The New Nation. [The Riverside History of the United States,  IV. William E. Dodd, Editor.] By Frederick L. Paxson,  Professor of History in the University of Wisconsin.  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. [1915.] Pp.  342, xiv. $1.25 net.)

In attempting to tell the story of the United States from the Civil War to the middle of Woodrow Wilson's administration, Professor Paxson has assumed a most difficult task. So infinitely varied and complex has our social and economic life become that one who would traverse our recent history can seldom be sure of his path. Lack of perspective and the influences of prejudices, which are frequently the more dangerous because subconscious, hinder at nearly every step.

To say that Professor Paxson has succeeded in giving in the main a clear and convincing narrative is, therefore, high praise. He has rightly given chief place to that economic growth which has contributed so powerfully to the development of a truly national but complex social organism and which has brought with it the tremendous problem of readjusting to this condition an old system based upon a relatively simple and homogeneous condition of society. To his mind the Civil War was but incidental to the development of this life and reconstruction equally so. One chapter of barely twenty pages suffices for his treatment of the latter subject and nowhere does he give evidence of any appreciation of the profound change in our constitutional system which was wrought by the stress of war and reconstruction. The subjects chiefly dealt with are the intimate relation of big business and politics, already apparent in the years immediately following the war; the development of the far West; the greenback and granger movements; the tariff; populism; free silver; the trust and corporation problems; Roosevelt and the New Nationalism. But one chapter is given to the Spanish war, which again is merely incidental to the larger developments of the country's economic growth. The narrative comes down to 1914.

Chas. W. Ramsdell.