ences which should have some standing if candidly appraised. For instance, it is scarcely possible, even though a series of instances cannot be summoned at will before the mind, to minimize the influence of heredity. Certainly one who preserved any shreds. of belief in the inheritance of acquired characters could not accept Ward's position. Again, can the author deny that many of the "opportunities" he catalogues may have been attracted to the neighborhood of the budding genius by reason of his being so? Genius is a mine worth working for some one, even though he may be no philanthropist. Again, it is hard for the anthropologist to share the belief in the equality of the various races, and in the potentiality of genius of the English or French type among Papuans and Fijians; so that if the latter were caught young and loftily "nurtured" there might arise a Beethoven with a simian facial angle or a Goethe with "forehead villainous low." These are hard matters and with many others still await demonstration.

Finally, as to the "panacea of education," as one of Dr. Ward's critics calls it; there is no doubt that we are in any case reaching out in that direction, especially in the western world. We are, in this country and generation, assuring opportunities to all, that should, if Ward is right, result in a crop of geniuses in the near future. Appearances do not point that way, but rather to a dissoluteness of social and ethical virtues, consequent upon too much freedom and too little discipline. Perhaps this is the inevitable bumptious period with which parents get familiar, in tolerance yet ad nauseam, as their children grow, but one doubts it. Our freemen are vain and impudent; our high-class laborers are largely insolent, pretentious and spendthrift, prone to violence and devoid of pride in workmanship; our emancipated women are too often noisy and unfeminine, forgetting that a certain division of function is imposed by natural conditions upon bi-sexual organisms. All this occasions a more than fleeting doubt as to the value of the new, and a query as to whether the old class stratification and other antiquated social forms did not secure more out of life, after all, for both high and low.

Thanks are due Professor Ward for his robust advocacy of the views here touched upon; his insistence in so highly interesting and compelling a manner upon the antithesis of a doctrine long accepted by the majority of writers on sociological subjects is just what candid scientists will welcome as they welcome all vigorous stimulation to thought. But in our opinion he goes much too far,

especially in what he has to say of equality of the races and the sexes. The specific question about genius deserves much more attention along the lines laid down in this book; if great ability is distributed as Ward thinks, and can be brought out by education, certainly its development is more hopeful in this way than through the nearly chimerical scheme of controlling human mating.

A. G. K.

The National Tax Association, of which the president is Mr. Allen Ripley Foote, formerly editor of Public Policy, and now Commissioner of the Ohio State Board of Commerce, and the vice president is Mr. Lawson Purdy of the Department of Taxes and Assessments of the City of New York, has sent out a call for a conference on State and local taxation, to he held in Columbus about November 1st. The tax "system," if so it may be called, of the country has been shown both by academic writers and by persons practically connected with the operation to be very bad indeed, and every impulse which may lead to its improvement deserves a welcome. The platform of the Association is as follows: "(1) The attempt to tax all classes of property in the same way and at the same rate produces gross injustice. An unjust system checks production, reduces wages, and lessens the reward of industry and thrift. (2) Constitutional restraints must be removed so that State and local revenue systems may be divorced and home rule secured for local taxing districts. (3) Property should be so classified that every tax shall bear equally on all persons similarly situated. (4) It is the duty of the State to require all public accounts, State and local, to be kept by a uniform system prescribed and audited by authority of the State. (5) Knowledge of the incidence of taxation and an enlightened public opinion must precede intelligent action. Therefore, we unite our efforts to develop and guide discussion and study of the principles and incidence of a just system of State and local taxation, with the purpose of securing their practical application in any and all States, counties and municipalities, whenever and wherever opportunity may offer." The first four paragraphs of the platform express ideals of which some will never be realized in perfection, and of which others will wait long for fulfilment; but we can all give cordial assent to the fifth paragraph, and we may hope that the deliberations of the Association will spread the knowledge of present evils, and stimulate the movement toward reform.

C. D.

History of the United

BOOK REVIEWS.

RECONSTRUCTION.

States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at The South in 1877. Volumes VI and VII. By James Ford Rhodes. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1906-pp. xx, 440; xiii, 431.

Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. By Walter L Fleming, Ph.D., Professor of History in West Virginia University. The Columbia University Press. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1905—pp. xxiii, 815.

Documentary History of Reconstruction, Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial. 1865 to the Present Time. Volumes I and II. By Walter L. Fleming, Ph.D. Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906, 1907— Pp. xviii, 493; xiv, 480.

