War has taught the Southern farmer the value of diversification of crops, and that cotton growing in California, in Egypt, and in other lands will probably become of sufficient importance in the near future to break the monopoly held by the South in the production of this staple.
Among the important subjects which it is surprising to find are not considered at sufficient length are the growth of the cotton-seed oil industry, the damage wrought by the boll-weevil and the efforts made to overcome this danger, and the increasing tendency to supplant negro labor by white labor in the cultivation of cotton.
If President Scherer's book be regarded not as an original piece of investigation in the field of economic history but as a useful summary of the researches of other writers who have dealt with the influence of cotton in the world's history, it can be warmly commended as a work interesting to read and fairly reliable in its facts and generalizations. There are some useful statistical appendixes, a handy bibliography, and a good index.
This volume is strictly what it purports to be, a revised edition of General Davis's work. He lived long enough to record the work of the two Hague Conferences of 1S99 and 1907, but not long enough to judge of its practical value. His third edition was published in 1908, before the adoption, ad referendum, of the Declaration of London. Professor Sherman prints in an appendix (H, pp. 604–620) the text of that paper, and a succinct and clear account of how far it has affected the pending European wars. Appendix I also gives our treaty of 1909 with the Dominican Republic
It was, of course, desirable from the publishers' standpoint to make as few changes as might be, in the stereotype plates of the edition of 1908. It remains Davis's book. It remains a treatise in which the author writes as a military man, and gives special consideration to problems connected with war. This gives it a particular value at the present time.
Professor Sherman found it necessary to rewrite important parts of the first two chapters, which treat of the value and sources of international law and the nature of a political state. This he has done with discrimination and good judgment.
In printing the Declaration of London he has added notes, referring to the bearing of its dispositions on the present wars, as wrought
