of the whole history. The style is allusive. Read by itself, without a previous knowledge of political details, the volume would leave upon the mind a disjointed and incomplete effect. The narrative is compressed and uneven. The sixth volume, like the first, is rather a series of closely connected essays on constitutional topics than a consecutive history. The discussions of the Mormon question, of the debates on the Lecompton constitution, are both admirable; but the background of general political movement is wanting. The author might reply that narrative history could be written by many other hands; that he alone had undertaken the labor of a search into constitutional cause and effect. But in his anxiety to set forth clearly and distinctly the constitutional elements of the struggle over slavery he has destroyed the impression of continuity which he is most anxious to leave upon his reader. It is for this reason even more than because of the length of the work that von Holst's reputation as a writer for Americans in general must depend on his Staatsrecht and his Calhoun, and still more on his projected brief history; the constitutional history must remain a guide for the constitutional student.

Another fault of style is the complexity of construction and profusion of metaphor, which are perhaps somewhat increased in some passages by the process of translation. Take an exam

ple at random, page 133:

And if all this was already determined by the political nature of Mormonism, the same was true, in a still higher degree, of the social institution, which, partly on account of its exclusiveness that is, its absolute irreconcilability with the ethico-moral convictions and with the fundamental principles of legal life of the rest of the people — tended more and more to become its principal pillar, although it was only a supplementary appendage to the original body of doctrine.

It is a striking fact that the author's own English style in the Calhoun is less involved and abstruse than that of his translator, Mr. Lalor. In common with the whole series, Volume VI is deficient in those conveniences which cost an author little labor and which double the value of his work to the reader. The first two volumes had no other guide to the text than a list

of half a dozen chapters; later volumes contain an ill-arranged table of contents. No head-dates are inserted in the running headings—an omission which causes peculiar vexation in a work so far from chronological; and no volume has an index. The author promises an index to the whole at the end of the work; till that time the reader who wishes to find again some of the phrases which most attract him has no shorter way than to turn the leaves.

The characteristics thus far discussed are important, but the value of the work must be determined from deeper considerations. Volume VI has all the peculiar qualities which make von Holst's works stand out from all other histories of the United States. The volume is, even more than earlier ones, based on the debates and documents of Congress: it is in considerable part a legislative history. As a statement of facts, as an evidence of the movement of public opinion, the speeches in the Congressional Globe are valuable: the author is perhaps too prone to look upon them as final. He has sometimes been accused of too facile an acceptance of untrustworthy authorities. Some years ago a very eminent Massachusetts statesman accused him of undue dependence on Joshua R. Giddings and John Quincy Adams. An examination of von Holst's foot-notes showed that he had cautioned his readers against Giddings, and had quoted Adams chiefly for statements of fact. With due allowance for difference of judgment or for errors in judgment, the author discriminates between his authorities and depends upon sources as none of his predecessors has done.

Whatever criticism may be made upon the details of the author's method, no one can deny the force and interest of his works. Volume VI bears throughout the mark of a strong mind, well convinced of its own conclusions. The tone of the writer is always positive and sometimes dogmatic. For this characteristic there are two reasons: von Holst feels a pardonable pride in the possession of a large body of facts hitherto almost unworked by a philosophical writer; and he sees what he does see with such clearness that he is impatient alike of the characters who misbehave and of men of a later generation who admire them.

Yet it is this impatience with characters whom he considers unworthy that has enabled him to break down some of the best developed political myths in United States history. He has attempted little with regard to Jefferson: the task of analyzing that unequally great man has been left for Henry Adams. But the chapter in the second volume on "The Reign of Jackson must in the end aid to destroy the unreasoning admiration of that President which has lasted down to the present day. Polk and Pierce have received a like castigation in later volumes it is in this volume the turn of Douglas and Buchanan. The hearty, unconcealed contempt for men who have no political principle except to be on the winning side is ingrained in the author it appears in his vigorous accusation of all "Northern men with Southern principles" and especially of Douglas. For men like Calhoun, champions of their own institutions, he has respect; for Douglas he has so little that he gives him no credit even for his undoubted lively national feeling. Like all writers of the present day, von Holst cannot picture to his mind a state of political feeling in which the majority of voters, North as well as South, shared Douglas's indifference as to whether slavery were "voted up or voted down." He seems to single Douglas out for castigation from among the whole group of politicians, but he disentangles in this volume the complications of the man's character and his lack of moral principle. He shows how inevitable was the disruption of the Democratic party, and how irresistibly yet unwillingly Douglas was compelled to abjure the Lecompton constitution and thus to give up all hold on the Southern Democrats, in order to maintain his control of the Northern Democrats.

