Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/381

 Mc Master : People of the United States 371 and is illustrated by a map of Maine and the Maritime Provinces for the year 1S30. The remainder of the chapter is filled with the story of the fiasco of the Panama Congress, showing all the threads of South Amer- ican politics that were spun about that mortifying failure. The final paragraphs in Chapter XLI. about the support of the Latin-American republics against the Holy Alliance are substantially repeated (pp. 52- 54, 43S-440). The Central and South American republics would prob- ably have secured the independence of both Cuba and Porto Rico at that time if our government had not feared to see the resultant establishment of a free negro population so near to our shores. It was due to slavery in the United States that Spanish misgovernment in the Antilles was en- dowed with a new lease of life. The slave power here bore to Spanish rule in America the same relation that Russia bears to Persia, at once its best friend and its worst foe, defending it against all attacks but its own. When slavery in the United States was overthrown, the Spanish authority in the Antilles was no less certainly doomed than that of the French in Mexico. It was interesting that the doom of the former should follow closely enough upon the heels of the latter to permit men who had been Confederate generals to become the agents of destiny. The author dis- misses the magnificent visions and scanty realizations of the Adams administration with this view of foreign relations only, and passes on in Chapter LII. to the " bargain and corruption " cry against Adams and Clay which had already been partially examined in Chapter XLII. In the con- cluding chapter of the book (LIIL), the reader is introduced to the new heavens and new earth of Jackson's first administration, and the volume ends abruptly, in the midst of the mutterings of southern Democrats, in 1829, against the tariff. Turning now to the eight chapters that compose the real substance of this volume, we pass at once from diplomatic conferences and con- gressional politics to a series of essays upon different aspects of the pop- ular development during the generation prior to 1830. The author himself has provided a review of this part of his work in the following single sentence (p. 488), somewhat characteristically minute and un- wontedly clumsy : "An attempt has been made to describe the life of the people in the cities, in the towns and villages, on the frontier ; their ideas on government, on banking, on labor, on education, on literature, on the social problems of the time, have been reviewed ; the astonish- ing betterment in the conditions of life brought about by new inventions and discoveries, new means of locomotion and the rise of new industries and new ways of gaining a livelihood, have all been described, and it is now time to turn, etc." Under the topic "Socialistic and Labor Reforms " Professor McMaster groups together, first, a review of workingmen's parties in Philadelphia and New York City from 1791 to 1829 ; secondly, a description of the Owenite paradise at New Harmony, Indiana, where Robert Owen's en- thusiastic disciple, William Maclure, awaited the time when he should see "foxes peering out of the windows of the crumbling buildings of