Builders of the Canadian Commonwealth by George H. Locke, Parties and Party Leaders by Anson Daniel Morse (review)

358 THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW remainsthe chief title to value that much is garneredhere which would otherwisehave beenirretrievably lost. The absence of an indexcanbeaccounted for only uponthe assumption that the formal serviceto history may have been after all a byproduct . It is a grave omission--gravest in a book of this nature-and it ought to be remediedin the next edition. Cn•.sT•.R MARTI• Buildersof theCanadian Commonwealth.By G•.o•c•- H. LocIr•.. With an introductionby A. H. U. COLqUHOUN.Toronto: The Ryerson Press. 1923. ($2.50.) As Mr. A. H. U. Colquhounpoints out in the introduction to this volume,Canadianliterature, althoughit isrichin biographicalmaterials, is singularly lacking in collectionsof public speeches. The present reviewer onceattempted to beguilean idle hour by compiling a bibliography of the publications in which the speeches of Canadian public men were available, and the list when completed was astonishingly brief, and full of the most surprisinggaps. It becameapparent that even for many speeches of first-rate historical importance it was still necessary for the enquirerto haverecourse to the filesof old newspapers or the pagesof Hansard. Dr. Locke, in the volume under review, has not attempted to supply this deficiency. Nothing lessthan a sortof goldentreasuryof Canadian public speechesin many volumes would sufficeto do this. But in the presentvolume Dr. Locke has done somethingat least toward making Canadian readers more familiar with the best fruits of Canadian eloquence ,and what he has done, he has done with great judgment and skill. He hasselectedfrom the speeches of Canadian public men,from the daysof Papineauand Mackenzie to thoseof Mr. Meighen and Mr. MackenzieKing, shortextractsillustratingthe qualitiesof their oratory and dealingas a rule with someimportant phaseof history or politics; and each extract he has prefaced with a biographical sketch--a sketch just sufficientto indicate the speaker's personalityand the backgroundof the speech. One could wish that the extracts from the speeches had been less brief. A reader can hardly obtain an adequate idea of the eloquence of a speaker like Sir Wilfrid Laurier or Sir George Rossby reading a mere gobbet,and one almost regretsthat Dr. Locke did not think fit to give us a few complete speeches rather than a miscellany of short passages. But this, no doubt, would not have beenwholly in harmony with his object in writing the book, which was to catch and stimulate the interestof hisreadersin "a history of our country asrevealedin the REVIEWS OF BOOKS 359 speeches of her public men". From this point of view, Dr. Locke has chosen his materials with real discrimination. PartiesandParty Leaders. By ANSON DANIELMORSE. With an introduction by DWIGHTWHITNEY MORROW. Boston: Marshall Jones Company. 1923. ($2.50.) SOMEof hispupilsand admirershave publishedunder this title a collection of the essaysand papersof the late ProfessorMorse of Amherst College. Most of thesepapershave to do with the history of political parties in Great Britain and the United States; and it is worthy of note that in this field Professor Morsewasoneof the pioneers. Though in somecases written many yearsago,they may still be read by students of political science with great interestand benefit. But the chiefreason for calling attention to them is the fact that there are includedin the volume two brief papers affecting the commercial relations between Canada and the United States. Thesepapersare entitled "Commercial Union with Canada" and "The Commercial Relations of American Countries" They are a frank discussion,from an American point of view, of Canada's"ultimate destiny", and it isinterestingto knowthat ProfessorMorse came to regard the political union of Canada with the United States asno longerlikely, although he was a strongadvocate of commercialunion. "The fact is," he says, "that nature and history have made the Canadians and ourselveseconomicallyone people; and the loss which the denial of this fact entails Canada is less able to bear than we." Anyone who is interestedin learning what a profound and suggestive studentof Americanpoliticalconditions thoughtof the future relations of Canada and the United States will not regret a perusal of ProfessorMorse'spages. W. S. WALLACE; Federalism in North America.By HERBERT ARTHUR SMITH.Boston: The Chipman Law PublishingCo. 1923. Pp. v, 328. THIS volumeis the outcomeof experiencein lecturing to law studentsin McGill University. If the essayscontained in it form, even substantially , ProfessorSmith's lectures,we...