the autumn of 1918 I had never heard of this step of Wilson which apparently went pretty far to meet us. I do not know, even today, whether mistakes or a chain of adverse circumstances were responsible. Ludendorff's account (Own Story, vol. I, pp. 379-81), while not explicit, leaves the impression that Hindenburg was present at the discussion of this proposal with the Emperor. The point should be cleared up, but is perhaps immaterial, for Hindenburg adds that "war with America was inevitable at the end of January, 1917 ".

Just a word must be said about the readable style and the excellent translation. But the publisher should have known that the title "Marshal" is not used in the German army.

BERNADOTTE E. SCHMITT

WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

Mexico and Its Reconstruction. By CHESTER LLOYD JONES. New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1921.—xi, 330 pp.

2

As results of the study of Mexican conditions which began in the fall of 1917 under the auspices of Mr. E. L. Doheny, there have now appeared seven books. Two are by Walter Flavius McCaleb,1 three by Wallace Thompson, another by Fred Wilbur Powell, and the seventh is by Dr. Lloyd Jones. Together they present the chief interests which invited the attention of the body of men and women enlisted in the investigation. As yet no works have appeared which devote themselves specifically to the petroleum situation, the mining industry, the educational interests, or the agrarian problem.

Mexico and Its Reconstruction includes a wider range of topics than any of the other volumes mentioned, save perhaps Mr. Thompson's People of Mexico, this latter being a survey of many phases of the social problem in Mexico. It contains much of value, the chief defect being that it presumes an untenable thesis, namely, that the Mexican nation is a reversion to the Indian type, and that in order to survive it must be dominated by a white race, the inference being that foreign investors will provide the dominant element. This

1 Present and Past Banking in Mexico. New York, Harper's, 1920. The Public Finances of Mexico. New York, Harpers, 1921.

2 The People of Mexico; Who They Are and How They Live. New York, Harper's, 1921; Trading with Mexico, New York, Dodd Mead and Company, 1921; The Mexican Mind, a Study of National Psychology, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1922.

3 The Railroads of Mexico. The Stratford Company, 1921.

ethnological and social deduction will not stand in face of the assimilation of the conscient population to the European type. Mexico is fast becoming a mestizo nation, just as surely as the United States is a creole nation, a native white people of European forbears. The half-Indian blood, the glorification of Indian forbears and virtues, the pride in the accomplishments of notable full-blooded Indians, is a Mexican trait of glorifying the happily dead past, and does not gainsay the obvious truth that the Mexican social ideal is as European as our own. Indeed, it is more strongly so in art, literature, architecture, philosophy-in most of the factors with which the Doheny group did not concern itself.

Dr. Lloyd Jones, recognizing that there never has been a Mexican 'people" by which he means that the numerous ethnic entities have never arisen to a sensibility of common spiritual possession of and identity with their geographical area-approaches his study from the angle of the need of developing more fully such a sense of nationality plus appreciation of international obligations and economic interdependence. That is to come about, he thinks, by operation of forces from within-witness the present educational expansion rather than by the superimposition of authority or direction from without, though the influence of American non-governmental agencies must be brought into fuller play than hitherto if success is to be obtained within a measurable period.

There is little in the volume with which to disagree. There are noticeable omissions. Some treatment might have been given to the influence of radical socialistic thought from the United States and Europe on the temper of Mexican laborers and politicians in their enmity to foreign capital. The mistaken policy of American labor elements in intervening in the social struggle in Mexico has been as unfortunate as the fact that much of the profit from foreign investment goes steadily out of the country. It is because of this deprivation of the "unearned increment" that the infiltration of foreign brains, energy and capital is irksome to the Mexican as he becomes economically conscient. And not even the taxes derived from all the exploitation benefit the public at large, it being notorious that heavy percentages of governmental receipts are misapplied or misappropriated. These are the underlying causes of the unrest of more than a decade, and until they are conquered there will be no reconstruction without alternating periods of confusion, injury and menace.

Dr. Lloyd Jones presents in twenty-one chapters some ten or eleven. topics, all concerned chiefly with the period since independence.

References to the colonial period are scant, and deductions drawn from it are marked by unfamiliarity with its literature and by the common characteristic of American and Spanish-American writers, that of belittling the Spanish colonization, always with Anglo-Saxon accomplishment of the present time as the unconscious basis of comparison. In his economic chapters the author would have done better had he consulted the six-volume edition of Bancroft instead of the 1914 one-volume revamp of that work. The select bibliography, covering eight pages of titles of books and periodicals, has a few other notable omissions, among these being several works on petroleum and on the Constitution of 1917 by Mexican authors. Some of the included works are propaganda material scantily reliable, as, for instance, T. Esquivel Obregon's Influencia de España y los Estados Unidos sobre México.

