THE CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. By Francis Newton Thorpe. Callaghan & Co.; Chicago. 1901. Three vol umes. Cloth: $7.50. (xxi -f- 595; xix + 685; xvi + 718 pp.) The aim of this work is to cover the Consti tutional History of the United States from 1765 to 1895. The first volume is devoted to the framing of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. The second volume deals with the ratification of the Constitution, the adoption of the first twelve Amendments, slavery, and secession. The third volume discusses emancipation, the last three Amendments, and subsequent events, It must be very difficult indeed for a writer upon constitutional history to determine upon his point of departure. Shall he begin with the Constitution itself? Or with the Articles of Confederation? Or with the colonial forms of government? Or with the rise and develop ment of free institutions in England? Or with the earlier attempts to establish popular gov ernments in Greece? And to what extent shall he discuss the influence of Dutch practices and of French theories? The author of these volumes has confined himself, though not invariably, to American soil, and to the time in which there has been something resembling an American nation. Unquestionably these limitations are intelligible and sensible. Further, the apportionment of the subject among the three volumes is quite in accordance with perspective, for it seems, as the author says, that our constitutional history falls naturally into three nearly equal parts. The less praiseworthy feature of the work is the author's apparent theory that the writing of constitutional history should be restricted almost exclusively to pointing out the steps by which the words of the Constitution and of the Amend ments became what they are. This unfortunate misconception results in the very grave defect — from a lawyer's point of view, the fatal de fect — that the work gives slight attention to the decisions of the Supreme Court. Of the fortv-two chapters, only two purport to be de voted to constitutional cases; and, though these two chapters are not exclusively given up to this subject, and the subject is to some extent treated in other chapters, a computation based
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upon the apparent apportionment of chapters is nearly accurate, and the work may fairly be said to represent that the decisions of the Supreme Court are in importance about one twentieth part of our constitutional history. This is very far from the lawyer's opinion; and it leads to the surprising result that the work apparently makes no mention of the Dartmouth College Case, the Slaughter-House Cases, and the Neagle Case. This conception, too, that constitutional history has to do with little save the very words of the Constitution and of the Amendments, leads to the equally unfortunate result that the work seems to omit the impeachment trial of President Johnson, the Tenure of Office Act, the Electoral Commission, and the present stat ute fixing the succession to the presidency. The work makes liberal use of quotations and paraphrases from documents and speeches. This is probably its most original and useful feature, and for the layman, but not for the lawyer, this feature goes an appreciable distance toward atoning for the inexcusable underesti mate of the part that the judicial department of the government has taken in creating or modify ing the doctrines, whether written or unwritten, which are, or have been, part of the constitu tional system of the United States. REPORT, OF THE TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIA TION. 1900. (682 pp.) Outside of the working books of the profession there is no set of volumes which have a stronger claim to a place on the shelves of a lawyer's book-case than the twenty-three volumes of the "Reports of the American Bar Association." One has only to glance through the list of an nual addresses, from the first one, in 1879, by the Honorable Edward J. Phelps, on John Mar shall, which has become a classic, to " The March of the Constitution," delivered by George R. Peck, Esq., at the meeting last summer, and to note the subjects and the authors of the other addresses during the twenty-three years to see how wide a field these papers have covered and how distinguished are the gentlemen who have had the honor of speaking before the Associa tion. These volumes may be opened at random with the certainty of finding some able and in teresting contribution to legal literature.
