CURRENT LITERATURE.
SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
(Under this heading we nonce such Books of the week as have not been reserved for review in other forms.] Mr. James Ford Rhodes adds a fourth volume to his History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (Macmillan and Co., 12s. 6d.) The volume takes in a period of something more than two years,—from April, 1862, when McClellan, whose record does not improve the more it is told in detail, was besieging Yorktown, down to the re-election of Lincoln in November, 1864. To us the chief interest lies in the relations between the United States and Great Britain. That there was a deplorable partiality for the South shown by many persons in this country, though never by the majority of the population, cannot be denied. Yet, actually, England did the States the great service of preventing European intervention, a service repeated, with remarkable exactitude, in the Spanish War. Our Government substantially did the right thing. As for the feeling of our governing classes, it must be remembered that the States had affronted us times out of number. Mr. Rhodes's narrative is studiously fair.
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