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 THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH 577

strongly marked and personal philosophy of American history \vhich looms behind the Boss and the Boom, the Hoodlum and the Mugwump. There is a valid excuse for preferring to address the unhistoric mind. The process of development by which the America of T ocqueville became the America of Lincoln has been lately described with a fulness of know- ledge which no European can rival. Readers \vho thirst for the running stream can plunge and struggle through several thousand pages of Holst's Ve1j"assungsgeschicltte, and it is better to accept the division of labour than to take up ground so recently covered by a work which, if not very well designed or well com posed, is, by the prodigious digestion of material, the most instructive ever written on the natural history of federal democracy. The author, who has spent twenty years on American debates and newspapers, began during the pause between Sadowa and Wörth, when Germany was in the throes of political concentration that made the empire. He ex- plains with complacency how another irrepressible conflict between centre and circumference came and went, and how the \velfare of mankind is better served by the gathering than by the balance or dispersion of forces. Like Gneist and Tocqueville, he thinks of one country while he speaks of another; he knows nothing of reticence or economy in the revelation of private opinion; and he has none of Mr. Bryce's cheery indulgence for folly and error. But when the British author refuses to devote six months to the files of Californian journalism, he leaves the German master of his allotted field. The actual predominates so much with Mr. Bryce that he has hardly a word on that extraordinary aspect of democracy, the union in time of war; and gives no more than a passing glance at the confederate scheme of government, of which a northern \vriter said: "The in- valuable reforms enumerated should be adopted by the United States, \vith or without a reunion of the seceded States, and as soon as possible." There are points on \vhich some additional light could be drawn from the 2 P

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