larization of chronicle, statute and usage, is obviously the most useful, and, indeed, ultimately, the only useful function of historical writing.

Professor Schlesinger has made a valuable contribution to the interpretation of American history in the volume before us. It consists of twelve essays on a variety of topics ranging from such familiar subjects as "The American Revolution" and "The Significance of the Jacksonian Democracy" to unusual titles like “The Decline of Aristocracy in America" and "The Rôle of Women in American History". The object of the book, as the author modestly says in the preface, is "to bring together and summarize in nontechnical language some of the results of the researches of the present era of historical study, and to show their importance to a proper understanding of American history". All serious students of our history realize the obligation to revise traditional opinions and reconsider accepted valuations which have been placed upon them by the work of specialists in the last twenty years or so-men like Beer and Andrews in the field of our colonial relations with the mother country; men like Beard and McLaughlin in the interpretation of the Constitution; men like Turner, Thwaites and Alvord in the vindication of the influence of the West in our history. The results of their researches have been appearing in increasing measure in our textbooks. But Professor Schlesinger is the first writer to attempt to synthesize the new points of view in a popular restatement of the most significant epochs of our history from colonial days to the present.

In this difficult task Professor Schlesinger has been remarkably successful. Not only does his book fulfil the most exigent requirements of a "popular" work in its sustained hold on the reader, its admirable style, its skilful use of analogy and allusion; but it satisfies the demand of the scholar as well. The author moves with ease and confidence amidst a great mass of fact and hypothesis, provok. ing the dissent or misgiving of the critic only on the rarest occasions. Not the least valuable feature of the book is the addition of discriminating notes at the end of the chapters, which not only furnish the documentation" for the author's views, but also, in welcome contrast to most perfunctory "bibliographies ", really tell the reader what books he should read and make him want to read them.

Two or three of the essays deal with a special crisis at a given moment in American history, like the American Revolution and the period of the formation of the Constitution; but the general plan of

the author is to trace some important topic like immigration, radicalism, the rôle of women, the party spirit, or the doctrine of states rights through the whole course of our history, showing its protean changes under different political, social or economic conditions, and estimating its significance for our history in general. It would be impossible, within the limits of this review, to give any analysis of these clever summaries. Among the best of them are the chapters dealing with the economic forces in American history (II), the decline of aristocracy in America (IV), radicalism and conservatism (V), and the "Fetish" of states rights (X). Often the author has condensed into a single striking sentence the gist of a chapter. What could be happier, for example, than: "By joining in political wedlock the two principles of protection and national internal improvements, he [Clay] hoped to bind the Northeast and the West in a political alliance solidified by the consciousness of mutual economic advantage" (p. 64); or "Like Rostand's Chantecler, his [Jackson's] crowing did not summon the sun of a new dawn, but his voice rang out in clarion tones when the morning light was breaking" (p. 218); or "The group advocating states rights in any period have sought its shelter in much the same spirit that a Western pioneer seeks his storm-cellar when a tornado is raging" (p. 243).

There are, naturally, a few points on which a critic would take issue with Professor Schlesinger. He gives the dates of the "Middle Period" of American history as 1800-1860 (p. 58); he puts the general level of the tariff act of 1828 too high (p. 65); he spells the treaty of 1848 with Mexico "Guadaloupe Hidalgo" (p. 67); he speaks of Jefferson and his friends "introducing a more democratic spirit into the system provided for electing the president, by seeing to it that the presidential electors merely registered the will of the voters" (p. 85); he speaks of "the abolition of child labor " as an accomplished reform! (p. 113); he narrows the industrial revolution in England to "merely a revolution in manufacturing processes" in contrast to the wider revolution in agriculture and transportation in the United States (p. 249); ignoring the Greenback movement, he calls the free silver campaign "the first stentorian demand for a consideration of homely and purely human interests in national politics" (p. 279). There are a few infelicities of expression also, which are perhaps the more noticeable in a book of exceptional excellence of form. By a curious inadvertence the author sums up "unaccustomed tax burdens, the loss of trading profits, and limitations of self-government" as "advantages that

were none the less precious because derived from an unwritten and unsanctioned constitution" (p. 164). He speaks of South Carolina as a different quarter of the Union" from Georgia (p. 228), and he excludes Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware from the "solid South (p. 276). The Hudson-Mohawk river system of western New York" (p. 32) is obviously a slip of the pen.

In the reviewer's opinion, it would be impossible to name a book of greater usefulness and suggestion to the advanced student of American history, or of more solid information in attractive form to the general educated reader who is interested to know the latest results of scholarly research in the field of American history, than these illuminating essays of Professor Schlesinger's. They will bear reading and re-reading before either the charm of their presentation or the profit of their contents is exhausted.

DAVID SAVILLE MUZZEY

Insurance Against Unemployment. By JOSEPH L. COHEN. London, P. S. King and Son, Ltd., 1921.-536 pp.

