Out of this mass of material examined one would expect a more unbiased treatment.  The work suffers from some of the defects of most Reconstruction writers, although the author has endeavored to write with restraint and care.  One man is made almost a hero while another is found wanting.  The white Southerner could not but be a Democrat but no excuse is made for the Negro who had no alternative but to ally himself with those who claimed to represent his emancipator.  The State was at one time bordering on economic ruin because the Negroes became migratory and would not comply with their labor contracts.  Little is said, however, about the evils arising from the attitude of Southern white men who have never liked to work and that of those who during this period, according to the author, formed roving bands for plundering and stealing.  But we are too close to the history of Reconstruction to expect better treatment.  We are just now reaching the period when we can tell the truth about the American Revolution.  We must yet wait a century before we shall find ourselves far enough removed from the misfortunes and crimes of Reconstruction to set forth in an unbiased way the actual deeds of those who figured conspicuously in that awful drama.

NOTES

“That the idea of a ‘Secretary of Peace’ for the United States is no new thing was brought out in the course of a paper by P. Lee Phillips, read by President Allen C. Clark before the Columbia Historical Society, which met at the Shoreham Hotel last night.

“In the course of the paper, entitled ’The Negro, Benjamin Banneker, Astronomer and Mathematician,’ it was brought out that Banneker, who was a free Negro, friend of Washington and Jefferson, published a series of almanacs, unique in that they were his own work throughout.  In the almanac for 1793 one of the articles from Banneker’s pen was ’A Plan of Peace Office for the United States,’ for promoting and preserving perpetual peace.  This article was concise and well written, and contains most of the ideas set forth today by advocates of peace.  Banneker took a ‘crack’ at European military ideas, and advocated the abolishment in the United States of military dress and titles and all militia laws.  He laid down laws for the construction of a great temple of peace in which hymns were to be sung each day.

“Mr. Phillips’s paper brought out that Banneker helped in one of the early surveys of the District of Columbia.”—­Washington Star.

This dissertation will be brought out in the Annual Publication of the Columbia Historical Society.

Professor Alain Leroy Locke, of Howard University, has published an interesting prospectus of his lectures on the race problem.

Professor A. E. Jenks, of the University of Minnesota, has contributed to the American Journal of Sociology an elaborate paper on the legal status of the miscegenation of the white and black races in the various commonwealths.