Wendell Phillips, after the negro was freed, went on broadening in the scope of his sympathies and his work. He became one of the stalwart champions of the rights of white labor. He studied its case, denounced its wrongs, demanded better things for the millions of toilers who were being exploited and destroyed by insatiable commercial greed. Not so Garrison. The negro freed, the South reeking with her own life-blood, her homes in ashes, her soul crushed in utter desolation, Garrison was happy. His work was done. White men, white women, white children might groan and suffer and die in a worse slavery than had afflicted the blacks of the South, but Garrison did not sympathize—did not lift a finger, did not utter a word in their behalf. Another trait in Garrison’s character was just the trait to stir the dislike of a Southern man. He carried to such an extent his doctrine of non-resistance, that he declared he “would not defend by force his own wife in case of an assault.” In other words, rather than forcibly resist the criminal who sought to violate his own wife, he would stand idly by and permit the crime to be committed. I do not know how many Northern men endorse a sentiment of that kind. In my judgment they are few, very few. But I do know that there is not a respectable man in the South or West, who would not feel disgraced by the utterance of such a doctrine. Mr. Crosby deserves great credit for his courage and candor in admitting that while slavery was wrong, the war waged upon the South was wrong. Of course it was wrong. The whole negro race, here and throughout the earth, were not worth the frightful cost of the Civil War. Mr. Crosby’s book would have been more valuable had he omitted the last two chapters. The author is a very talented man but he cannot get to know the true status of the South by listening to the talk of loafers in the office of the hotel where he happens to stop. =Sidney Lanier.= By Edwin Mims. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, Boston and New York. A more interesting biographical work than this it would be difficult to name. The author is temperate in his estimate of the genius of his subject, and relates the life struggles of the Georgia poet with sympathetic spirit. As the years go by the fame of Sidney Lanier will grow. That he wrote some poems which have little merit is true; that his peculiar and unfortunate mannerism mars the beauty of other poems which do possess merit is also true; but after all this is conceded, it can be confidently claimed that he sometimes rose to the heights of Keats and Shelley, and that his art sometimes equalled the marvelous skill of Edgar Poe. Here and there, throughout Lanier’s poems, can be found gems of thought and expression which in loftiness, purity and exquisite form lose nothing by comparison with the higher work of the best English poets.