light of the speeches and writings of Tupper, Laurier, Fielding and Brodeur, who have been outspoken in describing the power which Canada gradually drew to herself in diplomacy between the negotiation of the Treaty of Washington of 1871 and the Treaty of Paris of 1907. The General Survey was in the publishers' hands—or at any rate ready for issue-before war began in August, 1914. Developments arising out of the war may necessitate some revision of Mr. BarringtonWard's essay on the Foreign Office for the next edition of the volume. Much revision also will certainly be necessary in the unsigned article -thirty pages long-on imperial defence. HARTFORD, COnnecticut. EDWARD PORRITT. The Life of Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. By BECKLES Willson. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915.-Two volumes; xii, 544, 533 pp. From the dedication to the last chapter, Mr. Beckles Willson's Life of Lord Strathcona is a eulogy. In some places it would seem to be an undiscriminating eulogy. In the preface, for instance, Mr. Willson makes the statement that to Lord Strathcona more than to any other man is due the material prosperity of Canada and much of her political temper. This is a large claim, despite the fact that at the time of his death Strathcona was governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, president of the Bank of Montreal, a director of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, and from 1896 High Commissioner for the Dominion of Canada in London. Mr. Willson's tone towards Strathcona is exemplified when he records the fact that in 1887 Strathcona, who had been in the Hudson's Bay Company's service since 1838, was elected by the directors in London governor of the company. It was in this year that he, who had for so many years been the outstanding figure in the once mighty fur trade of Canada, became the titular governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. The suffrages of his fellow directors elected him to this position, first filled by Prince Rupert of the Rhine. It had lately lost its pristine glory; but the romance of the young Scottish lad, who, beginning at the lowest rung of the ladder, had finally achieved the summit, served again to shed, while he lived, a lustre on the chair. Lord Strathcona, as one of the directors of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, and as High Commissioner in London, undoubtedly had his part in the material development of Canada, and with charac teristic thrift and shrewdness he drew at the same time to himself the largest fortune ever made in Canada. As High Commissioner he also had his part in the remarkable development of the imperial spirit in the years between the Jubilee Celebration of 1897 and the great war in which all the Dominions are so whole-heartedly embarked. But when the history of the Dominion of Canada from Confederation to the beginning of the war is written, it is exceedingly doubtful whether Strathcona's place will be quite as high as that assigned to him in this biography. In the sense that Mr. Willson has had access to the Strathcona papers, to the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company, and to Strathcona's correspondence with Laurier of the period from 1896 to 1914, the biography is official. The letters that are embodied in it-and they are quite numerous-are of value chiefly for the light they throw on the organization and inner working of the Hudson's Bay Company; on the transfer of the Hudson's Bay Company's territory to the Dominion Government; on the Riel Rebellion, an episode of 1870-1871 arising out of the transfer; on the downfall of the Macdonald government of 1870-1874 in consequence of the scandal connected with the charter of the Canadian Pacific Railway; on the Manitoba school controversy of 1892-1897; and, finally, on the immigration policy of the Dominion government during the eighteen years when Strathcona was High Commissioner and was responsible for the carrying-out of this policy in the United Kingdom and in various countries of continental Europe. In these eighteen years-1896-1914-the Dominion government, acting through the Department of the Interior at Ottawa, spent in the aggregate nearly twelve million dollars on immigration propaganda in Great Britain, in continental Europe and in the United States. The propaganda was unprecedented in its scope and character; and the Strathcona correspondence makes it clear that Germany and Russia both objected to it. Strathcona was a strong and dominating personality. Interest always attaches to the biography of such a man; and, as has been indicated in describing the correspondence which gives most value to Mr. Willson's book, Strathcona had his part in the making of much Canadian history between the taking-over of the Hudson's Bay Company's territory in 1871 and his death in London in 1914. HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT. EDWARD PORRITT. In Western Canada Before the War. By E. B. MITCHELL. London, John Murray, 1915.-xi, 205 pp. Quite a library of books on Canada written by visitors from England and Scotland accumulated between 1900 and August, 1914, when the whole of the British Empire became involved in the war. This new interest in Canada is easily explained. In the years from 1897 to 1914, the Department of the Interior at Ottawa expended twelve million dollars on immigration propaganda; and between 1900 and 1914 the Dominion received 2,900,000 immigrants from the United Kingdom, from nearly every country in Europe, and from the United States. Most of the books about Canada in these fourteen years were merely impressionist sketches. The best are only of value as affording glimpses of the Dominion during this period of growth and material development, when immigration figures were mounting yearly, when there was more railway building west of the Great Lakes than had ever taken place before