called upon history to testify to the shame of all who have allowed themselves to drift away from the glorious principles which were recognized in the birth and baptism of our nation. He has invoked the patriot founders of the Republic again to sit in convention before the nation, and to tell us what to them was truth and policy and righteousness. By thoroughness of investigation, by candor and impartiality of selection, and by a sufficiently exhaustive draught upon his materials to present all the substantial elements of his theme, he has completed a most valuable work. Documents of prime value, of unquestioned authenticity, and conveying the minds of their writers or speakers with old-fashioned frankness, are spread before us in the beauty of modern book-art; and as we read them we learn to take wiser views, and to entertain brighter hopes of our distracted times. Mr. Livermore rightfully proceeds on the idea that the Constitution, being the work of men who had achieved their independence, was designed to be interpreted in consistency with the principles on which they declared their right to independence. Our own historical reading had long since satisfied us that, bating the acrimony and vituperation which some of the "Abolitionists," goaded by the abuse visited upon them, had mixed with their testimony, they had said nothing about the iniquity or the mischiefworking effects of slavery which might not be over-matched in emphasis and intensity of denunciation by quotations from the speeches and writings of our great patriots, especially of those who lived in regions where slavery had visited its dreariest blight upon the land, its homes, and its people, and who were themselves slaveholders. Whether Mr. Livermore designed it or not, the series and collocation of his extracts touching the pleas and professions of most of the slaveholding members of several of the Conventions have the effect of exposing the cunning and duplicity with which, while seeming to coincide with Northern sentiment and the spirit of freedom, they adroitly secured aid and comfort to slavery. This portion of Mr. Livermore's volume is thus made to offer a striking commentary upon a passage in a sternly severe vein, which the reader will find in a letter from the venerable Nestor of the society, the Hon. Josiah Quincy: "Disgust at slavery was so general as to be little less than universal. Among slaveholders, the language and hope of putting an end to the evil as soon as possible was on all their tongues; but, alas! it was far from being in all their hearts."

In the second part of his Research, Mr. Livermore gives us a most admirable résumé of the historical materials afforded by the military annals of our republic for deciding the views of our patriots on the expediency of employing negroes, bond or free, as soldiers, and upon the consequent change in the status of slaves to which they were or ought to be entitled when actually employed as soldiers. It has become a matter of equal interest for both parties in our civil war to know the precedents on this subject. There were also two parties to

lic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers. Read before the Massachusetts Historical Society, August 14, 1862. By GEORGE LIVERMORE. Boston. 1862. 8vo. pp. 215.

be interested in it in the Revolutionary war, the English and the Americans. Mr. Livermore instructs us how cautiously the subject was first opened by both parties then, how deliberately it was treated, and how decidedly the English and American leaders alike accorded in the policy of making soldiers of slaves, and in the consequent righteousness of enfranchising all of any color who had fought in their ranks.

This work is not on sale at any publisher's, the author having, of his own generosity, made free distribution of it. But it ought to be within reach of the largest public.

MR. WHITING'S very able and effective argument, contained in a pamphlet of nearly a hundred and fifty pages,* in a certain sense completes the task which Mr. Livermore had begun. It is not merely a legal vindication of those extreme powers of the government which have been hitherto questioned, denied, or at least kept in abeyance; but also a pretty full exposition of the common law as to the penalty of treason, and a summary of the opinion and practice found in our own political history. No sane man will deny the importance of guarding with jealous vigilance those boundaries which protect the liberty of the subject in time of peace, stated with so much force in a recent pamphlet by Judge Curtis; but when, in order to preserve the national existence itself, the highest and most perilous prerogative of government must be assumed, or else treason shall paralyze the arm raised to strike it down, then such arguments as that before us have a double value. They show that the necessary powers are also legal powers, and so reconcile us to them while the season of peril lasts; while they also fortify our respect for law, which is thus shown to provide in advance against such emergencies, and teach us how strict are the conditions which justify the exceptional and arbitrary uses of power. In a time of revolution, men must learn new lessons fast. And the public is well served, when the needed lesson of the time is taught by the wellconsidered words of competent and responsible men, such as the writer of this pamphlet. The most doubtful portion of his argument will probably be considered that which asserts for Congress constitutional jurisdiction over slavery in the States.

