SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Notice in this column does not necessarily producte subssquent review.]
There is always something attractive about those books which are the work not of one man but of many, those wise books which bind together essays by different people on different aspects of one subject. Whatever may be their faults, they do at least possess a pleasant freedom from monotony. In Studies in Southern. History and Politics (Humphry Milford for the Columbia University Press, 10s. 6d. net) this value is increased by the fact that all the writers who have taken part in the work are men who are expert in their subject : the essays are, without exception, able and convincing. The period with which they are concerned—the latter half of the nineteenth century in America—is one which we English people of to-day do not very readily understand: we find difficulty in contemplating with a mind free from prejudice the vexed questions of slavery and secession; we are at once too close to, and too far removed from, the problems which then beset the United States Government: it is a period which, if it is taught to us at all, is taught in terms of individual giants, not of national aspirations. So it was with some surprise that we found the book now under consideration to be not only interesting but absorbing. It treats of the recent political history of the Southern States from varying points of view ; there are chapters on " The Literary Movement for Secession," on " The French Consuls in the Confederate States," on " Negro Suffrage in the South." Sometimes, as in the essay on " Grant's Southern Policy," it is a biography, sometimes a collection of statistics, sometimes a history pure and simple. It is altogether a book of distinction, which is only marred by a most ungrammatical index.
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