iods of "Gallic fury." Thus it is that the book before
us is an unsafe guide on that point. Six years have rolled away since the
revolt of the Commune, the loss of two rich provinces and the imposition
of a tribute nearly half as large as the debt of the United States. The
evidence given and the effective results shown of patience, perseverance,
order, determined good faith, industry and self-control have no parallel
in a like period of the history of any modern people.

The Plains of the Great West and their Inhabitants. By R. I.
Dodge. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Here we are favored with a glance through another military lorgnette, but
at a scene geographically, socially and politically the antipodes of
Paris. Colonel Dodge leads us into the haunts of the original denizens of
Western America, and depicts their traits with a hand made facile by long
familiarity. At part of the aborigines--and that part obviously most
attractive to and most assiduously studied by him--he bids us look through
the sights of the rifle or along the dappled double-barrel. At the other
he essays, with less success perhaps, to aid us with the eye of the
amateur statesman and political economist. The wearers of fur and feather
have no moral side. The Indian has. His condition and future are
correspondingly complicated. How to shoot him is not the sole and simple
question, as it is with his original compatriots except the buffalo. With
the latter shaggy and multitudinous creature the fate of the Indian of the
Plains is more or less linked. They move together, and may be said to die
together. On a map of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the
Mississippi are traced two pairs of reservations. Of one the Yellowstone,
and of the other the Arkansas, is the centre. Each pair is composed of a
buffalo-range and a group of Indian tribes. The three lines of
east-and-west railway separate them, and shoulder to right and left, north
and south, the savage and his herds.

Of the enormous numbers of the wild cattle which were once the exclusive
property of the Indian we have been accustomed to form but a very
inadequate idea. They exceed those which have raised the Tartar into the
comparatively high rank of a pastoral nomad. The patriarch or poet Job was
a famous cattle-owner, but he was a small dairyman by the side of a
Cheyenne or Rickaree chief, and a stampede of a small detachment of
buffalo would have run down unnoticed the whole