BOOKSBYThomas E. Watson.
BOOKSBYThomas E. Watson.
The Social Secretary.By David Graham Phillips. The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Indianapolis.
An exceedingly clever novel, dealing chiefly with the effort of a Congressional family to break into good society in Washington, D. C. The Congressman is a Western man with a lot of money, and with a wife who has lots of horse sense and a sound heart.
They need a pilot to steer them into the realms of fashion and influence. To this position comes a beautiful, spirited and accomplished girl who belongs to a well-known family which is eminently respectable but is in reduced circumstances.
The campaign mapped out by the Social Secretary in behalf of the Congressional family is finally crowned with success, and the heroine marries the son of the Congressman, as a natural, logical result.
In the course of the campaign, the author gives us many an enlightening glimpse of what goes on in Washington “behind the scenes.” This little item for instance: When President Roosevelt is called away from the dinner-table by some urgent matter which requires instant attention, Mrs. Roosevelt, all the ladies, and all the gentlemen rise as the President rises and remain standing until he returns.
I, for one, was quite surprised to know that our sturdy lion-hunter, bronco-busting President had fallen into snobbery of that description. I hope it isn’t so.
A Maker of History.By E. Phillips Oppenheim. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, Mass.
A book which catches hold of you and takes you right along. It is original in its plot, dramatic in its incidents, absorbingly interesting in its narrative.
A young Englishman, by accident, happens to witness a meeting between the Emperor of Germany and the Czar of Russia—a meeting which elaborate precautions had been taken to keep secret. Another accident puts into the possession of the young Englishman a page of the secret treaty between the two Emperors. The scheme of this treaty is that Russia shall give England acasus belli, that Germany shall come to the assistance of Russia, and that Great Britain shall be despoiled. The young Englishman is suspected, and his footsteps are dogged by German spies. Later he talks imprudently in a Parisian restaurant, and becomes an object of intense interest to the French Secret Service. He suddenly and mysteriously disappears. His sister arrives in Paris, is astonished at the disappearance of her brother, and starts out to search for him. Then the sister disappears.
After a time everything turns out happily for hero and heroine, but in the meanwhile many an event of thrilling interest happens to keep the reader wide awake and wondering what the outcome will be.
The Greatest Trust in the World.By Charles Edward Russell. The Ridgway-Thayer Company, New York City.
This book is made up of the articles which were published inEverybody’s Magazine, and which created such a profound impression by their calm, relentless exposure of the most cruel and most lawless and most despotic Trust on earth. Not even the Standard Oil Company grinds the common people as the Beef Trust does, for the latter deals with food products which are indispensable to life, and the Beef Trust can and does say to the people, “Pay my price or die.”
The book treats of the might of this monopoly; of the great yellow car, the bandit of commerce; of the manner in which the Trust intimidates the railroads; of the manner in which the Federal Government white-washed the Trust; of the union between rotten business and rotten politics.
It is a book that all should study.
American Diplomacy.By John Bassett Moore. Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York City.
My own impression has been that “American Diplomacy” has never amounted to much, and I cannot say that Dr. Moore’s book has convinced me to the contrary.
The only apparent triumph of American Diplomacy was the securing of French aid in the Revolutionary War; and as to that most students will agree that “diplomacy” had nothing to do with it. France saw an opportunity to strike at her hereditary foe, Great Britain, and she sent an emissary to the American Congress to drop certain hints which led to the sending of Dean, Lee and Franklin to Paris. Where France was already so eager, “diplomacy” could claim no triumph.
It is to be regretted that Dr. Moore fails to mention John Laurens in connection with French aid. The fact is that Washingtonand Congress became dissatisfied with Franklin, and that John Laurens was despatched to France to hurry matters up. He did so. He got the money with which Washington made the decisive Yorktown Campaign, and brought it home with him. Surely Dr. Moore ought to have mentioned the name of John Laurens.
In the famous Jay treaty, “American Diplomacy” made a craven surrender to Great Britain, and in the Treaty of Ghent we certainly won no laurels. Andrew Jackson and his Southern volunteers threw the only crumb of comfort which the situation could boast when they shot the life out of Wellington’s veterans at New Orleans.
