Hart: American History told by Contemporaries 591 reads an American book. His contempt for what had been written in America was natural from his point of view, and not without justification. Little of what is printed in this book is of high literary merit. Yet one cannot examine it carefully without being impressed by the thought how much that was instructive and entertaining the Americans wrote in the first sixty years after the acknowledgment of their independence. How- ever it might appear in London, an observer from Mars, admitting that the inhabitants of this quarter of the globe had little of the refinements of literary cultivation indeed (if the Martian standards are like those of the best of this planet), would nevertheless have said that they had good stuff in them and were bound to accomplish great things. Dr. Hart has ranged, with evident gusto, over this large mass of writings, and has made an excellent selection of characteristic and entertaining pieces, choosing on much the same principles as governed the composition of his previous volumes. Collections of official docu- ments, writings of public men, diaries and private correspondence, me- moir-writers, essayists, travellers and writers of verse, have been drawn upon in rich variety. The compiler's chief object has been to exhibit the complexion of past times, the political and social conditions of Amer- ican life, rather than to set forth particular events, however striking. Narratives of the events of political history are accordingly not numerous. There are hardly more than a dozen. The chief of them are Nathan Dane's account of the drafting of the Ordinances for the Northwest Terri- tory, M. Otto's account of the Annapolis Convention, a letter of General Lincoln respecting Shays' s Rebellion, Madison's description of the closing scenes in the Philadelphia Convention, " Laco's " bitter statement of the manner in which Hancock supported the Constitution in the Massachu- setts Convention, selections from the narrative portion of the X. Y. Z. Correspondence, and Lucien Bonaparte's vivid and malicious account of the scene between Napoleon, Joseph and himself over the cession of Louisiana. The much more numerous pieces illustrating social and political ijuestions are similarly well-chosen ; but it is difficult to describe them by anything much shorter than a table of contents. We think there might well have been more than one selection from Tocqueville. A more serious criticism might be based upon the lack of pieces illustra- ting the character and condition of the Southwest. The author is abundantly alive to the importance of the West in his scheme, but it is practically the Northwest alone which is in his mind's eye. Now south of the Ohio and west of Georgia there dwell to-day nearly as many mil- lions as north of the Ohio and west of Pennsylvania. They have been the Boeotians of our history. We have not heard much about them. Yet their development is well worth recounting, for they constitute one of our great types and embrace something near a quarter of our popula- tion. We dwell upon this thought because it is distinctly the habit of his- torical scholars, more especially of Northern historical scholars, not to consider the western expansion of this portion of our population in any-