Until the appearance of this volume the part of Buchanan in the first three years of his administration had never been clearly understood. We now see the elements which prepared the way for his abject downfall in 1860-61. He had undertaken. to unite his party by yielding Kansas to the Southern wing, and he was unable to deliver the goods; he set himself against the sense of fair play of the nation, and he was overwhelmed. Here is von Holst's estimate of him:

[He was] much inclined to purchase freedom from trouble, care and danger, at a high price. But, at the same time, his vanity was great enough, notwithstanding all this, to play for the highest prize, and his vain self-reliance could not but grow, through his great degree of weakness, to senescent wilfulness, and this all the more the deeper he was dragged into the whirlpool of the conflict of over-powerful actual events, promoted as much by his marrowlessness as by his blind self-reliance. Weakness, self-overestimation and wilfulness a more disastrous combination of qualities could, under existing circumstances, be scarcely imagined.

Von Holst is no hero-worshipper. He has once said that if the angel Gabriel had come down to lead the colonies through the Revolution and into a successful federation, there would have been no credit for the Americans: the wonderful thing was that mortal men with human characters and failings accomplished so great a work. It is this wholesome attitude of criticism, of taking great Americans for what they were and did, and not for what they were supposed superhumanly to have done, which has probably caused some assertions that von Holst is unfriendly to American institutions. On the contrary, in his own country he is accused of an undue appreciation of and fondness for the United States. That the habit of philosophic examination of character does not prevent admiration for great men, is shown by his clear and sympathetic account of Lincoln's attitude on the slavery question and of his debate with Douglas. He recognizes in him the prophet of the epoch, the one man who could clearly see and express the inevitableness of the division over slavery. It is a tribute to the man who is more and more recognized as one of the two greatest Americans -- and not the lesser.

The volume is by no means biographical; and the central and dominant idea is, as in others of the series, the essential contradiction of free institutions and slavery - the necessity that the Union should be all free or all slave. The thought is not original with von Holst; but he has so urged it and insisted upon it, that the idea is entering text-books and infiltrating into the schools. Like all dominant ideas, it often carries him too far. However true it may be that slavery affected all other

questions, and was itself the great and insoluble question, tariffs, land-grants, homestead bills and other measures were carried through on other grounds, and they also are evidences of development. As in the other volumes, there is one chapter devoted especially to the discussion of the elements of the slavery struggle and the differences between the North and the South. The political history may be and probably will be worked over hereafter by other hands in briefer and more direct form; these chapters will remain the standard authority upon the political results of slavery. The weakening influence of slavery was seen in its fall; the causes of that weakening influence are here set forth in permanent form. The author has a strong bias he thinks slavery wrong and sympathizes with its opponents; he exults not only in the triumphs of the champions of freedom, but also over the mistakes and errors of the friends of slavery. This bias is very distinctly traceable in his rhetorical indictment of the Dred Scott decision:

How could the opposition fail to look upon the judgment, legally as an invalid usurpation and as a perversion of the law, never to be recognized, politically as an absurd and bold assumption, and morally as an unparalleled prostitution of the judicial ermine?

It is impossible for any man to discuss the slavery question without bias: von Holst does not write judicially, but he does write in sympathy with the spirit of the American people. The fact that he is a foreigner and of foreign parents may perhaps prevent him from appreciating the difficulties through which the slavery question was worked out. In his effort to judge American statesmen as they were, he may sometimes apply to them the standard of a later age than their own. But the chief aim of the present volume is to trace the progress of that which we recognize now as the true and free spirit of America; and the book is one to make Americans more proud of a nation which has had the moral force to free itself of an immoral institution.

ALBERT BUSHNELL HART.