In the various negotiations concerning the Northwestern boundary, “American Diplomacy” has yielded up an Empire to British bluff and shrewdness. During the Civil War, “American Diplomacy” ate humble pie with a vengeance more than once; and even in the Venezuelan affair when Cleveland’s attitude seemed so heroic, England, it would appear, packed the arbitration board and got pretty much everything that she wanted.
In the last tilt between us and the mother country, touching the Canadian boundary, we were assured that the arbitration was a mere matter of form, and that Great Britain could not possibly get anything at all. Yet when the award was made, it developed that Great Britain had got slices of stuff all along the line—the land line and the water line.
American Diplomacy?
Bah!
Look at the manner in which Great Britain used us as her depot of supplies during the Boer War.
She held John Hay in the hollow of her hand, and with our aid crushed the republics of South Africa.
Fables and Symbols.By Clemence De La Baere, Sacramento, Cal.
Those who love truth and humor served up in the literary form of the fable, will find this an entertaining little volume. There is much wit and wisdom packed away in these stories; and they reveal a thorough knowledge of human nature and of present conditions.
Garrison the Non-Resistant.By Ernest Crosby. The Public Publishing Co., Chicago.
When a Southern writer eulogizes such a bitter foe to his people as was William Lloyd Garrison, his words will bear the same discount as must be given to the words of a Southern ex-Brigadier, when he goes North and tells pleased audiences, “I am glad you whipped us.”
The truth is the South does not love Garrison and isnotglad she was “whipped.”
When Mr. Crosby frankly states, as he does in this book, that Garrison had no sympathy whatever for the sufferings of the white laborers of the land, he put his finger upon the trait which caused Garrison’s great unpopularity in the South.
He was narrow and fanatical, and while he hated slavery for its own sake, he hated the South about as much as he hated slavery.
Wendell Phillips, after the negro was freed, went on broadening in the scope of his sympathies and his work. He became one of the stalwart champions of the rights of white labor. He studied its case, denounced its wrongs, demanded better things for the millions of toilers who were being exploited and destroyed by insatiable commercial greed.
Not so Garrison. The negro freed, the South reeking with her own life-blood, her homes in ashes, her soul crushed in utter desolation, Garrison was happy. His work was done. White men, white women, white children might groan and suffer and die in a worse slavery than had afflicted the blacks of the South, but Garrison did not sympathize—did not lift a finger, did not utter a word in their behalf. Another trait in Garrison’s character was just the trait to stir the dislike of a Southern man. He carried to such an extent his doctrine of non-resistance, that he declared he “would not defend by force his own wife in case of an assault.” In other words, rather than forcibly resist the criminal who sought to violate his own wife, he would stand idly by and permit the crime to be committed. I do not know how many Northern men endorse a sentiment of that kind. In my judgment they are few, very few. But I do know that there is not a respectable man in the South or West, who would not feel disgraced by the utterance of such a doctrine. Mr. Crosby deserves great credit for his courage and candor in admitting that while slavery was wrong, the war waged upon the South was wrong. Of course it was wrong. The whole negro race, here and throughout the earth, were not worth the frightful cost of the Civil War. Mr. Crosby’s book would have been more valuable had he omitted the last two chapters. The author is a very talented man but he cannot get to know the true status of the South by listening to the talk of loafers in the office of the hotel where he happens to stop.
Sidney Lanier.By Edwin Mims. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, Boston and New York.
A more interesting biographical work than this it would be difficult to name.
The author is temperate in his estimate of the genius of his subject, and relates the life struggles of the Georgia poet with sympathetic spirit.
As the years go by the fame of Sidney Lanier will grow. That he wrote some poems which have little merit is true; that his peculiar and unfortunate mannerism mars the beauty of other poems which do possess merit is also true; but after all this is conceded,it can be confidently claimed that he sometimes rose to the heights of Keats and Shelley, and that his art sometimes equalled the marvelous skill of Edgar Poe.
Here and there, throughout Lanier’s poems, can be found gems of thought and expression which in loftiness, purity and exquisite form lose nothing by comparison with the higher work of the best English poets.
