per cent. more. British traders were pressing westward from Carolina. All these things strengthened Bienville's position and forced a final decision. The matter once settled all opposition ceased, and enemies became devoted supporters. M. de Villiers calls attention to the fact that Pénicaut, Charlevoix, and others writing of the place described what was to be hoped for, rather than what really existed. Of all descriptions of New Orleans at that time, the most exact, says M. de Villiers, seems to be that of the Abbé Prévost, except for the mention of the hill. Prévost's description is in his story of Manon Lescaut. M. de Villiers makes a study of the basis of that story, tracing the characters and events in a most interesting manner. He also takes up in the same way those other contemporary romances of European connection, so dear to the hearts of the Louisianais, the story of the Princess Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, wife of the Tsarevitch Alexis, and that of the beautiful Desbrosses, the élève of Molière. The author's great familiarity with the literature of early Louisiana, both printed and unprinted, has enabled him to put all of these things and many more in the eight delightful chapters of the book, and to speak the final word on the subject. He has earned the gratitude of all who love that most individual of all American cities. An eloquent preface by M. Gabriel Hanotaux adds much to the volume. The printing is exquisite; there is a portrait of Bienville, a number of maps, plans, views, and daintily designed and executed decorative figures.

WALTER B. DOUGLAS.

Georgia as a Proprietary Province: the Execution of a Trust. By JAMES ROSS MCCAIN, Ph.D., Professor of American History in Agnes Scott College. (Boston: Richard G. Badger; Toronto: Copp Clark Company. [1917.] Pp. 357. $2.50.)

HITHERTO the institutional organization and development of the province of Georgia have been almost ignored. Now at last we have the above luminous and interesting volume by a pupil of the late Professor Herbert L. Osgood of Columbia University. On the basis of a careful study of the printed sources and of unprinted and hitherto unused original manuscripts and transcripts in the state capitol at Atlanta and in the possession of Professor Osgood, our author's ten chapters treat successively of: I. The Creation of the Trust; II. Personnel of the Trustees; III. Relation of Oglethorpe to Georgia; IV. Organization and Activities of the Trust in England; V. Organization. of the Executive in Georgia; VI. Legislative History of the Province; VII. Judiciary; VIII. Land System; IX. Educational Progress; and X. Religious History of Early Georgia. The volume has a very careful analytical table of contents, a working bibliography, and an index which is good though not quite complete as to proper names.

The Georgia Trust was created by the royal charter issued on June

9, 1732, and ceased on June 23, 1752, when the trustees surrendered the charter and Georgia thus became a regular crown colony. There were seventy-one regular trustees; Professor McCain gives tables of figures showing the record of each as regards attendance on meetings of the trust and of the common council, and committee service, followed by a general summary.

The trustees were men of high character, and many of them were also considered very able as well as conscientious, but they had no idea as to how to govern a distant colony, yet they were unwilling to delegate real authority to anyone on the spot. They gave elaborate instructions to their official botanist, but none to their magistrates in Georgia, and there were no law-books or lawyers in the colony before 1741-for fear of unnecessary litigation! The keeper of their public store in Georgia (where all purchases had to be made) received four times as much salary as any other official, and in influence and prestige soon overshadowed all the rest. The trust being for charity, the charter prevented any trustee from becoming a real governor. Thus Oglethorpe's position in Georgia was necessarily anomalous from the first and caused so much confusion that McCain, though recognizing his high character and abilities, reluctantly concludes (p. 96) that it would have been better for the province if he "had never gone to Georgia, or at least if he had gone there only as the commander of the regiment and without any civil authority at all". In 1737 the office of "secretary to the trustees in Georgia" was created, and William Stephens, an able man, appointed. In 1741 the province was to be organized into two counties, each to be governed by a president and assistants, but in 1743 the scheme for the separate Frederica County was abandoned, and so Stephens was placed at the head of the whole colony, but with little independence of action. In 1751 the first provincial general assembly met, but it could merely offer suggestions to the trustees, who then refused to allow it to make any by-laws, to establish courts of equity in Savannah, or to reduce the import duty on slaves. In 1751 also the assembly was definitely constituted as a permanent advisory body. Next year the charter was surrendered.

Strange to say, three laws approved by the Privy Council in 1735, namely, the act prohibiting the importation and use of black slaves or negroes, the act to prevent the importation and use of rum and brandies, and the act for maintaining the peace with the Indians, were the only laws for Georgia passed during the whole twenty years of the proprietary period; and all three gave serious trouble, though Oglethorpe himself had urged their passage. The common council ordered a thousand copies of each law to be printed separately, in folio (London, John Baskett); but they seem never to have been reprinted, and so they are usually referred to with significant vagueness. The DeRenne Library has the first two, and also a photostat reproduction of the third, the only one in the Library of Congress. The John Carter Brown Library still lacks all three.

