conscience which will be acceptable to sociology, if philosophy can show the spirit gaining its liberty by an élan vital, and in that struggle for self-realization developing a "faith in duty" which is religion. J. T. SHOTWELL.

The Holy Christian Church. By R. M. JOHNSTON. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912.-xx, 331 pp.

This is less a formal and detailed history of Christianity than a stimulating summary of points of view and conclusions of recent investigations. The boldest invasions of comparative religion and criticism are given with suggestive clarity. But it is more than a compendium of conclusions; it is a thoughtful and original synthesis, covering the elements of Christian faith, thrown on the background of a wide survey of the antique world. As for the doctrines themselves, Professor Johnston views the evolution of dogma from the standpoint of the philosophy of James and Bergson. In contrast with the dynamic quality of life and the variant pressures which make for sacredness and religious power, the author shows the static mould of theological thought, based fundamentally upon Greek concepts, and of ecclesiastical organization. The contrast is real and the implications inevitable. With the new consciousness of to-day, intuitively aware of that change which is the essence of our being, we are assisting at the decline of the church! The author does not hesitate to present his interpretation in straightforward form, and is not lacking in courage.

It is almost inevitable that in so broad a field there should be places where one might object to the author's sweeping characterizations, such as his insistence upon the growth of antique slavery and his identification of the cult of the Virgin with that of Cybele, and that there should be some slips, such as the attribution of the taurobolium to Mithras; but a more serious fault lies in the working up of historical material out of sources which the author himself questions. Such sources have played their own creative rôle in the history of the church to be sure, and a modern discovery of their illegitimacy does not permit the historian to dismiss them from his narrative; but they should never lose the flavor of fiction. For instance, the reader is warned that the incident of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery is not in the best manuscripts, yet it is treated as "the most convincing and greatest of his miracles." This is not exactly what the author meant. He wished to show how perfectly the incident illustrated the character of the Jesus of Christian belief; se non e vero e ben trovato.

But a keen artistic sense of the situation got the upper hand and left the wording free for misunderstanding. This is to be regretted in a book which is bound to be the object of attack; for the unsympathetic critic can make sufficient capital out of it to obscure the merits of the book as a whole. In style one finds in it, as in all of Professor Johnston's works, expert and deft literary turns, interesting though compressed narrative and a direction of energy upon crucial points which brings both lucidity and force.

J. T. S.

Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul. By T. G. TUCKER. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1910.-xix, 453 pp.

This is a companion volume to the same writer's Life in Ancient Athens, and, like it, is intended for the general reader. The author has endeavored "to represent as faithfully as possible the Age of Nero, and nowhere is it implied that what is true for that age is necessarily as true for any other. The reader who is not a special student of history or antiquities is perhaps as often confused by descriptions of ancient life which cover too many generations as by those which include too much detail" (preface, pages vii, viii). By judicious elimination and by vivid and graphic presentation the book is intended to "help the general reader to visualize the contemporary Roman as a human being." The author has aimed to avoid the exaggerations of the Roman satirist and moralist, to correct the attitude of those who know this period only through the medium of the Acts of the Apostles, and to make it more than a treatise on Roman antiquities.

While the main interest of the book centers in the Rome of Nero, the broader viewpoint is rightly and consistently taken that life in the Roman world of Nero" is not the same thing as "life in ancient Rome" at the same date, and that it is quite impossible to realize Rome, its civilization and the meaning of its monuments, unless we first obtain some general comprehension of the Empire. With this in mind. the author devotes the first six chapters of the book to a lucid and concise survey of the Roman Empire, its extent, its population, its communications by land and sea, its government and administration. To these should be added chapters xviii and xix, dealing respectively with the Roman army and the Roman state religion. Some one hundred and fifty pages out of a total of four hundred and fifty, i. e. about one-third of the book, thus provide the background and the larger setting for a picture of the life in the imperial city itself. While this

is intended by analogy to apply also to "those parts of the Empire which were either fairly romanized or else contained a large number of resident Romans" (page 260), the major part of the book deals with private and public life at Rome.

Beginning with a survey of "Rome, the Imperial City," its streets and its public buildings, the various types of Roman house etc.—the author presents in graphic fashion, first, a sketch of a Roman aristocrat's day. This is followed by a chapter on the life of the middle and lower classes, in which the meagre and biased allusions of the Roman writers are supplemented and corrected by archæological evidence (taken largely from Pompeii). In logical order the author discusses in successive chapters the Roman home, Roman education, the career of the Roman citizen in the army and in the public service, the place of religion, society and culture in the life of the average Roman, and finally "the last scene," Roman burial and burial customs.

There are some excellent remarks on the attitude of the Roman government towards and the relation of Roman religion to Christianity (though perhaps too little is made of the Oriental religions and too much emphasis is placed on philosophy, especially Epicureanism), on the Roman feeling for nature (page 175 et seq.), on the question of the unemployed and the relation of free to slave labor (page 244 et seq.). Pages 73 and 74 present some excellent and sane estimates of the individual emperors of the Early Empire.