Nor will the story of his life ever lose interest. It is so full of innate nobility; he met the most exacting duties so cheerily, so bravely; he fought the battle for bread with such manly confidence, such sweet sympathy for others; he gave to the world so much more than he asked from it; he was so independent and yet so companionable; he so long held at bay, with buoyant pluck, the ghastly White Terror, Consumption; he was so refined and strong and lovable and valiant and nobly aspiring that always and everywhere the simple facts in the life of this Georgia boy, Confederate soldier, painstaking lawyer, aspiring author, heaven-endowed musician, original poet, will move the hearts of men to respect, to sympathy, to admiration and love.
Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.By Walter L. Fleming. The Columbia University Press, New York, Publishers. The Macmillan Company, Agents.
All things considered, this is the most valuable contribution that has yet been made to the literature of the Reconstruction Era.
The book contains some 800 pages, and the mass of important data is a monument to the industry of the author.
Not only are we given a full account of the manner in which Secession was brought about, not only do we get the story of military operations during the Civil War and Carpet-Bag operations afterward, but we are given illuminating pictures of social and economic conditions, the unspeakable rottenness of negro government; the cotton frauds and stealings; the troubles in the churches; the movements of the Ku Klux Klan (which Tom Dixon most unaccountably traces back to the clan life of Scotland); the struggles of the native whites to throw off the carpet-bag and negro yoke; the upbuilding of an educational system; the gradual creation of a new industrial system; and the final triumphant vindication of Alabama of the right of local self-government and white supremacy.
Mr. Fleming has done a great and beneficent work in the gathering of the mass of facts which he embodies in this volume.
Compared to his, every other book on the same subject seems fragmentary.
Frenzied Finance.By Thomas Lawson. The Ridgway-Thayer Co., New York.
No matter what Mr. Lawson’s motive may have been, he has done a public service in the exposure of the methods of Wall Street which cannot be overestimated. For thirty years the story which Lawson has told has been asking for an audience. Time and again, books and magazine articles were published warning the people of the ways of the system. As far back as the days of Peter Cooper, loud voices of clear-eyed men were raised in the effort to rouse public attention. The literature of the Greenback movement, of the Farmers’ Alliance movement, and of the People’s Party movement was full of notes of warning, full of statements of fact exactly on line with Lawson’s revelations.
Why then did the revelations of Lawson sound like a new trumpet and rouse the country so quickly and so universally? Because Lawson spoke from theinside: because Lawson was one of the kings of finance himself: because Lawson had played the game himself: because Lawson drew to himself that peculiar attention which attaches to the witness who “turns State’s evidence.” A robber who has worn the mask and ridden with the band on many a midnight marauding foray is always listened to with breathless interest when he enters the box and tells how the robbery was planned, how the crime was committed, and now the spoil was divided. This is but natural. No matter how much proof one may have to establish the guilt of the accused, one feels, always, that there are details which none but the criminal can supply. Here Thomas Lawson’s value is beyond dispute and beyond price. That the methods of Frenzied Finance are substantially what Lawson says they are, can no longer be a matter of doubt.
“When You Were a Boy.” By Edwin L. Sabin. The Baker & Taylor Co., New York.
It seemed impossible that another successful book on school-life and boyhood days could be written, but the author has shown how easily one may be mistaken about a thing of that sort. Here is no story of a fascinating but impossible “Little Lord Fauntleroy”; here is no coarse, witless, stupid “Stalky & Co.,” here is no “Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer,” or “Tom Brown,” or “Peck’s Bad Boy,” or “Master William Mitten.” The hero of “When You Were a Boy”—is you. The author has looked into his own heart and drawn your picture to life. You had your little “fist and skull” fights—and here they are in this book. You had a pet dog who did all sorts of funny, aggravating, endearing things, and then died while you were off from home; and the author tells of it, intimately. Your first experience with your father’s shot-gun, your savage rapture over the first thing you killed—here it is in the book. And the first fishing trip, the first “party” you attended, the first girl you “saw home,” the first sweetheart—it is all put down, accurately, vividly. Even that time—you mean little whelp!—when you determined to punish your parents by “runningaway from home,”—the author found it out on you, and you will hang your head once more, and your eye will dim, as you read about it, in the book. The author does not preach and does not prose, and does not sentimentalise—but “When You Were a Boy” is one of the most life-like delineations of the American boy—his character, his feelings, his habits, his fun and frolic, his passions, his standards—that has ever been put in a book.
