peoples.  These peoples do not really have revolutions.  What we call the American Revolution was only the reaffirming of principles which were as precious in the eyes of most Englishmen as they were in the eyes of Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, but which had been for a time and owing to peculiar circumstances, neglected or contravened.  Political development in this family of nations does not, he maintains, proceed by revolution, but by evolution.  On all these points his Constitutional Government in the United States is only a richer and more mature statement and illustration of the ideas expressed in his Congressional Government.  The main thesis of his George Washington is that the great Virginian and first American was the truest Englishman of his time, a modern Hampden or Eliot, a Burke in action.  Again and again he pays respect to Chief Justice Marshall, who represented, in our early history, the conception of law as something in its breadth and majesty older and more sacred than the decrees of any particular legislature, and yet capable of being so interpreted as to accommodate itself to progress.  Mr. Wilson has from the beginning been an admiring student of Burke.  And if Burke has been his study, Bagehot has been his schoolmaster.  The choice of book and teacher is significant. Mere Literature shows how Mr. Wilson revered them in 1896; his public life proves that he learned their lessons well.  In An Old Master and Other Essays, he had already borne witness to the genius of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who, as compared with Continental writers, illustrate in the field of economics the Anglo-Saxon spirit of respect for customs that have grown by organic processes.

Mr. Wilson’s Division and Reunion is an admirable treatment of a question upon which a Southerner might have been expected to write as a Southerner.  He has discussed it as an American.  His well-known text-book The State, which has been revised and frequently reprinted, discusses the chief theories of the origin of government, describes the administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in detail of the functions and objects of government, with special reference to law and its workings.  His History of the American People, though it contains many passages of insight and has the charm that comes from intense appreciation of details, is too diffuse and repetitious.  A great history should be a combination of a chronicle and a treatise; it should be a record of facts and at the same time a philosophical exposition of an idea.  Mr. Wilson’s five-volume work is insufficient as a chronicle and too long for an essay.  Yet an essay it really is.  Moreover, unless I myself am blinded by prejudice, it makes too much of the errors committed by our government in the reconstruction period after the Civil War.  On the whole, with all their faults, the administrations