_Henry Adams and John Hay._--“Democracy” (1880), an anonymous novel the authorship of which has hitherto baffled the critics, and which the present writer can now announce definitely to have been the work of the historian Henry Adams, is a keen and incisive study of political society in Washington, vividly portraying the corruption which perhaps inevitably attends the growth of the people’s power, but concerning which the author is all too pessimistic. The bribery case which aids Mrs. Lee in unmasking the real character of Silas P. Ratcliffe finds a parallel in our contemporary history; and several of the characters are thought to have been drawn from real life. Happily, whatever may have been the state of affairs in Washington in 1880, the story would be very far from a true picture of the Washington of to-day. John Hay (1838-1905), lawyer, journalist, diplomatist, and statesman, was the author of a single novel, and his connection with that has been, up to the appearance of the present volume, only a conjecture. Prudence, however, obviously, required that “The Bread-Winners” (1883) should appear anonymously. As a politician, and as acting editor of _The Tribune_, Mr. Hay did not then wish to avow himself the author of a “frivolous novel”; besides, in the story he had spoken rather plainly about strikes and labour troubles. The story itself is well written, natural, and for the most part true to life. Of the two love scenes, the proposal of Maud Matchin is more convincing than is Farnham’s to Alice Belding. The plot is well worked out; our interest in the story for itself almost never flags.