THE LAW
“Bryce’s Modern Democracies,” Chapter XLIII, is a recent survey of the American legal system; Raymond Fosdick, “American Police Systems,” Chapter I, states the operation of criminal law. For legal procedure, see Reginald Heber Smith, “Justice and the Poor,” published by the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching and dealing with legal aid societies and other methods of securing more adequate legal relief; Charles W. Eliot and others, “Efficiency in the Administration of Justice,” published by the National Economic League; Moorfield Storey, “The Reform of Legal Procedure;” and many other books and articles; the reports of the American and New York Bar Associations are of especial value. John H. Wigmore, “Evidence,” vol. V (1915 edition) discusses recent progress; see his “Cases on Torts, Preface,” on substantive law. A very wide range of topics in American law, philosophical, historical, procedural, and substantive, is covered by the writings of Roscoe Pound, of which a list is given in “The Centennial History of the Harvard Law School.” The same book deals with many phases of legal education; see also “The Case Method in American Law Schools,” Josef Redlich, Carnegie Endowment. For the position of lawyers, the best book is, Charles Warren, “A History of the American Bar;” a recent discussion of their work is Simeon E. Baldwin, “The Young Man and the Law.” No one interested in this field should fail to read the “Collected Legal Papers of Justice Holmes;” see also John H. Wigmore, “Justice Holmes and the Law of Torts” and Felix Frankfurter, “The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes,” both in the Harvard Law Review, April, 1916, and Roscoe Pound, “Judge Holmes’s Contributions to the Science of Law,” ibid., March, 1921. A valuable essay on Colonial legal history is Paul S. Reinsch, “English Common Law in the Early American Colonies.” A mass of material will be found in the law reviews, which are indexed through 1907 by Jones, “Index to Legal Periodicals,” 3 vols., and afterwards in the Law Library Journal, cumulative quarterly.
Z. C., Jr.
EDUCATION
The ideas contained in the article are so commonplace and of such general acceptance among educators that it is impossible to give specific authority for them. In addition to the articles mentioned, one of the latest by Dr. D. S. Miller, “The Great College Illusion” in the New Republic for June 22, 1921, should be referred to. For the rest the report of the Committee of Ten of the National Education Association, and the reports of President Eliot and President Lowell of Harvard, President Meiklejohn of Amherst, and President Wilson of Princeton, may be cited, with the recognition that any such selection is invidious.
R. M. L.
SCHOLARSHIP AND CRITICISM
There has been no really fundamental discussion of American scholarship or American criticism. Those who merely seek a good historical sketch of our older literary scholarship, along conventional lines, will find one in the fourth volume of the “Cambridge History of American Literature” that is at all events vastly superior to the similar chapters in the “Cambridge History of English Literature.” But more illuminating than any formal treatise are the comments on our scholarly ideals and methods in Emerson’s famous address on “The American Scholar,” in “The Education of Henry Adams,” and in the “Letters” of William James. The “Cambridge History of American Literature” contains no separate chapter on American criticism, and the treatment of individual critics is pathetically inadequate. The flavour of recent criticism may be savoured in Ludwig Lewisohn’s interesting anthology, “A Modern Book of Criticism,” where the most buoyant and “modern” of our younger men are set side by side with all their unacademic masters and compeers of the contemporary European world. All that can be said in favour of the faded moralism of the older American criticism is urged in an article on “The National Genius” in the Atlantic Monthly for January, 1921, the temper of which may be judged from this typical excerpt: “When Mr. Spingarn declares that beauty is not concerned with truth or morals or democracy, he makes a philosophical distinction which I have no doubt that Charles the Second would have understood, approved, and could, at need, have illustrated. But he says what the American schoolboy knows to be false to the history of beauty in this country. Beauty, whether we like it or not, has a heart full of service.” The case against the conservative and traditional type of criticism is presented with slapdash pungency in the two volumes of H. L. Mencken’s “Prejudices.” But any one can make out a case for himself by reading the work of any American classical scholar side by side with a book by Gilbert Murray, or any history of literature by an American side by side with Francesco de Sanctis’s “History of Italian Literature,” or the work of any American critic side by side with the books of the great critics of the world.
J. E. S.