The shoe business was not unknown in Lynn before 1750, but in that year it first got a firm footing here.  So we are not surprised to find the fact mentioned, but we are somewhat disappointed to find only half a page given to it.  Beyond this, mention of the shoe trade in the last century is very slight, as, no doubt, was the trade itself.  Since 1800, however, the trade has been rapidly increasing, and has gradually assumed enormous proportions.  Yet in this precious volume we find the subject mentioned just once in the chronological annals, three lines being devoted to it under the head of 1810:  “It appeared, by careful estimation, that there were made in Lynn, this year, one million pairs of shoes, valued at eight hundred thousand dollars.  The females (!) earned some fifty thousand dollars by binding.”  To be sure, the burning of two shoe factories received, respectively, two and three lines; the formation of an ineffective board of trade by shoemakers, ten lines; and of an equally fruitless union by journeymen shoemakers, ten lines.  A page and a quarter (mirabile dictu) is devoted to a shoemakers’ strike with no definite result.  In a biography, the connection of its subject with the shoe business is mentioned in a quoted letter.  A quick job by a shoemaker receives six lines, and one by another, four; and the death of a third is mentioned.

In an appendix the state of the shoe business in 1864 is discussed at length in a third of a half-page!  All we learn from it is that by the State returns in the year ending June 1, 1833, there were made 9,275,593 pairs of shoes valued at $4,165,529.  In the year ending September 1, 1864, about ten million pairs of shoes were made, valued at fourteen million dollars (probably paper, not gold, value), and the number of shoe manufacturers was 174; of men and women employed, 17,173.  As the total population of Lynn at that time was little if anything over twenty-three thousand, it will be seen that even these figures are untrustworthy, or else the shoe business played even a greater part in Lynn affairs than is generally supposed.

And this is all the mention to be found in a History of Lynn concerning the backbone of the city—­that great industry to which it almost wholly owed its population of 38,274 in 1880.  Can any one maintain that this sort of a book is a history?

And so we might go on, finding history after history of the towns and cities scattered through New England and the Middle States, most of them on a par with those last mentioned, in all styles of print and binding, some decrepit and musty with age, others fresh and enticing, with gaudy covers and scores of illustrations; some like Sewall’s History of Woburn with no table of contents or index, and so practically useless; a few like Staples’s Annals of Providence, scholarly and creditable; yet none of them ideal histories.  But occasionally we meet an oasis in this vast waste, and though it may not be a paradise, yet we are too grateful for the water that nourishes the palms and the grass, that refreshes our parched mouths and wearied bodies, to think that in other climes we might call it brackish and unclean.