regarded the annexation of any portion of Canada as likely to be, within his lifetime, within the sphere of practical politics. There are Americans with other views of course, and perhaps the present attitude of New England business men toward the subject of Canadian reciprocity is connected with growing opinions about the further possibility; but to the majority of us the subject is at most one for humorous bravado toward our Canadian neighbors, or for purely speculative discussion.
No country needs self-knowledge more than America. I have indicated these inevitable lines of negative criticism of the book, not because the most important things to be said about it are adverse, but because I welcome it as an invaluable addition to our apparatus for self-inspection. Its judgments are so much more flattering, on the whole, than judicial Americans would or could pass upon themselves, that a certain consistency will force them to discount such items as those specified, before they will feel at liberty to take the benefit of its analysis. Having recognized these limitations, I am free to say that the book ought to go into the list that every intelligent American should read. After all, large-minded men will find enough, not only between but in the lines, indicative of our rawness, and our faults, and our dangers, in every department of life, to prove that the author is as discriminating as he is generous.
M. Gabriel Hanotaux, who belongs to the French Academy, has undertaken a contemporary history of France from February, 1871, to the end of 1900. This volume treats of the end of the Franco-German war, with the government of M. Thiers, the negotiations for peace, the Commune, the constitutional crisis, the debates of the National Assembly, and the liberation of the territory. It ends with May 24, 1873.
The author, a diplomatist and formerly minister of foreign affairs, was able by reason of the positions he occupied to obtain unpublished documents on that period of French history. He possessed such documents concerning both the inner and the outer affairs of France. This work is more a political and diplomatic than a general history of France. As it is, it is a most interesting book,
