Monroe himself, would have approved them, as emphasizing the fact that the Doctrine was a doctrine of the United States, by the United States, and for the United States.

These are illustrations, which might be multiplied a hundred fold, of the value of a compilation forming what might be termed a history of original documents.

Here is another example, in the first and third volumes of the forthcoming fifteen, in which history is presented in an entirely different manner; equally authentic, equally serviceable, and far more engaging; to wit, history in original pictures. There come to mind, in scanning the opulent and luminous pages of The Pageant of America, the shrewd observation of Carlyle upon the value of pictorial portraiture in historical research and study. "Often," said the Sage of Chelsea, himself a master historywriter, "I have found a portrait superior in real instruction to half a dozen written biographies." Then we must reckon a series of history pictures to be at least complementary to a series of history books. If a narrative in words can be made so graphic and vivid as to present pictures of scenes and persons to the mind's eye, surely drawn or painted pictures may be made so informing as to present to the mind a narrative of events or a statement of facts.

It seems to be upon this soundly logical principle that the work before us has been conceived and is being executed. And judging from the first two volumes issued, the execution is worthy of the conception. The number of pictures secured for reproduction, thousands upon thousands, is stupendous, as their variety is bewildering. The world must have been ransacked to obtain them. Yet more impressive still is their uniform pertinence. There is not one that suggests having been merely lugged in to fill space, or that seems superfluous. Every one has an explicit story to tell; every one makes clearer to the mind the history of America. There is a great array of early maps, some of which have hitherto been all but unknown; and of ancient drawings and prints; historical paintings of the best type, and those works of artistic imagination which sometimes most strongly and unerringly convey the truth of history; innumerable individual portraits; a wealth of reproductions of illustrations from periodicals;

and of course photographs without number. Significant doings in war and peace, characteristic occupations of the people, landscapes, buildings, and what not, are portrayed, each with brief letterpress for identification and for linking the graphic scene with the historical narrative.

It would be ungracious not to remark, also, upon the singularly fine mechanical work that has been performed. The reproduction of old maps, documents and pictures, frequently faded, stained or many colored, is always a trying task, and the results are frequently unsatisfactory. But the achievements in these volumes, which necessarily implicate the most difficult subjects, are above all praise; often suggesting belief that the reproduction is in clearness and relief an improvement upon the original. A few years ago I had occasion to acclaim an earlier output of the same press, The Chronicles of America, as setting an unsurpassed standard in both subject matter and technical form. Nothing more could be wished, and nothing less would be just, than to say that the Pageant worthily complements the Chronicles.

Another kind of history is found in the monuments, sculptures and inscriptions of remote antiquity, unearthed and interpreted by laborious exploration and study. Egyptology has long ranked among the sciences. Now we are beginning generally to recognize what some men, often accounted visionaries if not impostors, long ago declared, that in America there are remains of former civilizations which in magnitude, in tokens of high culture, and in age, are comparable with those in what we once incorrectly called the "cradle of civilization"; and to realize that our "New World" may yet be regarded as "that new world which is the old". In The City of the Sacred Well we have a fascinating account of many years of patient and intelligent research amid the remains of the great cities of the Mayas, with a wealth of photographic illustrations of buildings, sculptures, and pictorial records. It was pure research, open-mindedly directed, which was doubtless prudent. We recall only too keenly the impassioned odium archæologicum which has too often arisen over theories and interpretations of Mayan antiquities. But a lucid, unbiased narrative and exposition like the present demonstrates that the most extreme and apparently fantastic suggestions of former explorers,

while they may have erred in fact certainly did not err by exceeding possibilities. There is a history written in stone in the Yucatano jungles that rivals in importance and fascination any that is to be found in the archæology of the Eastern Hemisphere.

Still another type of history is that presented by those who can say with the Pious Æneas that all of these things they saw, and sometimes that a part of them they were. Such a work is Our Times. Mr. Sullivan has long been known as a trained observer, exceptionally endowed with the two supreme qualities of the observer of affairs, namely, a discriminating judgment in the selection of the affairs best worth observing, and a penetrating vision in discerning not merely their superficial interest but also their esoteric significance. The close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth formed a period far more epochal-and epical-than most of us probably realized or imagined at the time. Great scientific and mechanical inventions, geographical discoveries, and profound political, industrial, social, educational and religious changes, marked it as a time of flux scarcely rivaled in all former ages. So swiftly are we now living that those days, less than a generation ago, already seem to belong to the remote past; to that a distinct and profitable sensation is produced by the reminder that a man not only still living but also not yet grown old, is able to recall them from personal memory, and we realize that we, too, can remember them, though too much without Mr. Sullivan's accuracy of detail and luminous power of interpretation.

