the civic spirit which prevails in Germany. Our states have home rule.

Mr. Maurice B. Dean in Municipal Bonds Held Void (Published by the Author, 20 Broad Street, New York City, 1911; 122 pp.) enumerates alphabetically by states and by cities all issues of municipal bonds in the United States which have been declared void by the courts. The preface and the accompanying tables present an interesting classification of the decisions and their practical results. 510 decisions in which bonds have been declared invalid, 205 resulted from judicial proceedings preliminary to the issue of the bonds. questioned, so that no loss accrued to investors. In 305 decisions, however, bonds have been held void after issuance and delivery. In 56 of these cases the amount in issue does not appear, but the remaining 249 cases involved bonds to the extent of $171,646,600. The aggregate is undoubtedly larger than this, because in a number of decisions all that appears is the amount for which suit was brought, and the total issue of which the bonds in suit formed a part is not given. But such tables as the author gives possibly tend to exaggerate the loss to investors and the consequent profit to municipalities from their own carelessness or illegal action, owing to the legal doctrine which in many instances permits holders of void bonds to follow the proceeds in order to prevent unjust enrichment on the part of the borrower. There are a number of instances, also, where cities have paid bonds or a certain fraction thereof, even after a judicial declaration of invalidity. That the courts are not wholly successful in their general efforts to protect purchasers who buy before maturity and without notice of the facts which produce invalidity appears from the information that in 153 cases such bona-fide purchasers were the losers to the extent of nearly $7,000,000. And though the courts endeavor zealously to apply the doctrine of estoppel by recitals for the protection of lenders, such recitals have furnished an insufficient protection to the investor in 45 cases, causing a loss of about $1,800,000. The author suggests that reliance was doubtless placed by the creditor on the rule of good faith and that of estoppel in many of the other decisions in which it was not passed upon by the courts. The author's exposition emphasizes the pressing need of some more effective way to protect investors and to maintain the marketability of municipal securities and yet to confine the borrowing of municipalities within the limits set by statute. The expedient of providing by statute that registration of bonds with state officials shall cure all defects has been tried but has not been found entirely effective, for in 8 cases bonds so registered

have still been declared invalid with a resulting loss of $364,000. The author's tables indicate also the causes of invalidity and the purposes for which the various bonds were issued. It appears that in 19 states no issues of municipal bonds have been held invalid. The record as a whole is far from creditable. It would appear much worse if it included all the issues of state bonds which have been repudiated. The holders of state bonds are denied even the consolation of prosecuting an unsuccessful suit in the courts, owing to the doctrine of the nonsuability of the sovereign and the unrighteous advantage accorded to the states by the eleventh amendment to the federal constitution. On the whole, the courts and in particular the federal courts have been generous towards the investor in balancing his interests against the importance of maintaining effectively the constitutional and statutory limitations on the debt-incurring propensities of municipalities. But our existing machinery for preventing the cities from transgressing the bounds prescribed is sadly defective. The expense of the minute and exhaustive examination of records by attorneys for the houses which market municipal securities necessarily reduces the price which such securities will bring. And all too often, even after the greatest precautions, the borrower enjoys the proceeds and never repays.

No branch of the law enjoys more rapid development than that which deals with commerce between the states. The insistence of interstate carriers that state legislation purporting to be passed merely in exercise of the police power or of the power to tax imposes invalid restrictions upon the freedom of interstate commerce brings before the courts an increasingly large amount of litigation. The activities of Congress and of the Interstate Commerce Commission impose heavy burdens on the courts in the interpretation and application of statutes and administrative orders. It is no small task to decide the constantly arising questions of fact as to whether any specific act of commerce is inter-state or intra-state. Mr. Frederick N. Judson has therefore met a pressing need in bringing out a second edition of his excellent work on The Law of Interstate Commerce and its Federal Regulation (Chicago, T. H. Flood & Co., 1912; xxiv, 805 pp.). Since the appearance of his first edition in 1905, Congress has passed the Employers Liability Act of 1906 and its later amendments, the Live Stock Transportation Law of 1906, the Hours of Service Act of 1907, the Commerce Court Act of 1910, and by a number of amendments to the Interstate Commerce Act, notably the Hepburn Act of 1906 and the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, has greatly increased the powers and duties of the Interstate Commerce Commission and thereby provoked a

Most of the

corresponding increase in the litigation before the courts. increment of 300 pages in the second edition deals with questions which have arisen by reason of this additional legislation, although there is a substantial expansion of the treatment of what constitutes interstate commerce, the extent of state power to regulate commerce, federal control over state regulation, and combinations of business and of labor in interstate commerce as they are affected by the Anti-trust Act. The important statutes are set forth in full in the appropriate chapters in the text. In the appendices are found some of the statutes of minor importance, the rules of practice before the Commerce Court and before the Interstate Commerce Commission and the forms of procedure promulgated by the latter body. Those who would avoid the pain of reading the decisions for themselves may object that much of the author's exposition is too succinct and compressed, but in so many instances the reasoning of the courts is relatively so unimportant as compared with their decrees, that the method of accurate and pithy statement of the law as it has been laid down seems worthy of high commendation. Even now the book is out of date. But those who would keep abreast of the law of interstate commerce must religiously read the judicial opinions in the advance sheets.