Bossism and Monopoly.By Thomas Carl Spelling. D. Appleton & Co., New York.
An exposition of the evils of the twins—Bossism and Monopoly. Mr. Spelling brings the record of trust robbery and boss despotism down to date, and while he necessarily has to treat the same facts and conditions which so many other writers have handled, none of them has a firmer grip upon the subject than he—nor have any of them produced a more essentially useful book. He is the only writer who has seized upon and utilized the tremendously important facts set forth by Albert Griffin in the financial articles which he wrote for thisMagazinesome months ago. What Mr. Griffin calls Hocus Pocus Money another may call fictitious values, unsupported credit, wild-cat inflation, or any other name, but the fact as first pointed out by Mr. Griffin is that the Privileged Few in the Banking world are taxing the people to an enormous amount for the use of bogus money.
Mr. Spelling also deals with the Railroad problem in a masterly way, advocating, as all sane men will soon be found doing, Government Ownership.
The Coming Crisis.By Gustavus M. Pinckney. Walker, Evans and Cogswell Co., Charleston, S. C.
This is a book to read closely and to think about. It is full of solid fact and sound reasoning. Its tone is calm, but its thought is deep, and it deals with matters of gravest import.
A quotation will give some idea of the scope of the work:
(1) “Society under government naturally tends to fall into two parties, one attached to the consumption of taxes and increase of power, the other attached to the decrease of taxes and to the limitation of power.
(2) The tendency of the first party is to absorb the rights and property of the second: the tendency of the second is to resist the process.
(3) Remaining unchecked, the first will steadily encroach and absorb until the second is compelled in self-preservation to resist by tendering the issue of force.”
That’s a clear bold statement and a true one.
Illustrating the method by which the one party appropriates the property of the other, Mr. Pinckney cites our infamous Tariff System.
“The amount of prices advanced under a 40 per cent. tariff andtransferred from one private pocket to another, would ... soon extend to figures todwarf the national debt.”
Some one has calculated that from Independence to 1861, the amount thus transferred from private pockets to other private pockets, without consideration, was something like $2,770,000,000.
The sum so stolen from private pockets by the damnable Tariff, since 1861, and put into other private pockets is a great deal more than the colossal figures mentioned above.
Mr. Pinckney likewise takes up the National Banker and shows how the Government allows him advantages over his fellow man that are “utterly without right, reason, or justification.” After explaining the juggle which takes place over the bonds, and the notes, he sums it up thus:
“The people are taxed in order that the privilege of issuing money may be farmed out to the banks.”
Nobody has ever summed up the iniquity of the National Banking System in a more startling sentence, and a good Democrat, like Mr. Pinckney, must have been sorely grieved when he saw every Democratic Senator and every Democratic Representative unite with the wicked Republicans in 1893-1894 to renew the charters of the National Banks for twenty years.
Space forbids the extending of these comments further. I will only add that no student of present conditions can afford to miss Mr. Pinckney’s book.
Letters and Addresses of Thomas Jefferson.Edited by Wm. B. Parker, of Colombia University, and Jonas Viles, of the University of Missouri. The Unit Book Pub. Co., New York.
When two college professors start out to give the world a new book onThomasJefferson, the world has a right to expect an unusually valuable book.
Professors Parker and Viles did not undertake an original composition. Theirs was the simpler task of making a good selection from the letters, State papers and addresses of Mr. Jefferson. That such a selection should be a success, it was necessary that the compilers acquaint themselves intimately with all that Jefferson wrote, and that the selections made should fairly representJefferson himself—Jefferson the man, the scholar, the farmer, the builder, the inventor, the advanced thinker, the man of bold speculative ideas, the statesman, the student of social and industrial problems.
Have our learned professors done this?