THE policy of emancipation, to which our government, as we trust, is at length thoroughly committed, is one that deserves the vindication of facts as well as argument. With full faith ourselves that that policy is not only just in itself, and required by the exigencies of the war, but easy and safe in comparison with any other treatment of our present difficulties, we are glad of every accumulation of evidence that shall convince our countrymen, and sustain our government in its responsible task. Nothing could be more timely than the publication, at this mo

The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress, in relation to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery. By WILLIAM WHITING. Boston: John L. Shorey.

+ Executive Power. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

ment, of those portions of the volumes of M. Cochin which bear directly on the argument. We have already borne our testimony to the uncommon merits of the original work. Of the results of slavery, which make up a large part of it, no illustration could be so vivid as that which is before our eyes every day in the newspapers, and acted out on the battle-field. The counterpart is convincingly traced in the compact and fair volume before us. All the better testimony from the emancipated West India Islands has gone to the same general effect; but the elaborate and trustworthy summary here set forth statistically, with the vivid and eloquent exposition of the bearing of the facts, gives both present and permanent value to this publication. We are glad to learn that it is already attracting attention in the Executive Departments at Washington.

COUNT GUROWSKI writes of our war as a foreigner, who has served his apprenticeship to political life in the troubled period of conspiracies and abortive revolutions stretching thirty years onward from the Polish struggle of 1830, yet as a man who has a cordial and enthusiastic sympathy with the great North in its true tendencies and its uprising, and is as genuine an American as it is possible for a foreigner to be. The prominent trait in his book we esteem its touching and earnest espousal of the cause of our nation in this struggle, in which he considers all the hopes of humanity for this generation to be wrapped up. What seems in it to be the temper of cynicism, morbid distrust, or hurt pride, we easily pardon and forget in one who has grown old in the ardent service of republicanism. The personal judgments which he gives so frankly, and his almost despairing comments on the strategy and diplomacy which have signalized this long campaign, we have no materials to refute, still less to ratify. He must pardon us for our constitutional inaptness to share his keen emotions and his passionate misgivings. The faculty of strong passion is one which is long in maturing: we are still too untried and buoyant to see, as he sees, what terrors lie before us in the contingency of defeat, a contingency of which none of us have seriously thought at all. On the other hand, we must be pardoned for doubting whether he quite appreciates the temper of our people in either of its two strongest points; its cool and elastic confidence, which contains all the promise of its future; and its tenacity of law and settled institutions, in which the Anglican is so widely distinguished from some other stocks. Both these traits are exhibited in the wide extension and the immense multiplication of local liberties in this republic, a point which we do not think any one has illustrated with more clearness and force than Count Gurowski himself. Yet it seems to us, sometimes, that he fails to give due weight to them in his desponding and indignant prognostications. At least, we trust it is so; for we own to a transient misgiving, that his gray experience may be

* Results of Emancipation. By AUGUSTIN COCHIN. Translated by MARY L. BOOTH. Boston: Walker, Wise, & Co.

+ Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 10, 1862. By ADAM GUROWSKI. Boston Lee and Shepard.

more trustworthy than our easy confidence. In details -tracing his "Diary" from month to month - his anticipations have often been startlingly confirmed by fact. Whatever foundation there may be for his warnings as to the future, we trust they may have been uttered in season to prevent their being verified. Still, however we interpret it, his volume is a very curious and indispensable chapter in the body of commentary on our current history.

A BRIEF pamphlet

the "Thanksgiving Sermon" of Mr. Weiss is worth separate mention here, for its condensed statement, its pungent phrase, its keen and strict philosophizing, and its noble anticipations of the fruit to grow from the thunder-riven soil of our national life. Only we must protest that we find sorry consolation in being told that nobody was to blame, and that nothing could have happened in the smallest particular different from what did happen. On the contrary, it is a comfort to us to think that things might have been very different, and that somebody was very much to blame. If "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” the whole plot being prearranged and every cue writ down,- at least, we prefer the philosophy of Bacon, that in this theatre only the angels have a right to be mere lookers-on. The actors must have the conviction that they have some little influence in the development of the play, or, as a piece of exquisite moral machinery, what is it all worth to us?

