overnment, describes the
administrative systems of Greece and Rome and of the great nations of
medieval and modern Europe and of the United States, and treats in
detail of the functions and objects of government, with special
reference to law and its workings. His _History of the American People_,
though it contains many passages of insight and has the charm that comes
from intense appreciation of details, is too diffuse and repetitious. A
great history should be a combination of a chronicle and a treatise; it
should be a record of facts and at the same time a philosophical
exposition of an idea. Mr. Wilson's five-volume work is insufficient as
a chronicle and too long for an essay. Yet an essay it really is.
Moreover, unless I myself am blinded by prejudice, it makes too much of
the errors committed by our government in the reconstruction period
after the Civil War. On the whole, with all their faults, the
administrations of Grant and Hayes accomplished a task of enormous
difficulty, with remarkably little impatience and intemperance. The
disadvantage of having been written originally under pressure in monthly
instalments, for a periodical, is clearly visible in the _History_.
There is a too constant effort to catch the eye with picturesque
description. Nevertheless, in this book, as in the others, Mr. Wilson
evokes in his readers a noble image of that government, constitutional,
traditional, democratic, self-developing, which, from the days of his
youth, aroused in him a poetic enthusiasm.

And now for the way his imagination works and clothes itself in
language. The quality of his mind is poetic, and his style is highly
figurative. There have been very few professors, lecturing on abstruse
subjects, such as economics, jurisprudence, and politics, who have dared
to give so free a rein to an instinct frankly artistic. In the early
days of his career, Mr. Wilson was invited to follow two courses which
were supposed to be inconsistent with each other. The so-called
"scientific" method, much admired at that time even when applied to
subjects in which philosophic insight or a sense for beauty are the
proper guides, was being urged upon the rising generation of scholars.
Perhaps the Johns Hopkins University was the center of this impulse in
America; at least it was thought to be, though the source was almost
wholly German. If he had had to be a dry-as-dust in order to be a writer
on politics and history, Mr. Wilson would ha