Twice during our history as an independent nation have our public men been called upon for the exercise of constructive statesmanship of a high order. The first was during the ten years immediately following the close of the Revolution; the second was during a like period following the close of the Civil War. In the first period American statesmen were confronted by the various economic and social evils resulting from the long war of independence and the disorders which had preceded it. These evils were not perhaps very great in themselves. They were not to be compared with those which afflicted France before her Revolution or England during the generation following the close of the Napoleonic wars. However, the situation was more than ordinarily serious. Our statesmen had to make and administer the laws called for by these economic and social difficulties, but before they could make these laws and carry them out they had to create the governmental machinery with which they were to do their work. This was their great problem. They had to do the ordinary work of practical statesmen, and in addition they must do the work of political philosophers in the formation of a new constitution. On both its theoretical and practical sides their work will always stand. among the most brilliant and successful examples of statesmanship in the history of the world.

In the second case the situation was no less difficult than in the first though the nature of the difficulties was very

different. The statesmen of that period were not called upon to create any new political institutions nor indeed to essentially modify the old ones. They had only to restore as nearly as possible to its original form the government which a part of the people had tried to overthrow. On its political side their work was one of restoration only and not of construction. Nevertheless, it was not without its special difficulties, the chief of which was to cause two bitterly hostile communities, who had waged the most bloody and expensive wars of modern times, to forget their enmity and dwell together in peace and harmony. They must see to it that the conquered South should not become an Ireland or a Poland in our political system. It was not, however, on its political side that the work of reconstruction presented its greatest difficulties; more important by far was the social problem involved in the emancipation of the slaves. It was necessary to provide for the immediate evils of the sudden transition of a large part of the community from the condition of slavery to that of free labor, so as not to ruin that community or hopelessly degrade the emancipated race itself. They were called upon also to look far into the future and to lay the foundation for that slow development of the negro race and the adjustment of its relation to the white race which every thoughtful student of southern society had foreseen would be the most difficult problem of emancipation. Here the work of the statesmen of reconstruction touched what Mr. Brice calls, "one of the great secular problems of the world presented under a form of peculiar difficulty." It is the one great social evil that American statesmen have had to deal with, and far transcends all others in its difficulties and far-reaching importance. It is safe to say that American statesmen will never receive such commendation for their work of reconstruction on either its political or social side as has been accorded them for the work of political construction after the revolutionary war. Indeed the very qualities which have rendered their work in the earlier. period so distinguished-that wise, far-sighted conservatism which made them turn to history rather than to speculation and theory for their political institutions, and kept them from trying any radical experiments along this line-are quite as conspicuous by their absence in the later period as by their presence in the earlier one. No reformer of the French Revolution was more dominated by the idea of natural rights or the perfectibility of human nature than the reconstruction radicals of the type of Sumner, and few

people ever tried a more extraordinary experiment in political theory, than the granting of suffrage to a large population of ignorant negroes just freed from slavery.

Historians have only recently begun to study this important period. But already we possess in the works of Burgess, Dunning, Rhodes, Garner and Fleming, a fairly satisfactory account of its political history, and one remarkably free from that strong sectional prejudice which might be expected to color for a long time whatever was written upon it. Much the most important contribution yet made to the subject is that of Mr. Rhodes. The final volumes of his great history of the United States from the compromise of 1850, cover this period. Like the former volumes they are in form and title a history of the country-that is, an account of the activity of the American people during this period. In fact they are devoted almost entirely to the politics of the period. The author makes little attempt to give an account of the various changes which took place in American society, and to explain their cause and consequences. He confines himself for the most part to an account of the action of the Government, and an explanation of whatever influenced that action. This was true. of the first volumes especially, which dealt with the decade from 1850 to 1860, when American politics were absorbed in, and dominated by, the slavery controversy. To a less extent it was true also of the next three volumes, which dealt with the civil war. It remains true of these concluding volumes of the series, which are devoted to the period of reconstruction. Other subjects such as finance and currency, commercial crises, political corruption, the tariff, and the broader economic and social changes affecting American society are not ignored, as they were not in the previous volumes; but they are not adequately treated, and the author shows in his treatment of them none of that breadth of view and well-balanced judgment which appears in his account of the political controversies that have to do with slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction. The same consideration which induced him to abandon or postpone writing the history of the country after 1877, viz., "a lack of basic knowledge for attacking the social questions involved" (see preface), have prevented him from giving a satisfactory account of a large part of the activity of the American people during the period he has covered. These remarks are not offered in criticism of his work but only to point out its perfectly proper limitations and to justify the classification of these last two volumes with books on reconstruction.