Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/872

862 traveller's chance observations and impressions to neighborhood gossip, hearsay, and tradition; that many of his alleged facts are unsupported by direct evidence from any authorities—all this makes one feel that the picture he gives is overdrawn, incomplete, and, from a scientific standpoint, rests on an insecure foundation. .

yesterday the best book on this subject was S. N. D. North's essay, published in 1884 as one of the by-products of the census of 1880. That essay presented a fairly continuous story down to about 1835, and then the narrative was soon lost in statistics and chapters on the mechanical side of newspaper publication.

Professor Lee's book, which begins with the records of the Roman Senate in 449 B.C. and ends with Creel's Committee on Public Information in 1917, will now replace Mr. North's volume as a history of growth, though it will not entirely supersede the latter as an authority for reference.

Statistical information of historical importance is better arranged in Mr. North's work and is more complete. It is unfortunate that Professor Lee did not follow his predecessor's example in arranging lists of names and dates in compact tables, separate from the text. The policy, which he has adopted, of strewing statistics thickly over thin surfaces of story, does not always produce readable paragraphs, and throws a heavy burden of responsibility upon the index. This burden the index is inadequate to support. The student will turn to it in vain for scores of names mentioned in the story, and for some that ought to be mentioned but are not.

Professor Lee ascribes to the World the honor of reviving in 1884 the cartoon as a political weapon. A dozen years earlier, Thomas Nast had made Tweed and Harper's Weekly famous at the same time, but Professor Lee's index alludes neither to the Weekly nor to its distinguished editor, George William Curtis, nor to Nast himself, although the careful reader will discover that both the journal and the great cartoonist are merely mentioned on page 329.

It is inevitable that the New York city newspapers should loom large in a work of this kind. Nevertheless the historical student will be disappointed if he turns to this volume for an explanation of the fact that, for years in the first half of the last century, Albany newspapers were more influential in New York state politics than the metropolitan journals.

Perhaps too, in view of the pretentious title that Professor Lee chose,