8o6 Revieius of Books need any critical analysis or elaborate argument to prove that there have been some great impelling forces behind it. The forces may be difficult to identify. Perhaps some of them lie deep down in human nature among the other forces of involuntary human action. But however that may be, they have been as irresistible as they are unconscious, and as ceaseless as they are irresistible. It needs only a comparatively few carefully selected facts, skillfully interpreted and woven into a plain narrative, to make a convincing demonstration of their presence and their power ; and when they are once admitted to exist what reason is there for believing that they would suddenly cease to operate when population reached the Pacific? Why should they not be expected to persist and to cause the restless pioneer to overleap barriers, northward or southward, eastward or westward, over seas or wherever else there are lands unoccu- pied by an equally vigorous population and culture ? In the book under review, Professor Sparks has told how population and culture have been carried from Europe to America and from the Atlantic to the Pacific by the people who have become pre-eminently the ' ' American people ; ' ' and he has shown also how the same forces that have carried them over this region have by logical necessity launched them upon a colonial career. The author is evidently an assiduous investigator in the highways and byways of history. He is also a believer in illustrative material. His book abounds in outline maps and photographic reproductions of title- pages, broadsides, advertisements, objects and scenes of historical inter- est. In the text he has sought with a few data to give a general effect ; and has avoided the effort to be exhaustive in the enumeration of details. The book does not give the local history of the settlement of Virginia, or Ohio, or Kansas, or California. It is a monograph, and not a long one, on the "Expansion of the American People." Nineteen pages are al- lowed for bringing the narrative down to the period of American coloni- zation ; one hundred and twenty-two carry it on through the considera- tion of the " Pioneer life in the Ohio Valley; " fifty are devoted to the " Rounding out of the Gulf Possessions" and the "Assimilation of the Frontier French Elements; " seventy to the period from the beginning of "The Oregon Expansion " to the completion of a " Transcontinental Railroad;" and other chapters are devoted to "The National Seat of Government," " The Cumberland Road and the Erie Canal" and to American intellectual life, reforms and Utopias. , Often what the narrative omits and what it contains are equally un- conventional even if not always in accord with the reader's taste and judg- ment. Less space is given to the arguments made in Congress against the annexation of Louisiana than to the public ridicule incurred by Jefferson through his credulous belief in the existence of a huge mountain of rock salt in the new territory. The Indian wars of St. Clair and Wayne are treated of in a foot-note of six lines; but half a page is filled with typ- ical songs of the Ohio fiat-boat -men. The arguments for and against in- ternal improvements are curtly treated ; but the information, that between
