Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/170

160 seventies and eighties, as a sequel to Justin McCarthy's Portraits of the Sixties; and Portraits of the Seventies is the result. It scarcely need be said that the book is extremely readable. Readableness has always been a characteristic of Mr. Russell's writings. But in a volume of not more than 120,000 words, he draws no fewer than fifty-five portraits. They are of women as well as of men; for while the larger part of Mr. Russell's book is devoted to men who later were his contemporaries in Parliament when he was of the House of Commons from 1880 to 1895, he writes also of bishops and clergymen of the Established Church, of dignitaries and priests of the Roman Catholic Church in England, of poets and physicians, of the wives of statesmen, and of other women who in the seventies and eighties were famous as hostesses. Almost necessarily in a comparatively small book carrying so many portraits, there is in some of the shorter sketches a flavor of what in the jargon of Fleet Street would be described as "mainly about people" stuff. But as has been indicated it is the statesmen and politicians of the seventies and eighties who receive most detailed attention at Mr. Russell's hands. He is generous in the proportion of his book allotted to these men; and from the point of view of a contribution to the literature of English politics in the nineteenth century Portraits of the Seventies will always have a value for the side-lights thrown on Beaconsfield, Gladstone, Sherbrooke, Salisbury, Devonshire, Argyll, Bright, Chamberlain, Churchill, and Parnell. There are fifty-two reproductions of photographs or portraits, but there is no index.

E. P.

latest of Pratt's works on the character and development of railway transportation, in presenting an historical survey of the scientific utilization of the modern railway for purposes of war and conquest, is a very timely book. The tremendous task of all of the European belligerents in concentrating unparalleled numbers of troops, in providing vast armies with supplies and munitions of well-nigh limitless quantity, in maintaining lines of communication of unprecedented length and difficulty, in removing from the zones of war hundreds of thousands of prisoners and as many wounded men of varying degrees of disability, in protecting their systems of transport against the newer weapons of this war, particularly against the aggressive manoeuvres of alert air fleets, and more especially, the marvellous flexibility of the German war machine in maintaining an active resistance and a vigorous offensive on a multiple of fronts, have emphasized as never before the fact that railway transportation plays as indispensable a role in the successful prosecution of modern warfare as it does in the peaceful development of modern industrial society. But while The Rise of Rail-Power in