Mr. Jefferson’s book, “Notes on Virginia,” contains more than 300 pages. It is full of his most characteristic thinking. It displays the working of his mind on matters great and small, social, racial, historic practical and speculative.
Our Professors quote eight pages fromthe book, wherein Mr. Jefferson discusses Religion, Slavery and American Genius—three subjects only. These are important quotations, but what a pity it is that the Professors did not quote Jefferson’s profound study of the Indians, their physical and mental peculiarities, their mode of life, their love of their children, their fortitude under suffering, their undying loyalty to friends, their skill and bravery in war, their eloquence in council, their system of tribal government. Mr. Jefferson wrote nothing more interesting than this account of the Indians of Virginia. It was in this that he reproduced and handed down to posterity that gem of oratory which we boys used to “speak” at school—“Logan’s speech” sent to Lord Dunmore.
On page 166 of the “Notes,” Mr. Jefferson gives a concise and comprehensive statement of the wrongs which the colonies suffered at the hands of the King. Inasmuch as we have developed a school of Tory historians who make light of the American grievances, it might have been a good thing had the Professors quoted Mr. Jefferson’s summary of those grievances.
On page 172 of the “Notes,” Mr. Jefferson makes a remarkable prediction of the manner in which abuses will creep into our Government, and he solemnly warns his countrymen to combat these abuses “before they shall have gotten hold on us.”
Inasmuch as the abuses which Mr. Jefferson dreaded have gotten hold on us, his prophecy, published more than a hundred years ago, deserves a place in any collection of Jefferson’s works.
On page 216 of the “Notes,” Mr. Jefferson has a word to say on popular self-government which every American boy should read as soon as he becomes a voter. I am sorry the Professors left it out.
The most powerful chapter in the “Notes on Virginia,” is that beginning on page 228 and ending on page 235. As it stands written, it is a masterpiece. To spoil a good thing is easy; and the Professors spoilt the best chapter in Jefferson’s book by cutting out only a portion of it for use, and not the best part at that.
On page 240 of the “Notes” is Mr. Jefferson’s splendid tribute to the working classes of the rural communities—but the Professors seemingly attached no value to it.
What could have been more timely than the re-publication of Mr. Jefferson’s magnificent plea against War, and against Militarism, which covers pages 253, 254, and 255 of the “Notes”? The Professors could not have embraced in their collection anything of greater intrinsic and eternal value than this, and they have given much space to matter which, compared to this, is mere trash.
I have neither the time nor the patience to compare the letters which these Professors have collected with those which they have left out. If they selected the letters in the same spirit that they culled from the “Notes,” their compilation is just as far from doing justice to Mr. Jefferson as “The True Thomas Jefferson,” by W. E. Curtis, was from the truth. There is no American book of the same size that contains more errors than Curtis’s “True Jefferson;” and when I saw that these two Professors had named that book as one of their authorities—well, you can see for yourself how it stimulated my attention.
Democracy in the South Before the Civil War.By G. W. Dyer, M. A., Pub. House of the M. E. Church South. Nashville, Tenn.
The author modestly calls this a compendium of a more comprehensive work which will be published later.
It is an exceedingly valuable study. The author has dug up a lot of buried treasure. His refutation of many unfounded opinions concerning social economic and political conditions in the South prior to the Civil War is supported by a diligence of research that gather all the necessary evidence.
Among other facts of importance which Mr. Dyer establishes, Prof. John Bach McMaster to the contrary notwithstanding, are:
(1) There was no land monopoly in the South. On the contrary there was a better pro rata distribution of land than in the free States.
(2) Manual labor was not a badge of disgrace. On the other hand, the white population of the South was engaged in all kinds of manual labor, excepting menial service.
(3) The South had a larger number of miles of railroads in 1860 in proportion to her free population than the rest of the country.
(4) In 1860, Southern people were engaged in almost all kinds of manufacturing.
(5) In 1860 the South was the richest section of the country, and her wealth was increasing with greater rapidity than that of the other sections.
It will be remembered that in one of his great speeches in Congress William L. Yancey demonstrated this truth.
(6) Wages were higher in the South than in the North in 1860.
