and such an act the House is free to allow or disallow at its discretion, and that foreign governments are presumed to know that, so far as a treaty stipulates to pay money, legislative sanction is required to the validity of the treaty. Dr. Crandall's thesis rejects this view. While it recognizes, of necessity, that a treaty stipulating for an appropriation can be fully carried into effect only by an act of Congress, yet it is maintained (pp. 134-135) that "if the House has no agency in the making of the treaty, its action is not essential to the validity of the treaty. For the House to disclaim any agency in the making of the international compact, but at the same time to deny any obligation to execute it, is to recognize another organ of government as competent to bind the nation, but at the same time to except itself from the obligation." The monograph is a worthy study not only as an exercise in investigation, but in its tangible results. JAMES A. WOODBURN.

A History Syllabus for Secondary Schools. Prepared by a Special Committee of the New England History Teachers' Association. (Boston, D. C. Heath and Company, 1904, PP. 375.) This committee of ten, of which Professor Herbert Darling Foster was chairman, undertook the task of making a thorough syllabus covering the four blocks or periods marked by the Committee of Seven, giving references to available and useful books, and in other ways furnishing the teachers with suggestions and useful information. The work has been done with great care and with elaboration. A general introduction points out the purpose of the volume and the way it should be used and gives a few wellchosen suggestions to teachers. Then each block of history is treated separately; the main problems to be met in handling the period and the chief end to be gained are briefly stated. For each period there is an elaborate outline, accompanied by explicit references to authorities. For each period also is given a select bibliography, with the names of publishers and the prices of the volumes, as well as the more necessary and usual bibliographical detail.

Almost any one, unwise enough to try, could find fault with some portion of this work. One might question the advisability of referring to certain books, or might doubt the wisdom of the method of analysis used. Of course history cannot be reduced to an absolutely logical system which will extort acquiescence from everybody. But these references have been made by those who know historical literature, and the analysis has been made by those who know their history; and the result is a general scheme which will surely be of unusual service to the teacher. It is not unwise therefore to use a time-worn expression and say that the desk of every teacher should be supplied with a copy of The gratitude of the teaching profession (we do not speak so confidently of the boys and girls) is due the committee for the toil and intelligence with which this volume was prepared. Possibly some teachers will be bewildered by the wealth of illustrative material; but

it is unnecessary to say that many references are necessary to meet many conditions, and that the task of the teacher in making a selection ought not to be very burdensome.

A Register of National Bibliography, with a selection of the chief bibliographical books and articles printed in other countries, by William Prideaux Courtney (London, Constable, 1905, 2 vols., pp. viii, 314, 315631), reminds one of the Dictionary of National Biography not merely by its title but by the exhaustiveness and compactness of the information it contains. While it includes references to bibliographical matter of interest to all scientists, it must, like other works of this class, be of primary value to the historian; partly for its references to bibliographies of historical literature, but even more for its references to bibliographies of related subjects. The work also contains a few notes of bibliographies in manuscript. Among these may be mentioned a catalogue. raisonné of the Thomason collection of pamphlets in the British Museum, now in course of preparation, and the collections of a bibliography of ancient and Christian Rome, by Professor J. H. Middleton, which is preserved in the British Museum. W. D. JOHNSTON.

Geschichte der griechischen und makedonischen Staaten seit der Schlacht bei Chaeronea. Von Benedictus Niese. Dritter Teil. Von 188 bis 120 v. Chr. (Gotha, Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1903, pp. xii, 468.) Niese's History of the Greek and Macedonian States is a supplement to Busolt's Griechische Geschichte, and a companion work to Hermann Schiller's Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit. All three are professedly handbooks of ancient history. They have this in common-they all tend to be dull. Niese's history is more than dull—it is tedious. In the first place it lacks any distinction of style. In the second place it does not redeem or justify this defect by any real insight into character, or by any lucid combination of the material. In fact this volume is broken up into a number of parallel histories, which, according to Niese, is the only possible result when Rome is not made the historian's standpoint. That is tantamount to a confession that his work ought to have ceased earlier.

