Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/161

Rh ment that gives significance to the facts of the internal history. A good synthesis of the Napoleonic Period is less difficult to realize than one of the Revolution and here it is well done.

The connection between these periods and the present war is not made especially clear; it is treated very incidentally. Perhaps it could not be made clear in a work that ends with the Congress of Vienna; it might have been shown in two chapters on the great world development that has led to a world war to solve, if possible, the problem of how this world society, the result of six thousand years of history, shall be finally organized. A successful synthesis of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Period and an understanding of their relation to the present war are possible only under the conditions created by a clear insight into the character of the development of the world's history.

here presents a study of a question which, as Boissonnade has remarked, gave rise to one of the "most serious crises in the history of civilization". When one reflects upon the fact that the "colonial question" brought to the halls of the revolutionary assemblies, for discussion and settlement, social problems of such great import, both to the colonies and to humanitarian philosophers, as the institution of slavery and the slave-trade, economic problems of such far-reaching consequences, to planters and merchants, to colonies and metropôle, to the integrity of the empire and the welfare of the larger trading-world, as the reform of the pacte colonial, political problems of such vital interest to visionary reformers and to practical defenders of colonial interests, as colonial self-government and imperial control with all the intricate and perplexing minor problems related thereto, it is hard to regard Boissonnade's remark as an exaggeration. The importance of the question has not failed to attract scholars and to inspire some excellent work. Boissoimade, Castonnet des Fosses, Léon Deschamps, de Vaissière, H. E. Mills, Stoddart, Miss E. D. Bradby, and, since the publication of the present study, Miss Ellery, have all published works of value which have dealt with some vital phases of the question. All of these writers with the exception of Deschamps, of whom more will be said presently, have approached its study either with the purpose of delineating more sharply the role played by some character in the Constituent Assembly or else through a primary interest in the colonies as such, and have not examined with "painstaking care the records of the Constituent Assembly to discover the efforts of the national deputies at Paris to understand and redress the colonial griev-