history of Illinois with the
national drama of Civil War, however, the author has brought forward
facts which, although belonging to local history, have a national
significance and historians will make use of them, although they will
not agree with him in all of his views. The scientific use which he
has made of the newspaper material of that day is especially
commendable. He has, moreover, shown that this history was as economic
as political. Good farms and roads figured as conspicuously as
efficient generals and wise statesmen.

There is some mention of the Negro as a human element. Sympathy for
the race, "whether the southern slave or the northern victim of the
black laws, was aroused by _Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852_." Thereafter
came the effort to secure for the blacks equal rights before the law
but because of opposition to them in southern Illinois the black code
could not be easily repealed, for race hatred often broke out in
southern towns as in the case of Mound City, which in 1857 undertook
to drive out all Negroes. The author mentions also such strivings of
the Negroes as the efforts of the members of the race in Chicago to
defend their rights by protesting against the oppression through local
indignation meetings and the Colored National Convention in Cleveland
in 1848. Their Chicago Literary Society condemned the Fugitive Slave
Law, they organized to resist colonizationists and kidnappers, and at
the outbreak of the war organized a military force to fight for their
own freedom.

* * * * *

_The National Encyclopedia of the Colored Race._ Volume I. By
CLEMENT RICHARDSON, Editor-in-Chief. The National Publishing
Company, Montgomery, Alabama, 1919.

This is a fair effort at local and national biography with no pretense
to scientific treatment. Some attention is given also to religious and
educational institutions. Apparently almost any one financially able
to aid the enterprise or sufficiently influential to have his sketch
incorporated into the work appears in this volume. One man's
achievements seemed to count for about as much as those of another and
the law of proportion was disregarded. There are farmers, business
men, ministers, physicians, dentists, lawyers and the like, many of
whom are well known and others who have made no impression upon the
world except to complete a course in an institution of learning and to
use the knowledge thus acquired in maki