Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/943

 Minor Notices 933 1906, pp. ix, 345.) This correspondence illustrates at first hand ihe Port Royal experiment with negro labor in the first stages of freedom. Port Royal, in ante-bellum days, was the name only of the island on which Beaufort is situated, but during the war it was applied, in the north, to the entire Sea Island district of South Carolina. When the Federal forces occupied this district in November, 1861, twenty-seven plantations, with their slaves, were abandoned precipitately by the plant- ers. The writers of these letters were some half-dozen of the sixty- four volunteers from the North who were commissioned by the Federal government to take charge of the ownerless blacks. Under the super- vision of these instructors, by the close of the summer of 1862, three thousand eight hundred negroes were at steady work on fifteen thousand acres of land. Many of the letters here printed are from one prominent among these instructors, Edward S. Philbrick, of Brookline, Massachu- setts, who died in 1889. During the war, criticism was directed against him freely in the North for his formation of a company to purchase from the Federal government some of the abandoned plantations and for his employment of negroes on these estates. These letters present his side of the case and illustrate generally, amongst other matters, the local features of the government's disposition of these lands. The let- ters record, in the main, not matters political or military, but the daily experiences of the writers as housekeepers, teachers, superintendents of labor, and landowners. A few of the letters fall in the years 1866, 1867, and 1868; but the correspondence, which opens in February, 1862, closes practically in December, 1865. The Tariff and the Trusts. By Franklin Pierce. (New York and London, Macmillan Company, 1907, pp. ix, 387.) This is a lively and forcible denunciation of the present tariff system of the United States. The vocabulary of polite malediction has been put to good service. In the author's opinion the Dingley tariff is an iniquity full of flagrant wrong; in a spirit of ardent patriotism, he endeavors to arouse his read- ers to an adequate sense of the grievous evils which burden the people. As the title indicates, the author finds in the tariff the chief cause for the oppression of corporate monopoly. It is here that the logic is weak ; the analysis of the inconsistencies of the tariff is keen, and for the most part justified, but little evidence is given of the causal relation between the tariff and the great trusts which defy competition. Those who believe that trusts are fostered by many forms of privilege beside that gained through excessive taxation, will yet have to be convinced of the accuracy of the author's sweeping generalizations. There is an undis- criminating use of historical illustration, and by far too much weight is given to the influence of the tariff. The chapter on the tariff and public virtue is a vicious example of the practice of gathering together a few isolated cases of corruption and framing a general indictment. There is no institution in human society which can successfully with- stand such a method of attack. In view, however, of the evils of the