frequent use, it is an unpardonable nuisance. Misprints, as in No. 318, are very rare, where proof reading must have been no easy task, and the index is a model. Especially grateful is the almost entire absence of such time-devouring cross references as "Benedict of Peterborough, see Peterborough, Benedict of," the exact reference being given under every entry under which the book would be likely to be sought.

Yale University.

GEORGE B. ADAMS.

Surveys, Historic and Economic. By W. J. Ashley, M.A., Professor of Economic History in Harvard University, sometime Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. London, Longsmans, Green & Co., 1900-8vo, xxvii, 476 pp.

In this volume Professor Ashley has collected a considerable part of the articles that he has written during the past eleven years for publication in periodicals or presentation as public lectures. Some idea of the contents can be given by citing the heads under which the articles are classified: Preliminary (On the Study of Economic History); Mediaeval Agrarian; Mediaeval Urban; Economic Opinion; England and America, 1660-1760; Industrial Organization; Biographical; Academic. The book is clearly an "omnium gatherum," but it is mainly occupied with economic history; of the forty-five articles that comprise the volume nearly two-thirds in number, about one-half in bulk, are reviews of recent books on that subject. Some of these reviews are but two or three pages long, others are substantial enough to have appeared as body articles in learned journals, and one (The Beginning of Town Life in the Middle Ages) reaches a length of more than forty pages, and covers a wide range of the appropriate literature. The reviews in most cases appear in this permanent form just as they were first printed. Some passages of detailed criticism are omitted, some few notes are added, and one case I noted in which the rating of a work was scaled down from "epoch-making" to "remarkable," but the changes on the whole are unimportant. It is a testimony to the author's conscientiousness and ability, to the "honest and thoughtful labour," which he praises in another reviewer (W. F. Allen), that the reviews can stand this test. They are not the least interesting part of the book, and to many they will probably be its most valuable feature. They represent Professor Ashley's opinions of course, and follow the lines of his interests. They are occupied largely with the dis

cussion of disputed questions, and leave in the background many meritorious contributions of the books reviewed. They will not give the student of economic history a summary of all the work that has been done in this field during the last decade, but they will give him a just appreciation of the advances that have been made along certain lines, and a criticism that is always clear and strong if it is not always decisive.

The rest of the contents is so varied that it defies a summary. No reader can assume that the book has not in it something to interest him until he has explored the full analytical table that indicates the contents. The comparison of the systems of instruction and scholarships at Oxford and at Harvard contain some proposals for reform in American methods that come home to a wider constituency than that to which they were addressed; the analysis of "The American Spirit" in economic and political life, a lecture delivered in England in 1899 and not before printed, is equally interesting, though Professor Ashley contents himself here with describing conditions and does not tell us how to remedy them.

The most important contributions of the volume to the material of economic history are the essay on "The Tory Origin of Free Trade Policy" and the two essays on the "Commercial Relations of England and America." The first-named is a study of the dependence of English commercial doctrine and policy on party politics in the hundred years preceding the publication of The Wealth of Nations. In one of the essays on England and America, which has already been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the author analyses the effect of the restrictions imposed by England on colonial trade and manufactures. He goes behind the rhetorical complaints against British tyranny, which became common not long before the Revolution, and proves that during the greater part of the colonial period the restrictive acts could not be considered a serious burden by the Americans. Professor Ashley now appends to this article an unpublished study, in which he meets successfully the objection of a critic that the smuggling of colonial times is a proof of the oppressive character of the acts of trade. These original studies are sure of a permanent place in American History. But (to touch on two minor points), Professor Ashley is hardly fair to earlier investigators when he gives to Mr. A. McF. Davis the credit of being the first to show the importance, as a cause of the Revolution, of the attitude of the home government to colonial currency schemes (cf. Sumner, History of American Currency,

1878, p. 30). And I doubt whether he can confirm by facts his statement that there was little or no economic progress in the country between the Revolution and the Embargo. In some of the northern States, at least, there was a remarkable development of the industrial organization before the turn of the century.

All of the five and forty articles in the book have one distinction in common, the distinction of Professor Ashley's admirable style. There are few sentences which need to be read twice; there are many which the reader will like to linger over, because the meaning is so aptly expressed. Professor Ashley does not betray all the secrets of his skill in writing, but he does more than once indicate an essential element of it. The lesson is the old one, to keep the eye on the object. "We can only arrive at results satisfactory to the social historian by determining to visualize the process we imagine at work; and this we cannot do as long as the centre of the picture remains in mist" (p. 203). The criticism here was directed against a special offender, but he applies it pretty generally. The reason why the legal historians have not given us more valuable results is that "they were satisfied if they could put together a logically consistent series of formulae; they felt no craving to visualize, to make a mental picture of, the institutions they described" (p. 133). He wants to have things set forth so clearly that he can understand them by seeing them at work. "I must confess," he writes in an addendum to his review of The Tribal System in Wales, "that I am left with a growing inability to picture to myself the formation of 'weles'" as Mr. Seebohm describes the process, and he thinks that there must be something wrong with Mr. Seebohm's theory. He asks (p. 389) that the economist should make the same use of the scientific imagination that he demands of the economic historian. And he does for others what he would have others do for him. He has a keen sense for words, especially when they occupy an important position in a theory that he is criticizing, and uses them carefully in his own construction. These qualities of Professor Ashley's style are too rare to be passed over without thankful recognition; the excellence of his work cannot be explained without taking them into account.