A single example will illustrate the value of this trained observer's contribution to the truth of history. Probably almost every person in America in 1896 supposed William J. Bryan's famous "crown of thorns and cross of gold" speech, which made him three times the Presidential candidate of the Democratic party and for nearly thirty years its most popular and influential leader, was a spontaneous outburst of spiritual fervor and oratorical genius, as indeed it seemed to be; and that supposition has continued to this day, apparently confirmed by the lapse of time. Yet Mr. Sullivan tells us, with an authority that will not, I imagine, be challenged, that

Almost every paragraph of the "Cross of Gold" speech had been delivered scores of times to audiences up and down the Missouri Valley, during two years preceding. . . . The essential parts of the speech, those sonorous sentences, those emotion-rousing phrases, rolled out from Bryan's lips that day as familiar to Bryan himself as the Lord's Prayer. Every one he had tried again and again on country schoolhouse audiences.

Mr. Sullivan does not, of course, confine himself exclusively nor even chiefly to political matters. Society, education, music and drama, religious activities, fashions in dress, manners and customs, indeed, every phase of the whole kaliedoscopic comedie humaine comes within the scope of his encyclopædic recollections, his racy narrative and description, and his wittily wise interpretation.

Far less comprehensive in scope, yet far more intensified in interest, is Mr. James Kerney's Political Education of Woodrow Wilson. Also it approximates more closely to the attitude of Æneas, for the author might truly say, to a much greater extent than he does, that of the things which he records he was himself a part. Perhaps I may be permitted to add, from some degree of personal knowledge, that he was a very considerable and essential part of them, and that without his deftly diplomatic pedagogics the political education of Mr. Wilson would have been much less complete than it was. The book is instinct with three of the most important qualities of such a work: Intimate, authentic and sympathetic knowledge of the subject, candor and courage in exposition, and a lucid, direct and engaging style of expression. His characterization of Mr. Wilson will probably stand the test of time as one of the most discerning and most accurate that have been made:

Embittered by losing at Princeton, it was not exactly in a spirit of gentle sweetness that a year later, as Governor, he set out to save the people of New Jersey and make himself President in the bargain. At Washington, he was bent on twisting America into the Wilson idea of a democracy when the World War broke and gave him his chance to go out and save civilization. He was a wholesale dealer in uplift. "For the man who has ceased to struggle, life is over," he said in one of his best speeches. . . . For him the struggle was unending. He hit the line hard and, once he had discarded caution, battled like a savage. . . . He seldom admitted he was wrong; those who differed with him either became "wilful" or they "did not know what they were talking about." He mostly saw man, the individual, in his littleness, and was in

tolerant, impatient and disgusted with him. . . . In public all men do more or less play-acting. Wilson was no exception. He wanted to speak for the common crowd, but in private he frequently found it difficult to tolerate them. . . . His was a strange aloofness, and his political fortunes had a strange ascent. Full of the petty theories he had been teaching the university students, and unfettered with practical political experience or definite plan, he got off to a running start and made the whole distance to the pinnacle of greatest power at a tremendous moment in the world's history. . . . He was his own favorite confidant, at heart a solitary man "voyaging through strange seas of thought alone."

It is a book which must always be very seriously reckoned with in all further histories of Woodrow Wilson and his times, and in all evaluations of his character and career.

There remains before us another contribution to history made by one who was both the most intimate observer of the doings which he records and the most conspicuous factor in them. Nogales Bey, as the author of Four Years beneath the Crescent was known during the period of which he writes, is a soldier of fortune and a man of letters, notably accomplished in both capacities; a Venezuelan, who fought for Spain and against America in Cuba, was during the World War the Inspector-General of Turkish forces in Armenia, and then Military Governor of Turkish Sinai. His authority as a chronicler of one of the most sanguinary and lurid chapters in the history of that war is therefore unsurpassed, and there is satisfactory reason for esteeming as highly the impartiality and sincerity of his account. He was a witness of the horrors of the Armenian massacres and deportations, and for them he is no apologist. But he makes it clear, and this is his most important contribution to the history of that hideous time, that those crimes against humanity were the work of the Kurds and "irregular" bodies of Turks, and that "the Regular Army of the Ottomans was entirely innocent." This we should be inclined to accept as true; mindful of the fact that the "Bulgarian atrocities" of the eighteen-seventies, which, when disclosed by Eugene Schuyler and J. A. MacGahan, shocked the civilized world and started William E. Gladstone on his Midlothian crusade, were the work of "irregular" Bashi-Bazouks, and that only for a time in the reign of Abdul the Damned was the regular Turkish army de