Mr. Lippmann's book A Preface to Politics (New York, Mitchell Kennerly, 1913; 318 pp.) defies analysis and characterization. It is not a thesis but a running commentary on things in general and politics occasionally, full of shrewd suggestiveness and clever phrases. Probably nobody but the advocates of the mass-strike will be pleased with it, and they will be chagrined to find their philosophy based on a myth. That we have not made the best of our opportunities, that most of our statesmanship is blundering incompetence, that Mr. Bryan's mind is not very flexible, that the socialist's idea of making capitalism the scapegoat for all the ills of the flesh is folly, that the white slave problem will not be solved within the limits of a nonconformist's conscience, most thoughtful people have already discovered; but they will be glad to have it rediscovered with such generous and pleasing enthusiasm. Mr. Taft, whom Mr. Lippmann will not credit with much lightness of mind, found out in 1912 that the initiative and referendum would not pay a man's rent; and college professors whom Mr. Lippmann put in the eolithic epoch of thought have all been worried about the very same problems which he raises. A little more acquaintance with them and their writings would have shown him that they have as little liking as he for the systematic Philistine. Nevertheless, everyone will find profit in the author's reflections on the shortcomings of political

reforms, the reasons for the vacuity of party platforms, the place of third parties in our system, socialism and the farmer, the representation of interests, and political machinery and political aptitudes.

We have had books on the "true," the "new," and the "direct" democracy, but it has remained for three members of the Rota Club to attempt the "real" thing. In a word, Mann, Sievers and Cox's The Real Democracy (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1913; xi, 276 pp.) is an attack on capitalism by three men who fear that socialism will deepen the servility of Mr. Belloc's servile state. Capitalism is, in their opinion, a crude, blundering system, based largely upon exploitation, inheritance and privileges, which have produced no democracy at all, but an amplitudinous plutocracy. There can be a real democracy only when a majority possess property in severalty, and with President Woodrow Wilson they believe that the plutocrats must disgorge. Like him, however, they refuse to be too precise as to methods (page 237); they are certain only that there must be some confiscation to save the middle classes. The kernel of their nebulosity seems to be that capitalism is to be supplanted by "associated industry,"-a happy combination of sublimated communal anarchy, profit-sharing, attenuated state socialism and the police constable. The volume is an interesting and eloquent testimony to the fact that socialism-state and democratic-is to find plenty of foes among radicals, and it may be that the conservatives will prefer their old enemy to their new friends.

Professor Frank Parson's Legal Doctrine and Social Progress (New York, B. W. Huebsch, 1911; 219 pp.) is a brief summary of the legal theories that justify those measures of reform (which may justly be deemed socialistic) to whose advocacy the author gave so many full years of labor and sacrifice. It is, therefore, not a treatise, but a declaration of faith and an argument. Professor Parsons believes that

a very large proportion of our judicial decisions were determined by the personal and class bias of the judges, and he looks upon direct democracy and a wide extension of governmental activities as promising a fairer ideal of distributive justice. Nevertheless, he does not hold that the law is hopelessly reactionary. "Accepted legal doctrine is, on the whole," he says, 66 as radical as human nature will stand for. There is nothing in the fundamentals of the law to prevent progress, or to impede the development of the highest and noblest social institutions." The new order which he prophesies is to be very largely the application of old principles to new conditions.

It is interesting to notice that a second edition of Professor L. A.

Oppenheim's brochure on The Panama Canal Conflict Between Great Britain and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 1913; 57 pp.) has become necessary. Only slight changes are made in the new edition. It is to be hoped that in preparing the third edition, which in all probability will be required, Professor Oppenheim will consider the diplomatic interchanges that have been made since the tolls provision first became a matter of controversy.

Professor John MacCunn's Political Philosophy of Burke (New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1913; vi, 272 pp.) is a brief, clear and sober analysis of that great Whig's doctrines. It is sympathetic in spirit, but not laudatory or unduly oblivious to well-recognized faults. The author treats the subject topically, under such heads as theories and theorists, prudence, the people, conservatism, ancestral wisdom, government, rights and democracy, and endeavors to present the essence of Burke's views on these several matters. Underlying it all is the thesis that Burke's conservatism was a conservatism of principles, not of sentiment or prejudice (page 68), and it is with this concept rather than with the marshalling of extracts that we may fairly quarrel. Everyone likes to elevate his sentiments to the dignity of "principles " discovered in the nature of things, but Professor MacCunn's theory would make Burke too much of an abstraction. In his private letters that eminent Whig nearly always fell into a choleric passion whenever he had occasion to speak of the "black-hearted "advocates of French doctrines, and his speech on Hastings shows a virulence and an unreasoning bitterness which remind us that he too partook of the frailties of human nature.

In the well-known "Heroes of the Nations" series, each biography is intended to cover some important national period or movement; and Dr. Ernest F. Henderson's Blücher and the Uprising of Prussia Against Napoleon (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1911; xix, 347 pp.) is fairly to be judged from the point of view suggested by the subtitle. Of all the men prominently connected with Prussian history between 1806 and 1815 Blücher is the one who would generally be acclaimed a "hero;" but of them all he had the least to do with the regeneration of Prussia in preparation for the uprising against Napoleon. Stein, Hardenberg, Humboldt, Scharnhorst, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Boyen, Grolmann and Gneisenau were the men who forged the nation into a flaming sword of vengeance, and Blücher, with Gneisenau directing him as his chief of staff, was called upon to wield it during the Wars of Liberation. As Blücher himself said: "Gneisenau lenkt und ich gehe vorwärts." Blücher played his part well; but if his biography