In the presentation of his conception of _The State_[21] or the Elements of Politics, Prof. _Woodrow Wilson_ has taken a comprehensive view. Designing a book for study and instruction, he has sought to set forth the evolution of existing systems of government from the beginning. Possessing no model, no text-book of like scope and purpose having apparently hitherto been attempted, he has had to make his own type; and, in the absence of anything else to refer the student to, has been obliged to include much that might otherwise have been omitted. The volume is consequently large; but this disadvantage, if it be one, is compensated for by the fact that the student has the whole subject before him. For his descriptions the author has chosen governments which are types of their several kinds. An indispensable prerequisite to studies of things of this sort is a knowledge of the constitutions of the states of classical antiquity; hence the institutions of Greece and Rome are studied: Greece, which furnished the spirit and inspiration under which the world has advanced; and Rome, which laid the foundations of modern jurisprudence. Before these, even, a glance at The Earliest Forms of Government, their Origin and Evolution, was required. Then, coming to modern systems, which are also traced in their historical development, "the government of France serves excellently as an example of a unitary government of one kind, and Great Britain equally well as an example of a unitary government of another kind; Germany exhibits a federal empire, Switzerland a federal republic of one sort, the United States a federal republic of another; Austria-Hungary and Sweden-Norway show the only two existing European types of dual monarchies." Russia might have been presented as having a place apart in European politics, but the book was full. The work has been prepared in the belief that "our own institutions can be understood and appreciated only by those who know other systems of government as well and the main facts of general institutional history." The accounts of the particular systems of government are followed by short chapters on the Nature and Forms of Government; Law, its Nature and Development; the functions and the objects of government; and summaries, in which the conclusion is expressed that law grows with the growth of the community, can not leap too far ahead of it, and must not lag behind it; and that "the method of political development is conservative adaptation, shaping old habits into new ones, modifying old means to accomplish new ends." * * * * *