30 JULY 1904, Page 23

Robert Morris, Patriot and Financier. By Ellis Paxson Ober- holtzer,

Ph.D. (Macmillan and Co. 12s. 6d. net.)--A very readable biography of the financier of the American Revolution Full details are given of Morris's public work, and of what is hardly less interesting, his private career. He rose from nothing to be the merchant prince of Pennsylvania, and his fortune was freely used in his country's service ; but his over-sanguine disposition led him into embarrassment which ended in final and complete ruin. The patriot upon whom all the other patriots of the Revolution had depended, who had kept the " Con- tinental army in the field out of his own purse and from the abundant store of his private credit," had himself fallen, a victim to his belief in the "rapid industrial development of the new republic which he had done so much to create." His life, as his biographer truly says, " is one of the saddest and most romantic personal chapters in the history of North America."