At any rate, this, the last book of the three, is distinctly formless. It begins at 188 B. C. because the second ended there; and the second ended for the same reason for which the third comes to a conclusion, not because of anything intrinsic in the subject, but, as Niese frankly admits, on account of the exhaustion of the space at his disposal. Niese tends to include everything he happens upon, if not in the text, then in the foot-notes. Such faults as these would ruin an ordinary book. But this is a German handbook, and, besides, Niese is not an ordinary man. He is, indeed, one of the keenest of modern critics, and, in addition, a scholar of wide range and exact knowledge. This volume, like each of the earlier ones, contains many invaluable sections, and

practically all the available data. Appended are seven pages of Addenda et Corrigenda, a rather perfunctory chronological supplement, and a complete index. W. S. FERGUSON.

Die neue Livius-Epitome aus Oxyrhynchus. Von Ernst Kornemann. [Beiträge zur alten Geschichte, zweites Beiheft.] (Leipzig, Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1904, pp. 131.) The importance of the fragmentary epitome of Livy, which was one of the treasures of the fourth volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, warranted Kornemann in making it the subject of a special study. His text (pp. 13-34) differs in numerous points from that of the editio princeps, but the general sense has seldom been altered by the changes. The commentary (pp. 35-68) is noteworthy for the quotation of the passages in Livy and epitomes of Livy by which the restorations suggested are supported. So far little strikingly new is offered. It is in the last two sections of his book, IV (pp. 68-87), in which is established the genealogy of the papyrus; and v, in which the history of the years 150 to 137 B. C. is recast so as to include the new material, that Kornemann has done his best work. The stemma on p. 88 presents the main conclusions of section IV. In section v the new information contained in the papyrus is summarized and appraised. It comes from the last 135 lines of the fragment, as is natural, since these alone are derived from lost books (40 to 55) of Livy. The second century B. C. of Roman history is like the third century B. C. of Greek history in the lamentable dearth of other than the merest apology for literary sources. And yet where in ancient history is knowledge more desirable than in the epoch which preceded the Gracchi? Hence the ready welcome extended by modern historians to this puny fragment with its penchant for prodigies, games, stupra, and anecdotes of all sorts; for out of its record of domestic affairs issues clearly, what Eduard Meyer had already surmised, the deadly reaction of the disastrous Spanish wars upon the position of the senatorial government. We learn how seriously it was embarrassed in securing recruits for the thankless conflicts with the Lusitanian and Celtiberian mountaineers. It obtained relief by sacrificing the Italian allies, and reaped its harvest in the Social War. The Principate had in this respect the same experience as the Republic, and for the same reason, the inability of Italy to support the burdens of world-empire. All this and much besides Kornemann makes clear.

W. S. FERGUSON.

La Terre et la Race Roumaines depuis leurs Origines jusqu'à nos jours, by Alexandre A. C. Sturdza (Paris, Librairie J. Rothschild, L. Laveur, 1904, pp. xvi, 724), if it only had an index, might be regarded as a handy encyclopedia of the history and conditions of Roumania. As it is, the task of reading through its seven hundred closely packed pages will be too much for the ordinary reader, even if he is interested in the subject, for there is not sufficient grace of style to ac

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celerate the digesting of so large an amount of matter. Of course to the specialist any such volume of general history is but of occasional Mr. Sturdza has devoted his first 150 pages to geography, physical, political, and economic; history comes in for about 440 pages, or the larger half of the book; and culture and civilization for 225 more. dedication "à l'Héroïsme Séculaire des Roumains" shows the spirit in which he has written. We are thus prepared to find that the modern Roumanians are a harmonious blend of Dacians and Latins and no one can to-day support the theory of Rössler and Hunfalvy" (that they were emigrants from south of the Danube) without covering himself with ridicule". For the same reasons we are not surprised at being told that among the Magyars, "that last manifestation of Mongol savagery before the Tartars", the greater part of the aristocracy was recruited from amidst the Roumanians who, having already an organized feudal nobility before the arrival of the Hungarians, imparted to them, together with this institution, a strain which clarified their blood and thus made possible the formation of an upper class among them" (p. 175). This is obviously not the tone of serious history. Nevertheless, in spite of the rather dithyrambic patriotism which deprives Mr. Sturdza's views of all claim to impartiality, he has written a solid work in more senses than one, for it is the product of no small amount of learning as well as of much toil. Most of us, indeed, who are still unable to read the history of Roumania in the language of the country itself must welcome every serious contribution to the subject in a western garb, especially when as in the present instance the book is based on the researches of the latest native writers.

ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE.

Western Europe in the Eighth Century and Onward: an Aftermath. By the late E. A. Freeman, M.A., Hon. D. C. L., Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. (London and New York, Macmillan, 1904, pp. viii, 470.) This volume contains portions of a considerable work on Frankish history at which Professor Freeman labored in his later years. They were left in disconnected form and in various stages of completion at the writer's death and were sent to the press by Professor York Powell, who considered them a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the period. They consist of a fragment on Balthild and Ebroin, a series of fragments on "Charles and Pippin and the Change of Dynasty ", a fairly complete chapter of a hundred and eighty pages on the Italian and Saracen wars of Pippin, some scattering matter on The Strife of Paris and Laon", and an appendix of critical notes. A book on Frankish history which makes a clean jump over the decisive years from 768 to 887 reads queerly, and it required some courage and considerable confidence in the importance of Mr. Freeman's conclusions to put his work before the public in such unfinished shape. The volume is plainly meant for the specialist, who will find profit in the discussions of the patriciate and donation and in the

detailed account of Pippin's campaigns, in spite of the amount of more or less relevant comparison and allusion with which the author was in the habit of overloading his writings. Mr. Freeman was deeply interested in the Franks and well versed in the narrative sources of their history, and he might well have produced a work in this field which would have done something to make up for the surprising lack of even tolerable books in English on the subject; but his real duty lay elsewhere. No one else was so well qualified to write the great History of Sicily, of which the four published volumes are only a beginning, and the time he spent on the Franks was taken from the more important task. "For this kind of thing the West-Gothic kings are left undone ", wrote Mr. Freeman when Mrs. Ward published Robert Elsmere; and for an adequate account of the Normans in Sicily we could well spare all that is here written on the Aquitanian campaigns and the inexhaustible controversy over Pippin's relations with the pope.

C. H. HASKINS.

The Middle Ages: Sketches and Fragments. By Thomas J. Shahan, S.T.D., J.U.L., Professor of Church History in the Catholic University, Washington, D. C. (New York, Benziger Brothers, 1904, pp. 432.) The thirteen essays and papers which Father Shahan has here collected from various Catholic periodicals are addressed to a popular audience and make no claim to originality. The longer essays deal with such general subjects as Gregory the Great, Justinian, Islam, the cathedral builders, the results of the Crusades, and the Italian Renaissance. Among the "fragments" we find a summary of Janssen's conclusions regarding German schools in the sixteenth century, a few pages on "Clergy and People in Mediæval England" as seen by Gasquet, and a refutation of Michelet's characterization of the middle ages as "a thousand years without a bath". "The Book of a Mediæval Mother" deals with the little-known manual which Dodana (or Dhuoda), duchess of Septimania, wrote in 843 for the edification of her son William, and there are still briefer papers on "The Christians of St. Thomas" and "The Mediæval Teacher". On all these topics the author holds a brief for the medieval church; and the longest essay in the volume, entitled "Catholicism in the Middle Ages", is an elaborate plea for the preeminence of the church as the great formative influence in medieval society. Much that is here said the impartial student of history must admit, but there is also another side, and there is likely to be some dissent from the dictum (p. 191) that It is owing to the Catholic Church that we now enjoy a regular procedure in the administration of law." Even where no ecclesiastical considerations are involved, the author's habit of facile generalization leads him into such eccentricities of judgment as the exaltation of Justinian over Charlemagne, or into such an error as the assertion (p. 235) that "The inseparable text-book of the mediæval teacher was Vergil, and his majestic Latin the highest scientific ideal." The essays are pleasantly written and will prove agreeable