Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/693

 Rhodes : History of the United States 6S3 looking at the matter as a scientist, could find no good reasons to believe the negroes fit, and many reasons to believe them unfit, for the high privileges and duties of citizenship which it was now proposed to thrust upon them. When the whole wretched story of the dominance of the negro and the " carpet-bagger " has been told, Mr. Rhodes, so far from modifying his judgment, seems to be searching for stronger words in which to restate it. " No large policy in our country ", he concludes, " has ever been so conspicuous a failure as that of forcing universal negro suffrage upon the South" (VII. 168). He tells the story plainly and straightforwardly, as his wont is ; mainly by the use of specific facts and episodes and instances; undra- matically, and not without stiffness and clumsiness ; but convincingly. One can hardly believe that it will not some day be told after a fashion that will take it into literature, but meanwhile no one need any longer neglect it for want of a trustworthy and not unreadable version. It is interesting to observe the writer's own deep interest in it, and the thoroughly human way in which, as he goes on, he finds himself more and more in sympathy with the Southern people ; a sympathy which culminates in the approving citation of Senator Hoar's well-known tribute, and which is reflected in a striking phrase in the summing-up at the end of the book — " the oppression of the South by the North " (VII. 290). This is an attitude which is far less likely to provoke criticism at the North than it would have been ten years ago. At the South, one fancies, it may help to win for Mr. Rhodes's work an atten- tion which its thoroughness and fairness ought to have won for it before. But I have not meant to imply that the interest of these volumes all centres about Reconstruction. On the contrary, I incline to think those parts the most readable in which Mr. Rhodes turns northward, for epi- sodes like the fight with Tweed in New York City ; or westward, or to our foreign relations, or to unsectional political questions like those of finance and the tariff. I am decidedly of opinion that he does not turn westward often enough : that he makes too little of the resumption of the westward movement after the war. So far is he from giving to the building of the Union Pacific Railroad the epical character with which Robert Louis Stevenson and others have invested it that he tells the story of it only by way of explaining the Credit Mobilier scandals. The spreading of a network of railroads over the entire West, which followed hard upon the completion of the first transcontinental line, he discusses only as the chief cause of the panic of 1873. Less space is given to the westward movement in all its phases than to weighing the evidence for and against the integrity of James G. Blaine ; and this, I think, is an instance of a distaste for economic history which may be set down as one of the author's limitations. It must be confessed, however, that the handling of the Blaine controversy is a most admirable instance of Mr. Rhodes's straightforwardness and firmness of hand. Admirable