Within the limitations set for and by himself, the author has done his work well, though there are occasional lapses in style; and the book should help to accomplish its author's purpose-to interest the general reader and to teach him to appreciate and "to feel in ancient life and thought." Some one hundred and twenty-five illustrations and several maps and plans add to the value of the book.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

R. F. SCHOLZ.

The Franco-Prussian War and its Hidden Causes. By ÉMILE OLLIVIER. Translated by GEORGE BURNHAM IVES. Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1912.-xxxvii, 520 pp.

Of all those who were crushed by the overthrow of the Second Empire, two alone survive, the Empress Eugenie and Émile Ollivier, the head of the ill-fated ministry from January to August, 1870. The latter, at eighty-seven years of age, is just finishing a fifteen volume history of the Liberal Empire. Too much cannot be said in

praise of Mr. Ives's work in translating the gist of that ponderous work, following a resumé prepared by M. Ollivier and covering the Ollivier ministry with special reference to the diplomatic and cabinet activity leading to the Franco-Prussian war. Mr. Ives has done more, for he has translated and inserted as notes many essential paragraphs selected from the larger work and has added numerous appendices, including source and secondary material not elsewhere gathered together in one volume. The conception and execution of the volume are most praiseworthy.

As to the substance of the volume, it reveals no hidden causes of the Franco-Prussian war. Every prominent Frenchman connected with those disastrous times has published his memoirs, many of them furnished with contemporary dispatches and documents, and there is a considerable literature of an autobiographical kind from the German side. This particular volume can therefore add nothing strikingly new to what is already known. It is M. Ollivier's attempt to lay all the blame on Bismarck, the arch-conspirator, and to show that the author was not responsible for the mistakes of the Napoleonic empire in the crisis nor even cognizant of some of the important steps taken by his colleagues and Napoleon III. It is not history, in the sense in which the author would have us accept it; it is more in the nature of memoirs and to be used with the same degree of caution that is usually applied to sources of this kind. No one could judge Bismarck or M. Ollivier or Napoleon III on the history of the months between January and July, 1870, or on the basis of the Hohenzollern candidature or the Ems telegram. One must begin at least at 1866, or better yet at 1806, if he would explain the causes of the Franco-Prussian war.

As to M. Ollivier's qualifications to deal with the embarrassing situation into which Bismarck forced the French by the Hohenzollern candidature, two small points may be noted as significant. When the news came that the Hohenzollern prince had declined, and the whole situation was, for the time at least, in the French hands, Thiers, passing through the hall of the Chamber of Deputies, turned to Ollivier and warned him: "Now you must keep calm." The other is that in the larger work M. Ollivier devotes several pages to citations of definitions of the word leger, in order to show that Littré and all the lexicographers bear out his explanation of his famous phrase: "We enter on this war with a light heart." It is his contention that this meant "without sense of moral responsibility," and that this meaning was clearly indicated in the ensuing paragraph of his speech. One rises from reading the volume, even with all its intense human interest, with

a feeling that Bismarck was dealing with realities and that M. Ollivier was and still is-dealing with words.

In view of the relations existing between Prussia and France after Königgrätz, such a defence as M. Ollivier presents, even if it did not contain errors and misstatements, is a confession of weakness; and it leaves the January ministry and Napoleon condemned out of their own mouths. Disorganized finances, half-executed political and military reforms, hoped for but unconcluded alliances, confidence born of ignorance and misinformation, inconsequence in policy and indiscretion in utterance--all are revealed in what is meant as a defence. Bismarck was probably as crafty and unscrupulous as he is here represented; but he was master of himself and of every force necessary to the success of a cause infinitely nobler than any represented by the decadent empire of the third Napoleon.

One can not close the reading of such a book without raising the query already often propounded: why, since every leading actor in the tragedy has published his memoirs, are the archives not opened and controversy brought to an end?

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS.

GUY STANTON FORD.

Les Déplacements de souveraineté en Italie pendant les guerres du xviiie siècle. By IRENÉE LAMEIRE. Paris, A. Rousseau, 1911.— viii, 538 pp.

Following his monumental studies on the theory of conquest into the Italy of the eighteenth century, M. Lameire finds himself in the presence of facts so varied and conflicting that no adequate synthetic principle has been found for treating them. Those who have felt in his preceding volumes a similar difficulty will find their problem not much simplified in this. Granting that the work is "more for the study of facts than the study of doctrines," one is inclined to ask of the author exactly from what point of view the facts are to be studied; especially as he, who may be presumed to have studied the facts in all their possible bearings, confesses at the outset that his own point of view, that of constructing a "theory of conquest," is somewhat sterile in results. Certain it is that if M. Lameire is intent on evolving such a theory, the most effective system of documentation is to isolate those cases which throw the theory into clearest light. To cite his papers seriatim from archive to archive, from bundle to bundle, can result only in a surplusage that is oppressive; and to leave them, as he has