perform the duties of citizens; and, in the second series, to show how our diplomacy has been practically useful in furthering our commerce and navigation. Under the former head are the chapters on "The Department of State," "Our Consular System," and "Diplomatic Officials," in which the history, theory, purpose, and operations of those services are fully described; and under the second head is shown "how we asserted our rights to freedom of navigation, freedom from tribute such as was paid to the Barbary pirates, freedom from the police supervision of the ocean which Great Britain at one time wished to obtain, and freedom from the restrictions on the free navigation of rivers and seas, about which we had disputes with powers so remote as Spain, Great Britain, Russia, Denmark, and Brazil." Chapters have also been devoted to the fishery question, and to the efforts of our Government to conclude commercial treaties with foreign powers. The whole subject is a very large one, and Mr. Schuyler calls attention to the fact that several points still remain to be considered.
Dutch Village Communities on the Hudson River. By Irving Elting. Pp. 68. Town Government in Rhode Island. By William E. Foster. Pp. 36. The Narragansett Planters. By Edward Channing. Pp. 23. Pennsylvania Boroughs. By William P. Holcomb. Pp. 51. Baltimore: N. Murray.
These monographs, Nos. 2 and 3 being bound together, form the first four numbers of the fourth series of "Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science." The interest of the studies shows no signs of flagging; there appears to be abundance of material at hand on which to base the successive new researches, and it is well used by the several authors. Concerning the lessons that may be learned from the studies, Mr. Foster remarks, in the opening of his paper, that "the application of the comparative method to the study of early American history has within recent years been attended with results of the most substantial value. The scattered communities along the Atlantic coast which, since 1776, have been united in a common bond of government, had their origin in widely diverse sets of conditions. While, therefore, their development has been characterized by institutions bearing a general analogy to each other, there is sufficient individuality and local differentiation to be observed, in any one instance, to render a somewhat close comparison of their points of resemblance and difference extremely serviceable. It is plain, moreover, that the further down in the scale of local division we can go, the more fruitful will be the study of these local institutions."
Mr. Elting's paper, on "Dutch Village Communities on the Hudson River," shows how these communities, which were in fact a secondary though more natural form of organization supplementing the first artificial and unsatisfactory aristocratic form, were really the outgrowth of German institutions that are known to have existed at least as far back as the time of Julius Cæsar. The same idea of community in the ownership of the land appears to mark them both. In conclusion, the author asserts, with considerable boldness, we think, that "from the banks of the Rhine, the germs of free local institutions, borne on the tide of Western emigration, found here, along the Hudson, a more fruitful soil than New England afforded for the growth of these forms of municipal, State, and national government, which have made the United States the leading republic among the nations."
Mr. Foster, in his "Town Government in Rhode Island," dwells upon the independent origin and independent action of the towns, which prevented them from associating themselves together except under great stress of circumstances, and then under reservations which fixed a stamp on the character of the State; and this trait of original organization explains the hesitation which was shown by Rhode Island in adopting the Federal Constitution. In the "Narragansett Planters," Mr. Channing describes a peculiar landed aristocracy possessing large estates, who, obtaining a holding on Narragansett Bay, produced a state of society which had no parallel in New England, and "was an anomaly in the institutional history of Rhode Island."
In "Pennsylvania Boroughs," Mr. Holcomb glances at the antiquity of the borough in England, considers the meaning of the term, especially as used in Pennsylvania, in
