CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Leading Pacts of American History. By D. H. Montgomery. (Ginn and Co., Boston, U.S.A.)—This is one of the most important volumes of an excellent series, and, although it is not at all ambitious in its scope, is a work which writers—especially English writers on American history—would do well to have on their shelves. It is crisply written, abundantly illustrated with maps and portraits, and arranged in paragraphs, one of which sum- marises an important period in this fashion :—" President Grant's administration was inarkod,—(1), By the completion of the first railroad across the Continent ; (2), by the admission to Congress of representatives of all the seceded States; (8), by an important treaty with England ; (4), by terrible fires West and East, de- stroying many millions of property ; (5), by a severe panic ; and (5), by the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia." Mr. Mont- gomery takes, of course, the American side in the War of Independence and the side of the North in the Civil War. But he is anything but a bitter partisan, as an admirably condensed paragraph, What the Was [i.e., the Civil War] Settled," very clearly shows.
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