AH nor Notices 173 better and no worse than they have been written many times heretofore. Their condensed form is a good feature. But in a chapter on " Strife between Classes" as well as in his few pages of "Conclusions," the author has said something new and said it tersely and clearly on what may be called the sociological aspects of constitutional development. He feels that the growing nationality of the United States has surmounted three obstacles : provincial life, sectional strife between the states, and the decentralization of the federal departments. A fourth obstacle, reach- ing the proportions of a positive present danger, he finds in the contests between the classes and the masses, each of which seeks to use the power of the state against the other. The especial forms which this conflict ■takes are examined in contracts, corporations, police power, liquor laws, railroads and the interstate commerce commission, injunctions, labor movements, and the income tax. In treating these politico-sociological questions, the author is likely to become alarming to timid people and a happy find for sensational journalists. At times he sounds like the voice of Jefferson and again like a Populistic stump -speaker. Few will be found to deny the presence of the most obnoxious class legislation, and legislation in behalf of special interests, in the work of all our legislative bodies, or to deny that combinations of capital exist which are restrictive of individual motion. Few will question the severity of the author's arraignment of these evils. But the very fact that he calls recent political conditions in England an evidence of advance and those in America an evidence of retrogression is proof that in due time we too shall find a quietus for this conflict, certainly an inherited sin, and rendered doubly hard by local conditions. The author has done a service in collecting and calling attention to these dangers ; if he live long enough he can afford to laugh at them. From the standpoint of the historical student, there would seem to be no justification for the publication of The Territorial Acquisitions of the United States, by Edward Bicknell (Boston, Small, Maynard and Company, pp. xi, no). It is simply the briefest sort of statement of facts relating to the various territorial acquisitions of the United States, from the first acquisition of the Northwest by the central government under the Articles of Confederation to the annexation of Hawaii in 1898. It contains nothing new, and little, if anything, that is not perfectly familiar to everyone who possesses more than a superficial knowledge of American history. The book is evidently neither for the specialist nor for the student, but rather for the general reader, who is unacquainted with the history of our territorial expansion, and who, in view of our present conditions, desires to find in as brief compass as possible the main facts of our his- tory bearing upon these conditions. To such an one this little book may prove useful. Although relatively too much space is devoted to the annexation of Texas and the Mexican cession, and some assertions and rather sweeping generalizations would be bettered by further explanation,
