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 178 Rcvieic's of Books. also an unanswerable argument for the power of Christianity and the worth and efficiency of Christian missions, under apparently the most unfavorable conditions. How often by his personal bravery and Chris- tian spirit of love and justice he saved this country from disgrace, and massacres, and the terrors of Indian warfare, cannot be known, but these pages record many startling instances. The appendix of sixty-nine pages is a rare and most valuable collec- tion of original documents on Indian affairs. Charles L. Wells. A series of incidents, as casual and as lacking in significance as the occurrences which led up to the events which made the experience memor- able, took a young American girl from her Paris schooling and landed her in the city of Mexico in 1862. The account of her experiences during the five years that followed, written thirty-five years later for the Century Afagazine, and now expanded into a book, Maximilian in Mexico, by Sara Yorke Stevenson (New York, The Century Co., pp. 327), is in very many respects one of the most intelligible of the numerous accounts of what took place during that curious episode in the American drama. Writing from the standpoint of personal observation, Mrs. Stevenson has succeeded with quite unusual skill in maintaining the balance between what she saw and heard for herself, and what she, like others who study the af- fair, must have learned from the books in which those who participated officially have published their recollections of what they did. Knowing these participants, as table companions, partners at court balls, and as powerful protectors in times of serious danger, she has understood how to use their books, and the result is a clear, reasonable narrative of what happened, with some shrewd suggestions as to why. Her account, like most of those which are available to English or European readers, is written from the French side, the side of the story which must always chiefly excite curiosity. The pathetic martyrdom of the Emperor, whose stoic heroism at the end has been accepted as atonement for the years of indecision and inefficiency, and the controversies which grew out of the mutual recriminations of those who were variously respon- sible for the course of the disaster, are treated by Mrs. Stevenson with considerable appreciation of historic proportion, and she does the highest justice to most of the disputants by ignoring the details of their troubles altogether. The footlessness of the whole affair, the entire absence of justifying motive or of any sort of profit in the outcome to those who were responsible for the intervention, all that makes this episode the despair of those who would see some philosophy in history, were never more clearly shown than on Mrs. Stevenson's pages. It is only when one gets on the other side, and tries to understand what was happening to the Mexican people during these years of the Franco-Austrian Empire, that the meaning of it becomes visible. A year ago, the technically his- torical portion of Senor Romero's Mexico and tlie United States was noticed in this Review. The other portion of that volume was a de-