Mr. Cohen has prepared a useful survey and a just estimate of the various plans of unemployment insurance. A description of the Ghent System as exhibited in its various forms in Belgium, France, Norway, Holland, Denmark and Germany shows the inadequacy of a system based on the voluntary principle. The bulk of the volume is given to the British system, as the first large scheme of compulsory insurance; the author shows that it introduces some factors that tend to increase the amount of unemployment, and others which tend to diminish it. The former consist in weakening the motive of employers to furnish steady work, because of the knowledge that the workman has an insurance fund to fall back upon (p. 297). The latter consist in the weeding-out of unemployables, the motivation of all parties to the wage contract to reduce unemployment, the regularization of wages, the experimentation that has been induced. on the part of employers towards regularization, and the considerable reduction in numbers of inmates of poor-houses. Very detailed accounts and valuable comments are furnished on the actual working of the system in all its ramifications. Some of the experiments of leading employers are recited. The Italian and Austrian imitations, in 1920, of the British plan are briefly described. It is concluded that in Great Britain the scheme has been the greatest bulwark against revolution, and its withdrawal could not be attempted without precipitating a crisis (p. 246).

Several pages are given to the unemployment problem in the United States, and the book closes with a detailed account of the Massachusetts Bill introduced in 1916, in the drafting of which Mr. Cohen participated. The text of the Massachusetts bill is given in full, as well as that of the first "special scheme" drafted by the British Minister of Labour in 1921 under Unemployment Insurance Act, which contained a provision permitting experimentation. The Wisconsin scheme, proposed in 1921, which differs fundamentally from the others in that the burden is placed solely on employers instead of employers, employees and the state, is briefly described.

Mr. Cohen does not mention the significant change in the Danish law in 1920, which took the administration of the law out of the hands of the labor unions. Nor does he make sufficient use of the decisions of the umpire under the British Act, which show, better than anything else, the actual working of that law. In fact, an exhaustive digest of these decisions, covering now a period of ten years, is one of the most-needed pieces of work for a full understanding of the problems of unemployment insurance.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

JOHN R. COMMONS

The Story of the Irish Nation. By FRANCIS HACKETT. New York, The Century Company, 1922.-402 pp.

Although this particular book gives evidence of wide reading on the part of its author, and is much more free from errors of fact than such books are wont to be, it is avowedly a vivid “interpretation" of Ireland's history, rather than its sober record. It is, perhaps, one of the best of a rapidly growing class of books that mark the rediscovery of history by novelists and dramatists. Such books are not intended to serve as texts for students, but as sources of background for the general reader's grasp of matters of current interest. They are not subject to the application of the rules of historical criticism, and nobody-least of all their authors-expects them to be assayed for exaggeration, debatable chronology, trustworthiness of sources or like matters within the purview of the pedestrian compiler or sifter of historical record. To be sure, all works in this class, good, bad and indifferent, have to be taken into account by the student of the history of ideas, and of historiography, to whom even their inexpert use of historical apparatus and their subjective

intrusion of their authors' likes and dislikes must be of interest. The substantial interest in books of this character lies in the interpretation, to which they subordinate all else; and only on the interpretation can they be appraised.

Mr. Hackett's interpretation of the history of Ireland is interesting. Very briefly-and colorlessly-summarized, it runs somewhat as follows. Pre-Christian Ireland already possessed most of the elements which it later developed after the conversion to Christianity. The rapid success of St. Patrick and his followers is attributable in part to the tact and conservatism of the missionaries, and in part to the lack of a central government. The need for the latter was not recognized until centuries after the Norman invasion of Ireland. The four centuries which followed the invasion witnessed the futile effort of the Norman and Norman-Irish lords, and the agents of the Crown, to subjugate the Irish by castle-building, the implantation of feudal law and practice, and the sharp maintenance of racial lines. Then the British Crown, having worsted the feudal nobility in England, thrust it aside in Ireland, and began by legislation, religious persecution and corruption, the process of breaking down the spirit of national resistance which the Norman squatters had not only failed to overcome, but had even made their own. This process varied in emphasis, intensity and even, to some extent, in object, according to the vicissitudes of English politics. The Stuart and Commonwealth Century left Ireland desolate. "Night at last descends. It is a night of such blackness, cold and horror that it reminds one only of a no-man's-land in which two bands of crouching men are at work in the blackness; one to kill the wounded, the other to rob the dead." Confiscation of property, economic servitude, political, social and religious persecution, denial of educational facilities, merciless and instant repression by law of industrial beginnings-these were the characteristics of British policy towards Ireland.

The movements of Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald represent the revivification of the national spirit, while Grattan and O'Connell merely seek amelioration of the material troubles of the Irish, whom they regard as having "one common citizenship" with England. The constitutional movement bade fair to accomplish little under the "lymphatic leadership" of Butt, but Parnell was a genuine and creative national leader. After him again, the leaders were absorbed in the political life of England, and satisfied to improve economic and educational conditions in Ireland, and secure local