Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/707

 Minoi' Notices 697 however, that Miss Keys has gone very far afield for illustrative material such as might have been furnished by the Johnson Manuscripts, the newspapers, or the broadside collections. Golden has been presented to us in four characters, or rather as one character playing four parts — savant, surveyor, politician, executive. Aside from the fact that it is difficult to separate the surveyor from the politician, this arrangement does little violence to chronology, and is on the whole probably the best possible one. The style is a bit loose, the manner a bit casual; one is perhaps somewhat at sea in the mass of facts, unrelieved for the most part by any very suggestive generalization. Whatever the " general reader " may think, the specialist will nevertheless be grateful for much new light on the web of intrigue which enmeshed the colonial governors from Burnet to Clinton. And meantime three points of more general interest emerge from the detailed narrative : the e.xtent to which personal and family rivalries dominated New York provincial politics; the incredible neglect of the English government to support its officials in their efiforts to check the encroachments of the assembly on executive functions ; the uselessness of the well-meaning doctrinaire in practical administration. Miss Keys has appreciated Colden per- fectly : " With all his interests, all his learning, all his real worth, he had learned no lesson from experience" (p. 258). The least valuable part of the work is that which deals with the period after 1765. The author has apparently missed the striking significance of Colden's brief day of popularity after the death of Moore. The meaning of the elec- tions of 1768 and 1769 is not correctly appreciated. Statements with respect to the election of the Committee of Fifty-One and the elec- tion of the delegates to the First Continental Congress are misleading (P- 355)- An unfortunate blunder of the publishers has resulted in a systematic misplacement of the pages from 352 to 369. The citation of authorities is not so full as could be wished, and there is no critical bibliography. ^ t, " ^ •' Carl Becker. The Writings of James Madison. Edited by Gaillard Hunt. Vol. VI., 1790-1802. (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1906. pp. xvii, 464.) There is little that is new in this sixth volume. About half of it con- sists of Madison's speeches in the First Congress, for which the text in the Annals seems to be taken as sufficiently ample and authoritative, his various contributions to Freneau's National Gazette, " Helvidius ", his speech on the Jay treaty, and his Virginia report of 1799-1800. The rest is correspondence, embracing a dozen or so of family letters not printed in the former or Congressional edition, but of small imoprtance, dealing largely with the errands which a son or brother visitimg Phila- delphia would inevitably do for a country family or neighborhood in 'irginia. There are also a few other new letters, and from Madison's assumption of the secretaryship of state in May, 1801, an important series of instructions to the American representatives in England, France