century; that point is fully proved; for the rest it is an attractive summary of the enduring work of a well-bred, selfish, highly educated, and slightly miserly gentleman.
Four of the most timely papers read at the Cincinnati meeting of the American Historical Association have here been collected and delightfully published, with a prefatory note by Professor H. E. Bourne, under the imprint of the Harvard University Press. The papers, because of their pertinency to the present war and its issue and also because of the well-recognized competency of their authors, should now be read with pleasure and profit by a wide circle.
Messrs. Hazen, Thayer, and Lord, in dealing respectively with the Congresses of Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, have not bored us with repetitious discussion of the detailed problems that came before the assembled diplomatists or of the merits of the solutions reached. Rather, they have all conformed admirably to the dictum laid down by Mr. Hazen that he would content himself with describing "the manner in which the Congress approached its problems, the way in which it handled its business, its mode of organization, its methods of work, the machinery it employed in the discharge of its highly complicated task". To many it will seem a pity that the authors have not broadened the scope of their papers sufficiently to admit of some indication of the hopes and aspirations voiced in the press and popularly entertained immediately before, and during, the several congresses. Such hopes and aspirations—even prior semi-official pronouncements of the governments concerned—have so often been at variance with the treaty achievements, that a frank recognition of this fact might go far to restrain undue optimism about the millennium's being ushered in by the congress which will terminate the present war. With the exception of Mr. Lord's passing reference to the petitions of representatives of the Alliance Israelite and of the Peace Society to the Congress of Berlin, the congresses are considered as jousting matches for brightly caparisoned (though not over-chivalrous) noble diplomatists, never as dickerings of cabals unrepresentative of their fellow nationals in social position, in manners, in purpose, and in "interests". Perhaps the authors have done wisely to exclude consideration of contemporaneous public opinion of the congresses, for otherwise their studies would have been expanded to much larger dimensions, would have lacked unity, and would have engulfed the "gentle reader" in a most desperately abysmal slough of pessimism.
As it is, the effect of the hour's perusal of the three papers is to
