o Dr. Burgess to inform me as to the result of
his investigation and will let you know what he reports.

Yours very truly,
HENRY A. WALLACE.

BOOK REVIEWS

_Rachel._ By ANGELINA W. GRIMKE. Boston, Mass., The Cornhill
Company, 1920. Pp. 96. Price, $1.25.

Miss Grimke's drama of Rachel is a beautiful and poetic creation. She
has produced this effect by a literary instinct which is fine and
mainly cultivated. Its native vigor carries the reader past an
occasional crudity, which it would seem to be hypocritical to notice.
The sweep of passion in the drama is elemental. She has connected the
story of a girl-woman with the most woeful of earthly tragedies,
namely the crime of a great nation against one of its component parts.

The feelings expressed in the drama, though elemental, are uttered in
the terms of modernity. The structure of the drama is modern, and yet
there is something in the figure and movement of Rachel herself which
reminds the present writer of Antigone. We do not see Antigone before
the hour when she has chosen to meet the doom that man's law has
decreed should she perform the task that human love and religious
faith have enjoined upon her. Antigone goes to the death of her body
declaring that in the Infinite there is a longer time for love than
there is on earth.

But we do see Rachel before the ultimate choice has come to her. She
is a gay and happy girl. The drama proceeds to the hour when she too
must choose between the issues of earthly love and those which reach
into eternity. She learns from her mother, Mrs. Loving, that ten years
before, they all lived in the South and her father and her half
brother were lynched. Briefly summarized, this is Mrs. Loving's story.
As a young widow with a boy seven years old, she had married an
educated man of color. She was a person of color herself. Mr. Loving
owned and edited a paper in which he wrote on behalf of the people of
color. A Negro innocent of all crime was murdered by a mob in that
region. Mr. Loving denounced the murder and the murderers in his
paper. He received an anonymous letter apparently written by an
educated person, threatening him with death, if he did not retract
what he had said. In the next issue of his paper he published an
equally stern arraignment of the lynchers and their crime.

That night a dozen masked men broke into his house. Mr