Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/610

 602 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October The other volume began apparently as an historical introduction to the committee's papers, a very necessary addition to them, as the threads will obviously be very much mixed in a volume that is written up day by day. Miss Williams did her work thoroughly, and has produced a well-written and sane book, which sets out with interest and clearness the conditions of the times and the society, gives us a very fair idea of a good many leading characters in the story, protagonists of good and evil, and brings home the situation and the problem with great sympathy and skill, while all is checked by full references to the records in the other volume. She goes beyond the period covered by the records, however, and surveys the later history of the committee in 1856, and indeed somewhat briefly down to 1877. She concludes with a survey <5f lynch law as a national problem, and gives her judgement that, after all, while the committee of vigilance did in 1851 and for some time after reduce the amount of crime and so far better the conditions of life, it was not the real road to permanent improvement. One deduces indeed that its honourable record has served as a cover for deeds alien altogether to the minds of the promoters of the committee. The Ku-Klux Klan and the South Carolina mob of to-day may claim affiliation only too securely. If the San Francisco men took evidence and tested it, and the South Carolina men do not, the difference is only one of degree ; in kind their work is the same : it is outside the operations of an ordered community. Miss Williams brings out the very great difference between British and American control of societies equally mixed and irregular in lands equally unreclaimed and equally stimulative to crime and restlessness ; and it is significant. The theories of Jefferson have not historically been opera- tive in forming the English mind, and that is a great deal. But that may be a personal reflexion of the reviewer, and his duty is perhaps discharged when he commends the work of Miss Williams as well done and of importance. T. R. GLOVER. Storia della Storiografia Italiana nel Secolo Decimonono. By BENEDETTO CROCE. 2 vols. (Bari : Laterza, 1921.) IN January 1914, while staying with Professor Fueter at Zurich, Signor Croce planned to remedy a deficiency which he observed in his host's work on modern historiography, and he has carried out his promise with characteristic thoroughness. Croce's conception of history cannot but render him exacting in his valuation of the work of nineteenth-century Italian historians, and we must be the more wary in criticizing this book because this Review is in some ways comparable to the Italian periodicals which Croce condemns unsparingly as the outcome of the 'philological method ' which came into fashion during an age which Acton named ' documentary ' and Croce characterizes as dominated by ' positivism '. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Italians, as well as other people, were overcome, as Croce writes, by the passion for history. The unorganized collections of ' mere documents ' or ' mere facts ' which had been so laboriously got together during the eighteenth century were no longer felt to be satisfactory. Vice's philosophy in conjunction with social