The discussion of the government of Mexico and the sections on foreign status, petroleum demands, and border troubles are admirable in material and reasonable in tone. Probably the best chapter in the book is the last one, on Mexican-American relations. Without being tedious it shows that the two nations have often solved irritating problems by using common sense instead of sticking to "meticulous insistence on respect for technical rights under international law" (p. 288). Wider vision on both sides will increase the speed of approach to an entente cordiale and leave agonized fear of political absorption as far out of the minds of Mexicans as it is from those of the masses of Americans.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

HERBERT INGRAM PRIESTLEY

Histoire générale de la Chine et de ses relations avec les pays étrangers depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu'à la chute de la dynastie mandchoue. By HENRI CORDIER. Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1920. 4 vols. 572, 432, 428, 425 pp.

In these days of increased interest in China the appearance of a substantial history of the country is most timely. We have many studies of contemporary conditions and problems in the great Asiatic republic, in the form of articles and books. One difficulty with most of these, however, is that they lack sufficient historical background. To attempt to understand or to describe the China of today without a knowledge of the nation's past for the last twenty-five hundred years, would be as futile and misleading as would a study of con

temporary Europe with a similar deficiency. There has, however, been a dearth of good detailed histories of China. There are a number of one-volume narratives, such as those by Pott, Macgowan, Li Ung Bing and Hermann. There are larger works, as, for instance, those by Manilla and Boulger, and there are studies of particular periods and phases of the history of the country, such as Chavannes' uncompleted translation of Ssu Ma Ch'ien and Hirth's less pretentious Ancient History of China. Many of these monographs have made important contributions to our knowledge of China and are comparatively recent. For a general history of the country, however, the shorter works are either poorly done or are inadequate because of their brevity, and the longer works are entirely too old. Until the appearance of M. Cordier's volumes we had no recent good general work.

In some ways the volumes before us have met the need. They are by one who for many years has been working and writing in Chinese history. He has become familiar with the literature in European languages through the preparation of his monumental Bibliotheca Sinica and his editorship of Toung Pao. He has gone over with great care the history of the relations of occidental powers with China, and has published his results in many excellent and painstaking books and articles. On the basis of this knowledge and study these volumes come as a kind of climax to a long life of scholarship. They are, on the whole, well proportioned. Two volumes are taken to bring the story to the accession of the Ming dynasty (1368) and another to 1820. In spite of the subtitle, more attention is paid to the phases of Chinese history that are not connected with Europeans than is the case with most of the histories of the country. This, of course, is commendable, especially since a summary is made of the relations with occidental peoples and the subject has been discussed at length in other books, including some excellent ones by the same author. The work is based, moreover, on recent as well as older studies of China. In no other historical account are these so well used.

In spite of all the excellencies of M. Cordier's work, the careful reader is disappointed. In the first place, the author apparently has not gone to the Chinese for his sources. Such as are referred to are available in translation, and it is in this form that they seem to have been used. No one would think of writing a reliable history of Rome who had not used the Latin sources or had read them only in translation. And yet this is what M. Cordier seems to have tried to

do for China. He has rendered a real service in constructing a narrative out of what is available in European languages, but no account which is not based upon a careful study of at least a large part of the best Chinese works can be expected to make any permanent contribution to our knowledge of China. Moreover, the work seems too frequently to be a chronicle, a mere catalogue of facts, and there is little attempt to point out the significance and interrelation of movements and events. The book is chiefly concerned with the political history of the country, and the author fails even to see this in its relation to the economic, intellectual and religious phases of the nation's life. For example, in the chapters on the past twenty-five years there is little or no effort to indicate the connection between happenings in China and in Europe and America, except where, as in the Great War, such a connection is unescapable; and there is still less effort to present the causes and the significance of the changes that China has undergone in the past thirty years. Lack of space cannot be offered as an excuse, for in the same pages other writers have managed both to narrate the main events and to indicate something of their meaning and of their relations to movements in the Occident. In other words, while M. Cordier has given us a work which is of real value, his volumes are useful chiefly because they have no serious competition. He still leaves us in great need of a comprehensive history of China.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.

K. S. LATOURETTE

The Evolution of Long Island. By RALPH HENRY GABRIEL. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1921.-194 pp.

Whether Professor Gabriel's book on Long Island expounds commercial geography with attention to historical development or history with special reference to geography, may be left to the logomachists; he has mentioned neither science in his title, but has buckled them together and blurred the boundary with his general name of evolution. As this title hints, the present state of those societies which have their homes upon this reach of land is explained quite largely in the terms of environmental determinism. Important on the one hand is the sea, a highway and an endless reservoir of food-life; on the other is the city growing from a trading post to be the mighty capital of a continent. Given these factors, life on Long Island, the author almost says, had to develop as it did; "civilization has in no way diminished man's ultimate dependence upon the earth" (p. 12).