290 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April and three line battalions. Basil Jackson definitely states that the special rifle ammunition, the loss of which made Baring evacuate La Haye Sainte, was found upset in a ditch by the Brussels road. x. 263, for ' the Guards ' read ' Maitland's brigade ' ; p. 273, for ' Pirch I ' read ' Pirch II ' ; p. 287, for ' Vth ' read ' Illrd ' ; pp. 378 and 387, Chasse's division is mentioned as brought up into the second line on two separate occasions. Sir John has marked off all the Waterloo regiments as P. or G., according as they had served in the Peninsula or under Graham ; one wishes that he had more definitely tabulated them, their services, and their proportion of recruits to veterans ; also, it would have been valuable to have had the record of the battalions from America, Lambert's brigade arriving after a night's march on the very morning of the 18th, the 43rd missing the battle by barely twenty-four hours, others a month late but strengthening greatly Wellington's army in Paris. The reviewer, having now reviewed every one of the ten volumes, may be permitted to hope that the historian will, in spite of adverse circum- stances, carry on his work at least to the great Indian wars and the Crimea, if not to Afghanistan and the Cape and Egypt. J. E. Morris. The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Gait. By 0. D. Skelton. (Toronto : Oxford University Press, 1920.) Professor Skelton of Queen's University, Kingston, has made a real contribution to recent Canadian history. At first sight his book seems an unnecessarily large work to be devoted to the activities of a man who was never the leader of a political party, never a really great figure, who is now forgotten outside Canada, and only dimly remembered even there. But the emphasis is put on the ' times ' rather than on the ' life ', domestic details are wholly omitted, and from this book we are able to understand much Canadian history that before was obscure. Gait's main activities were only partly political, he went into politics to carry out economic pur- poses ; before and after his twenty-five years of parliamentary life he was directly concerned with town-building, land settlement, and railway development. So we get politics and constitutional issues as only one part of a many-sided career. Till recently Canadian histories have ignored the economic background of all change, and this book (as was to be expected from its author, an economist) brings the connexion into proper relief. Politically, Gait's was a curious career ; the reason why he never became a great party leader is apparent from his constantly shifting views — though Professor Skelton minimizes any inconsistencies. The son of John Gait, who mixed authorship of The Annals of the Parish with an attempt (in 1810) to open Salonika to English trade, and who from 1824 gave his main energies to planting British settlers in Upper Canada, Alexander Gait had naturally a non-political upbringing. He began life as a business man, in 1843, when twenty-six years old, becoming secretary of the British American Land Company, which was trying to do for the eastern townships what the Canada Company under his father's guidance had done for the Huron tract in what is now Ontario. Land
