Mr. Wilson's _Division and Reunion_ is an admirable treatment of a question upon which a Southerner might have been expected to write as a Southerner. He has discussed it as an American. His well-known text-book _The State_, which has been revised and frequently reprinted, discusses the chief theories of the origin of government, describes the administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in detail of the functions and objects of government, with special reference to law and its workings. His _History of the American People_, though it contains many passages of insight and has the charm that comes from intense appreciation of details, is too diffuse and repetitious. A great history should be a combination of a chronicle and a treatise; it should be a record of facts and at the same time a philosophical exposition of an idea. Mr. Wilson's five-volume work is insufficient as a chronicle and too long for an essay. Yet an essay it really is. Moreover, unless I myself am blinded by prejudice, it makes too much of the errors committed by our government in the reconstruction period after the Civil War. On the whole, with all their faults, the administrations of Grant and Hayes accomplished a task of enormous difficulty, with remarkably little impatience and intemperance. The disadvantage of having been written originally under pressure in monthly instalments, for a periodical, is clearly visible in the _History_. There is a too constant effort to catch the eye with picturesque description. Nevertheless, in this book, as in the others, Mr. Wilson evokes in his readers a noble image of that government, constitutional, traditional, democratic, self-developing, which, from the days of his youth, aroused in him a poetic enthusiasm.