First in order is Mr. John Fiske's History. This book has been very carefully examined, noting the changes appearing in the edition of 1899. Rev. Dr. Tucker's and Mr. Carter A. Bishop's reports upon it have already been submitted. The work done by both of these gentlemen is able and conclusive. To read their reports would, of course, overrun our time.
It is evident to all of us that Mr. Fiske is an able man and a student of history. He has seen, more plainly than any other perhaps (what the Northern orators and writers are silently or openly yielding), that every claim of the South, of such sort as naturally rests upon categorical facts, is already res adjudicata in our favor at the bar of the world. He knows from the writers around him (Mr. Lodge and others) that our claim to the right of secession cannot be resisted; that the right of coercion cannot be maintained; that the superior personal and military character of our leaders is beyond dispute; that estimating Americans, foreign mercenaries, and the negroes in their ranks, the average type and quality of their private soldier was far below ours; and their numbers so far superior that the Southern victories set the world wondering. He knows, too, that the records made up along the track of armies and their own statistics of deaths in prison have forever proved our higher civilization in war. So he foresees and dreads the day of doom, when, as already prophesied, history is to declare the truth triumphant and his the "Lost Cause." His writings, the others as well as the history, prove his consciousness that there remains to his section only this last resort—to make the world believe that our motives were base—a charge which they hope will be answered with more difficulty, inasmuch as it rests upon unsubstantial and intangible interpretation of facts, and not upon facts themselves.
ELEGANCE OF DICTION.
With elegance of diction and wealth of knowledge sufficient to blind and interest a multitude of readers he devotes himself to this object. He is an advocate seeking to procure pardon for the wrong-doings of his own section by persuading the world of the guilt