THE Belgian Baron who furnished the Preface to the first English translation of a forgotten defence of himself by the great Emperor, Charles the Fifth, has injured the book, not only by his own confused style of writing, but by absurd exaggeration of the importance of his adopted child. When thirty-five years of the most active of reigns are all rehearsed in less than two hundred duodecimo pages, not many of "the secrets of imperial policy" could possibly be explained; when, in every case, the principal business seems to be informing posterity how many times the Emperor had visited a particular country, and how high the number ran of that particular attack of gout, where he proposed to journey, and in whose company, with hardly any attempt at general reflections, no very valuable intelligence could be expected regarding a life which has been as fully written upon as any in history. The old title of the manuscript, "Summary of Voyages and Journeys," had better have been retained; a truthful Preface in tolerable English ought to have been furnished; gross mistakes like that of the death of Charles's father in 1516 instead of 1506 should have been corrected, and copious notes freely furnished to the body of the work. As it stands, this disappointing book with its deceptive title does nothing for the Emperor's fame; by his own state

* A Discourse upon the Causes of Thanksgiving. By JOHN WEISS. †The Autobiography of Charles V., recently discovered in Portuguese, by BARON KERVYN DE LETTENHOVE. Translated by L. F. SIMPSON. London: Longmans. 1862.

ment, his life seems more than ever a failure; he flies about all over Europe with great suffering and frequent breakdowns, is tormented by the Protestants, cheated by the Pope, afflicted in his own household, admonished in vain by disease, and then hides himself away at Yuste, certain of having bestowed upon a difficult government one whom he had not trained at all for a task in which he was certain to fail. In a single respect the narrative is wonderful, — there is an utter absence of self-glorification; the sufferings which were so heroically borne, the sacrifices of every kind which were so constantly made, the trials of temper which had to be endured from the treacherous Pope on the one hand and the revolutionary Protestants on the other, are hardly noticed, as the rapid writer hurries over a year in a paragraph. The usual advantage of an autobiography is of course sacrificed in such a compressed diary; no impression is made by presenting those petty incidents which reveal character; no feeling is permitted to flow freely over the private page; no secret of state is whispered as into the ear of posterity; but all is hard, cold, and stern, like that haughty voice which thundered defeat to the Protestant armies and ruin to the rebellious Dukes.

A NATURAL desire to know whether England had not been fooling away blood and treasure led Lieut. Arbuthnot to visit the Slavonic provinces of European Turkey, and judge for himself of the worth of the reforms there commenced, and the influence of European interference in the affairs of "the sick man " of the East.* It was by no means a tour of pleasure. Herzegovina is as destitute of the necessaries of life as any country pretending to be inhabited; the route is wholly an untravelled one; a guerilla warfare once at least rained bullets around the English adventurer. The intelligence he gives would seem dearly bought to all but those alive to the importance of the Eastern question; and, to them, will not appear decisive. The present condition of these Slavonic provinces depends on Omer Pasha's continuance in power; and that again depends, not merely upon the caprice of the Sultan's favor, but upon such a pressure of peril as will compel Constantinopolitan politicians to employ an officer whose superiority puts every Turkish favorite to shame. Lieut. Arbuthnot, after marching, bivouacking, and becoming familiar with the Pasha, pronounces him an incorruptible administrator, a far-seeing statesman, a brave soldier, and an accomplished general. Distinguished from other Turkish officials by fidelity to the government even when it has been ungrateful to himself, he will be remembered not only for military achievement, but for the unusual humanity with which he has waged war in a country where prisoners are still impaled alive. He seems fitted by nature to rule these semi-savages upon the frontier; fitted, too, to advance their civilization as fast and as far as Russian jealousy and Constantinopolitan folly will permit. Arbuthnot commends the

* Herzegovina: or, Omer Pasha and the Christian Rebels. With a brief Account of Servia. By LIEUT. G. ARBUTHNOT. London: Longmans. 13

VOL. LXXIV. 5TH S. VOL. XII. NO. I.