The volume is fitly dedicated to Gustav Schmoller, the master of the subject of which the author writes so proudly, "we who concern ourselves with economic history have with us the current of the world's thought."

Yale University.

CLIVE DAY.

Russia and the Russians. By Edmund Noble. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.-12mo, vii + 285 pp.

The special and peculiar character of Russian history comes chiefly from the separation of Russia from European development and interests, while her territory forms an integral part of the continental Her political estrangement from Europe may be said to have ended in the eighteenth century, and since the Napoleonic period she has been a factor of formidable importance in the affairs of the civilized world, but it is still obvious that in the economic and intellectual life of Christendom she exercises a scarcely perceptible influence. Perhaps the best thing that can be said of Mr. Noble's readable monograph "Russia and the Russians," is that he undertakes the discussion of a phenomenon which is often and generally ignored by historians, and it is high praise to add that he has made his little volume a supplement of value to the comprehensive work of Leroy-Beaulieu. It need not be asserted that his explanation of the agencies which have isolated Russia is exhaustive, yet so far as it is carried, his reasoning is sound and based on observation, not on theories. In considering the present situation of the Russian people he accounts for the survival of pure autocracy there on the principle that it still remains the kind of government desired by the great majority, and that the demand for free institutions on the part of an infinitesimal minority of the educated class "is overborne by the practical consent given to an autocratic régime by the masses of the people who, besides being ignorant and superstitious, are also politically unambitious." After all, people are apt to make the kind of government they want, in China as in New York.

We need not, however, take a gloomy view of the situation. There is tremendous potentiality in this inert mass of humanity, though it is tardy in quickening. Nothing in the character of the peasants forbids us to believe that they would endeavor to better their condition if they knew how. The economic necessity for this sort of ambition will arise, not from the propaganda of nihilists, but from the gradual development of Russian cities and of the industrial life within them, the creation of labor-and-capital controversies and collisions between factory operatives and their employers. Russia has to-day less than thirty towns of over 30,000 inhabitants, while with half her total population ten years ago we had fifty; it is the survival of mediæval rural conditions rather than of mediæval political institutions that retards the social development of Russia. There is an extremely interesting and suggestive chapter on the

religious situation in the empire, which seems to exhibit more clearly than any other sociological feature the retarded mental development of the nation. A gross and ignorant people have determined the character of the Russian church, which retains the spirit of ancient paganism while conforming outwardly to the forms of Christianity. This is deliberately fostered by the ruling class, which insists upon conformity, treating religious disloyalty as equally wicked and injurious as political disloyalty in order to preserve a strictly uniform and homogeneous mass in the body politic. One would like to have fuller statistics than the author has provided as to the actual number or proportion of mystics and rationalists in the empire. It is said that there are some 15,000,000 dissenters of various shades, all living under more or less restriction, but we should know more about their distribution and activity to determine their probable effect as an element in a social upheaval.

A word of commendation ought to be added for the terse and vigorous style in which Mr. Noble has written a book of unusual interest as well as for the care with which he accents all Russian proper names employed.

Yale University.

F. W. WILLIAMS.

The American Negro; What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become. By William Hannibal Thomas. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1901-pp. xxvi, 440.

This book, written by a member of the race which it discussesa soldier, newspaper-writer, teacher, lawyer, and legislator-has brought upon its author the maledictions of the negro people themselves, and of their white friends. And justly so, in large measure; for it is one-sided, uncritical, bombastic, and tedious with repetition, in its onslaught upon that race. After being assured for the hundredth time in varying phrase that the negro is "an idle, mentalincapable, with a self-satisfied knowledge that substitutes shadows for substance, darkness for light, sound for sense, chattering for wisdom"; and that his "overshadowing curse is mental imbecility, moral induration, and spiritual torpor," one experiences a revulsion of feeling in behalf of the accused, or else one asks whether this book be not itself the crowning demonstration of the negro's illogical and vengeful nature. But this would be unjust also, for the work contains, beneath its exaggerations, a body of substantial and threatening truth, which the people of the country, north and south,