trade, etc. Mr. Smith states clearly the general principles of this form of combination and shows what in his opinion is its relation to the workingman and the consumer. The combination consists of a close union of the employers and the workingmen in a single trade for both defensive and offensive purposes. It provides for an elaborate system of administrative control supplemented by an appeal to arbitration in case of disagreement between the representatives of capital and labor. Mr. Smith's plan is primarily a rebellion against underselling and therefore provides for a systematic method of cost-taking, supplemented by an agreement that, save in exceptional cases, no goods shall be sold except at a fair profit. To quote Mr. Smith: "You have no right to cheat your customer or to ruin your competitor by selling goods at less than it costs to produce them." So far as the New Trades Combination movement induces manufacturers to give scientific attention to the cost of producing goods, its influence must be healthy. The real danger lies in the opportunity which a close combination of employers and workingmen in a trade opens to monopoly methods without any of the compensating benefits of concentrated management.

Professor Alberto Morelli of Padua has written an instructive chapter in the history of the Academic teaching of Political Science under the title of La Prima Cattedra di Diritto Costituzionale, a reprint from the Archivio guiridico "Filippo Serafini," Modena, in which he aims to show that the first university chair of constitutional law was that established in Ferrara in 1797. Of the first professor, Compagnoni and of the course of instruction, he gives a careful account. In view of the extensive range of lectures on the Germanic constitution, general jurisprudence, etc., given at Goettingen by Pütter and others in the eighteenth century, of the establishment of the Vinerian professorship at Oxford which Blackstone occupied, and of Adam Smith's Lectures on Justice, Police, etc., one cannot but feel that Morelli should have inserted in his title in Italia. The significant thing is the teaching of the sub

ject not the exact title of the chair. To provide for rational and historical teaching of Political Science was one of the main objects in the foundation of Goettingen University.

As the century draws to a close the impulse to pass its achievements in review and to measure its significance in the history of the modern world will be widely felt. To facilitate such a retrospect as well as to supply a serviceable manual is the purpose of Mr. Edmund H. Sears of Mary Institute, Washington University, St. Louis, in his "Outline of Political Growth in the Nineteenth Century" (New York: The Macmillan Co.). Some attention has been given to every country where there has been progress. Yet, at this juncture, one must question his judgment which included. Liberia and left out China. Mr. Sears' narrative is fluent and dignified and his reflections appropriate if somewhat conventional. A most meritorious feature of the book is the classified bibliography, which is excellent in method and well selected in content. It indicates a rather unusual command of the field.

Dr. Max Klemme examines systematically the economic views of Hume (Die Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen David Hume's. Jena: Gustav Fisher), and arrives at the conclusion that he should be accorded a position far superior to his predecessors and immediate contemporaries on account of his more nearly attaining a correct analysis of the phenomena of Political Economy and on account of his penetrating criticism of traditional views. To Adam Smith he rendered the double service of laying a solid foundation for his refutation of the Mercantilists and Physiocrats and of paving the way for a great advance in the science, both by his own contribution and by his indication of the lines by which progress could be made.

Two contributions of Karl Marx to the contemporary history of France a half century ago are now made more accessible by a translation into French (La Lutte des Classes en France 1848-1850 and Le LXVIII Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte. Paris: Schleicher Frères, 1900). They are not mere narratives but rather the interpretation from Marx's economic standpoint of the real significance of the Revolution of 1848 and of the Coup d'Etat.

Dr. Samuel E. Dawson has contributed to "The Transactions of the Royal Historical Society of Canada," series of 1899-1900, a valuable study of the "Demarcation Lines of Alexander VI and of the Treaty of Tordesillas" (J. Hope & Sons, Ottawa). The explanation of the relation of the Bulls of May 3 and May 4