So they are even now. The laborer who produces that free trade product, cotton, gets nearly one-half of the value of the cotton produced. In the Protected industries of the North the laborer does not receive an average of twenty-five percent of the product of his labor.
Mr. Dyer proves another fact worth mention:
The idea of a State fund for the education of those who were not able to pay their tuition originated in the South. In other words, the present American system of State free public schools was born in the South. If Mr. Dyer’s more comprehensivework increases in value as it increases in size it will deserve to be a most successful book.
“Sonnets to a Wife.” By Ernest McGaffey. William Marion Reedy. St. Louis, Mo.
Mr. McGaffey makes his Sonnets a continuous hymn of the beautiful in Nature. The clean atmosphere of the open world is in every sonnet. All the airs of heaven blow pureness about these lovers. The spiritual significance of the great Nature, of which husband and wife and their love for each other are a part, is always strongly suggested, and this without cant either of orthodoxy or of the dolorous minor poet lamenting the loss of himself to the world.
The Eternal Spring.A Novel. By Neith Boyce. Fox, Duffield & Co., New York, $1.50, postpaid.
The story opens at an Italian villa, overlooking Florence. Elizabeth Craven is wearing “second mourning” for a deceased husband who was too old for her, and who had never satisfied her womanly cravings for male companionship. Elizabeth is thirty-eight years old, but is still in the flush of health and strength and beauty. Hers is the villa, and to her comes Barry Carlton, who has been stock-gambling for several years in Chicago, and has quit because he had won a modest competence and had brought himself to the brink of nervous collapse.
Barry Carlton had known Elizabeth intimately five years before and had become warmly attached to her. Poor Elizabeth! She had loved Barry all the while, and she loves him yet.
She is radiantly happy as she welcomes Barry to her villa. She knows that he has come from America to ask her to become his wife. He is thirty years old, and while worn down to a painful thinness she has no doubt whatever that rest and loving attention will soon restore his robust youth.
Thenshe will live. She has never known life; she has been cramped and confined all these years; when she marries her young lover, she will know the passion ofliving.
But alas! Barry wooes tamely. Elizabeth is coy, expecting more heat. Barry cannot give it, the wooing lags, no engagement occurs, and then comes the shipwreck of Elizabeth’s hopes. Barry falls in love with a divinely gifted and lovely young creature who is also a guest at the villa.
A strange thing happens to the reader. Elizabeth has wonhisheart, and she holds it to the end. She is so womanly in her devotion to Barry; so womanly in her grief at losing him, so majestic in her renunciation of her own hopes, so beautifully generous and helpful to the man and the girl who have broken her own heart, that the reader feels himself about to say:
“One Elizabeth were worth a dozen Claras.”
For the reader does not fall in love with Clara. She is a bit unnatural and uncanny.
Her mother, the bad but magnificent Mrs. Langham, is far more real and interesting.
As to Barry himself, the reader never does quite understand why the women find him so irresistible. It does not appear that he is very handsome, or very accomplished, or very anything else, excepting that he is abominably selfish in his dealings with Elizabeth. The women who fall in love with him rave about his “honesty,” but that is a quality which seldom carries women off their feet. Decidedly Elizabeth remains the heroine and next to her in interest comes the bad, beautiful Mrs. Langham. The author tells the story with superb art. There are no incidents, no thrills, no dramatic climaxes, and yet there is not a dull page in the book.
“Well, now, which do you think is correct, ‘measles is’ or ‘measles are’?” chucklingly inquired the landlord of the Torpidville tavern. “Also, would you say, ‘The Glee Club are’ or ‘the Glee Club is’?”
“D’know!” replied the patent-churn man, shortly. “Those old catch-questions don’t interest me a little bit. But what I’d like to know is why everybody looks so pleased and smiling today? Is there a picnic or celebration or something of the sort on the tapis?”
“No, skurcely that. It’s the relief that is tickling ’em, not anticipation. You see, the Glee Club of the village Academy was going to give a concert and cantata tomorrow night, assisted by our best local talent, and now the measles have, or has, as the case may be, broken out, up there in the temple of learnin’, and every member of the Glee Club have, or has, got it, or them, good and plenty and the entertainment has been indefinitely—haw! haw!—postponed.”