from tired hearts and brightening lives. The best music is like unto the sweetness of Christianity; and Nordica has so much of the best to give. Her private life? It is all right, but suppose it were-anything. The offering of that woman at the last might lift unto Paradise a soul as black as Egypt's night."

But one despairs to hint even at all the good things in this book. As a frontispiece to the volume there is very fittingly placed that tenderest and most delicately expressed, perhaps, of all his paragraphs, "Violets," which has become widely popular. Equally fitting is the selection of the paragraph on "No. 97" to close the book. As a specimen of terse, vigorous English one might travel far afield without finding a better.

From beginning to end of the collection the reader is lured on without weariness, charmed by the beauty of the style and by the freshness and originality of the thought. He lays down the volume with a sigh of profound regret that the life of such a writer should pass out in the bright morning of its promise. As a conclusion to this sketch might come his own words: "Copy all in.' To me that expresses everything— the end of the game. You know what it means, of course. At the end of so many weary, weary nights I have scrawled the words as the finale of toil and as the good-bye to my men. 'Copy all in'-and sleep! That is all-the last of life, and then the rest."

BOOK REVIEWS

Government REGULATION Of Railway RATES. By Hugo Richard Meyer. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905,-xxvii., 486 pp. RESTRICTIVE Railway LegiSLATION. By Henry S. Haines. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905,—ix., 355 pp.

AMERICAN RAILROAD RATES. By Walter Chadwick Noyes. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1905,—277 pp.

Professor Meyer has contributed to the current discussion a vigorous argument against the government regulation of railway rates. He frankly says that his book "appears at the present time because of the possibility that Congress, influenced by the discontent that exists in some sections of the country because of the friction necessarily incident to the transaction of the complicated business of transportation, may be led to enact ill-considered laws granting dangerously enlarged power to the Interstate Commerce Commission.' The first half of the book is devoted to a discussion of the results of government regulation in foreign countries, both in those that have adopted state ownership, as Prussia and Australia, and those in which government interference is limited to control and regulation of rates, as France. The second half is occupied by a description of the part railways have played in the development of the United States under a comparatively limited interference in control by the government. Some of the latter chapters are devoted to a severe criticism of the policy and decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The conclusion reached by Professor Meyer from his study of foreign conditions is that, "No government that has undertaken to make railway rates, either by assuming government ownership or by exercising a thoroughgoing control over the rates made by railway companies, has been able to make railway rates in such a way as to conserve and promote the public welfare, if the test be the making of two blades of grass to grow where one had been growing. Re

straint of competition and of trade, with failure to develop the resources of soil and of climate, everywhere has been the result of rate-making by public authority." Professor Meyer claims that intelligent discrimination has been the secret of efficiency of American railways, that it has knit the different producing, distributing and consuming sections of this country into a more compact trading unit than is to be found anywhere else in the world. Some sections and localities have suffered from the changes in industry incident to such discrimination. This suffering Professor Meyer refers to as "the growing pains of progress," and he thinks it analogous to the hardship caused to those who are displaced by labor-saving machinery. Under government control those who are hurt by progress will get the rates "adjusted in the direction of impeding the general development of the community."

Views differing from those of Professor Meyer are presented elsewhere in this number of the QUARTERLY. It is but just to say that the accuracy and even the good faith of some of the statements made by Professor Meyer regarding European conditions have been publicly called into question by other students of railroad problems. Whether he is right or his critics cannot be determined without recourse to authorities not generally accessible. The author says that his book represents a painstaking study of the railway question extending over twelve years, and that he began with a strong bias in favor of state intervention in industry. His volume certainly handles a great amount of material novel to the American public in a vigorous and suggestive way. It will repay a careful reading.

Mr. Haines's work on restrictive railway legislation contains the substance of a course of lectures delivered at the Boston University School of Law, "the purpose being to present the manner in which legislation and judicial decisions have affected the operations of railway corporations in their relations to the public." After an enlightening discussion of railroad finance, construction, and operation, he comes to those phases of the subject which are of most present interest. The "one question of railroad rates furnishes

subject-matter for most of the discussion concerning the specific regulation of railroad operations by legislation." Mr. Haines, who writes from the standpoint of one who has been a railroad manager, concludes that "the obvious policy is to recognize, as a fundamental principle, private ownership under governmental supervision corresponding to the public nature of the functions that the corporations are expected to discharge." He believes that "the overshadowing importance of interstate commerce has necessarily tended to the regulation of rates by the general government," but points out many difficulties in the way. He says: "Legislation to define the powers and functions of a commission to regulate rates on interstate traffic in conformity with the provisions of the federal constitution should recognize the following propositions: the declaration of an unreasonable rate is a judicial function; the declaration of a rate which shall govern in the future is a legislative function; the commission is a prosecuting body exercising administrative functions for specific purposes. The problem to be solved by legislation is how to contrive that a prosecuting bureau, endowed with inquisitorial powers to detect crime, whose findings are to be held as prima facie evidence in the courts, can exercise delegated powers of legislation and at the same time sit as a judicial tribunal to do justice between plaintiffs and defendants." The broad outline of a plan complying with correct principles is suggested. Mr. Haines's book is a fair-minded treatment of the subject and is favorable to a conservative measure of regulation.

Judge Noyes has contributed to the discussion a remarkably clear and comprehensive study of the perplexing question of railroad rates. His volume on "American Railroad Rates" is the best work available for the purposes of the general reader. It is written in a judicial temper of mind, exhibits a logical development of the subject which it is a pleasure to follow, and reaches conclusions which have a convincing quality. Judge Noyes's plan for government regulation of rates receives consideration in an article in this number of the QUARTERLY.

W. H. G.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. By Ferris Greenslet. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1905,-309 pp.

Mr. Greenslet, as associate editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and as biographer of Walter Pater, had raised high hopes of his career as an authorative critic. The present volume fulfills those hopes, and causes the attentive reader of contemporary criticism to rank the author with Mr. Paul Elmer More as the best and most promising of the younger critics of the country. Both of them have had the best academic training and are familiar enough with foreign literature to make their criticism have the mark of being written "in the centre." This book shows Mr. Greenslet to be a master of an individual style; there is always the rhetorical coherence, a closeness of grain, that he finds Lowell frequently lacking in. There is, too, a richness of vocabulary, a charm of allu sion-sometimes carried too far, it must be confessed. There are many passages that one would fain quote. The book is full of such sentences as: "Side by side with subtilely allusive phrases that thrill the ripe reader with gleaming memories of old and far-off authors will be found some breezy vocable of the street that strikes a sudden gust of fresh air across the page." Or: "She [Maria White] possessed that quaint New England union of a transcendental exaltation of mood with shrewd domestic wisdom. that was so often seen among the liegemen and liegewomen of Emerson." Or: "Who else has performed so many and such happy marriages of wit and wisdom, of culture and conscience, of politics and poetry, of literature and life?”

Mr. Greenslet had a very difficult task to perform. With the wealth of material that has grown up around Lowellnotably Mr. Norton's definitive edition of the letters and Scudder's two volume life and the reminiscences of many contemporaries-there was little new material to draw from. With the exception of a few comparatively unimportant letters and an unpublished poem of Emerson's about Lowell, there is nothing new. But the author has made good use of the old. He has given a comprehensive summary of Lowell's life, using very judiciously the extracts from his letters and from reminiscences of friends, and welding them