in any part of the British Empire, and when at least one-third of the business men in the cities from Fort William to Vancouver were devoting themselves almost exclusively to the exploitation of urban real estate. Miss Mitchell's In Western Canada before the War differs from most of the books written by British visitors since 1900 in two important particulars. The author was in Canada from May, 1913, to the winter of 1913-1914. The real-estate boom had collapsed before she reached Saskatchewan and Alberta, and consequently urban conditions in the prairie provinces differed greatly from those which had existed from 1907 to 1912, the years of greatest activity in immigration, real estate, and railway construction. Miss Mitchell's book is superior to most of the books written by visitors to Canada between 1900 and 1913, since she is an able student of economic and social conditions, and, unlike many of the other visitors, stayed long enough in Saskatchewan and Alberta to realize what the conditions actually were. Every page suggests that Miss Mitchell is a trained and discriminating observer. Moreover, she writes well; and the result is one of the best books on Canada written between the turn of the twentieth century and the eve of the great war. Rural as well as urban conditions are described; and, as might be expected in a book by a woman, there is in its pages much about the daily life and outlook of women on the homesteads in the grain-growing provinces and in the new cities of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Like most visitors to Canada who stay long enough to realize conditions as they have developed since the adoption of the National Policy in 1879, Miss Mitchell discovered an antagonism between the manufacturing and commercial class and the farmers of eastern Canada and graingrowers of the prairie provinces. She also found that in Ontario the rural population was steadily declining; and that even in the West it was at best only stationary, notwithstanding the large immigration of the previous decade-conditions apparently due to the fact that farming has no romance for native Canadians, and educated men regard it as throwing their lives away. The commercial classes, from the great financiers of Montreal to the storekeepers in the tiniest little town in Saskatchewan or Alberta, have, according to Miss Mitchell," the profoundest sense of superiority to the land-owning farmers." Farmers and grain-growers could well afford to bear the contempt of the merely fashionable; but the men of the industrial and commercial classes control Canadian politics; and Dominion politics are, to say the least, run in their interest. "This," writes Miss Mitchell," is the difficulty, and it makes the social gulf a serious matter." Conditions in rural Ontario are far from hopeful. Canadians living in the province concede that much. In a country in which a census is taken every ten years, Ontario rural conditions cannot be hidden. Even in the western provinces, rural life, as Miss Mitchell saw it in 1913, appeared to be in a precarious condition; and she evidently left Canada with the conviction that unless there are developments which will raise the economic position of the graingrowers, there is a real danger that a decay will set in in the prairie provinces like the rural decay in Ontario, and that grain-growing and farming will be left mainly to the new comers from Europe. HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT. EDWARD PORRITT. BOOK NOTES A recent volume in the historical series published by the Manchester University Press contains a very useful collection of documents on The Making of British India, 1756-1858 (London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1915; xiv, 398 pp.). The object of the compilation, according to Professor Ramsay Muir, the editor, is to furnish a selection of contemporary materials illustrating "the process by which, in the course of a single century, the Indian Empire was established and its system of government developed." Wisely limiting his choice amid the voluminous masses of papers available, Professor Muir has concentrated attention on the reasons for the successive enlargements of British territory, on the stages in the growth of the British methods of administration and on the introduction of Western practices and ideas. Most of the matter presented is given in the form of excerpts. These are combined by means of explanatory introductions and footnotes into a more or less connected narrative. In several cases (e. g., nos. 2, 31, 61, 94, 110, 111, 112, 141) the sources are not given with as much definiteness as might be desirable. Sometimes (e. g., no. 32) the provenance is not described until after the excerpt has already been used. Documentary information regarding the introduction and extension of railways, irrigation, the telegraph, the postal service and scientific forestry is confined wholly to the "Minute by Lord Dalhousie" (no. 140). Practically nowhere is Indian testimony adduced to show the effect of western ways upon the native mind and customs. Indeed the fact of their entry seems to be emphasized more than the consequence of it. Pitt's speech of 1784 on the India Bill, also, and the despatch of the court of directors of 1834 might perhaps have been included. A promising evidence of Indian interest in the study of political science along occidental lines is afforded by "The Indian Citizen Series," to which the general editor, Professor Panchanandas Mukherji, of Calcutta University, has added Indian Constitutional Documents, 1773– 1915 (Calcutta, Thacker, Spink and Company, 1915; lxxvii, 473 pp.). This he has supplemented by a special edition of The Government of India Act, 1915 (ibid., vii, 68 pp.), which consolidates into a single statute the mass of fundamental laws issued since the acquisition by the East India Company of the Dewani of Bengal in 1765. As the editor |