After resisting slavery for eighteen years the trustees were forced to yield in 1750. By 1742 rum was being imported and used so publicly that the trustees instructed their secretary in the province to wink at this violation of the law and to discourage seizures, but to see to it that alcoholic drinks were not sold except in houses licensed to sell beer. The Indian act forbade trading with. Indians in Georgia except under license obtained in Georgia personally. This caused much ill-feeling in South Carolina, where the assembly published a whole volume on the subject in 1736, but this book studiously avoided quoting the act in full, and the authorities in London overruled the protest. Only very gradually and unwillingly the trustees were forced to modify in practice the complicated and annoying land laws for Georgia, all restrictions being removed in 1750.

All these matters and various others are treated fully and ably by Mr. McCain, who certainly deserves our thanks and congratulations.

The important periodical Political State of Great Britain (p. 347 and passim) of which there are incomplete sets in the Library of Congress, Columbia University and Harvard libraries, seems to be based, for Georgia, partly on Charleston newspapers.

LEONARD L. MACKALL.

Benjamin Franklin Self-revealed: a Biographical and Critical Study based mainly on his own Writings. In two volumes. By WILLIAM CABELL BRUCE. (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1917. Pp. 544; 550. $6.00.)

To say of Mr. Bruce's work, "At last a good book on Franklin!' would be an injustice to Parton, Bigelow, Stevens, Swift, McMaster, Hale, Ford, Morse, Smyth, Livingston, and many other commentators, expert and sympathetic, who have illuminated various aspects of a many-sided activity. The mere mention of these names, however, will suggest to the Franklinian the special opportunity prepared for the latest biographer. Since Parton's Life and Times, a capital performance for 1864, the primary duty of Franklin students has been the correction of the work of the early editors by reference to the manuscripts, and the collection, cataloguing, editing, and publication of constantly accumulating masses of new material. While this task was proceeding, many essays and partial portraits appeared; but Professor Smyth, most diligent of editors, could say as late as 1905, "I believe that no attempt has ever been made to take a comprehensive survey and estimate of Franklin's work."

Mr. Bruce's intention, one infers, was to produce a survey and estimate more comprehensive than that of any previous biographer; and he has been so far successful that nowhere else save in the complete works of Franklin can one find his subject so intimately and amply presented. He makes no profession of radically novel views or unpub

lished documents. He assimilates and artistically composes materials made accessible by his predecessors, to whom it is a little regrettable that he denies himself the pleasure of offering more than casual and incidental acknowledgments. A substantial work of popularization may well afford a few prefatory pages for the gratification of those who are interested in literary genealogy and for the guidance of those in whom it rouses an appetite for sources. That Mr. Bruce's digestion of the writings of Franklin has not exhausted them, one may ascertain by comparing his index with that of Smyth under the words, for example, Germany, Sweden, and Spain.

The plan of his book suggests, however, that he was less concerned to make an exhaustive summary than a sumptuous representation. Following the chronological order only within the chapters, he disposes his material under the following headings: moral standing and system, religious beliefs, philanthropist and citizen, family relations, American friends, British friends, French friends, personal characteristics, man of business, statesman, man of science, and writer. The topics overlap here and there; a certain amount of repetition is unavoidable; but the method permits great detail with easy and limpid exposition, and is well adapted to display that inexhaustible energy which flowed so fullfraught through so many channels so serenely to the sea. From time to time, furthermore, the cumulative effect of the chapters is happily anticipated by some such synoptic sentence as this, crowding into the consciousness the total significance of Franklin's opposition to the Stamp Act:

To their assistance and to the assistance as well of the great body of wise and generous Englishmen who loved liberty too much at home to begrudge it to Englishmen in America, he brought his every resource, his scientific fame, his social gifts, his personal popularity, his knowledge of the world and the levers by which it is moved, the sane, searching mind, too full of light for bigotry, superstition, or confusion, the pen that enlisted satirical point as readily as grave dissertation in the service of instruction.

The sentence just quoted indicates fairly well the temper of Mr. Bruce's criticism. Every biographer of Franklin, he admits, "seems to adore him more or less in spite of occasional sharp shocks to adoration". This wily American, so seductive in his simplicity, disarms his critics one after another, educates them to a large tolerance, insensibly persuades them that some of their fieriest principles are foolish prejudices, some of their purity mere poverty of spirit, and that a man, like a book, should be judged by his accomplishment rather than by his omissions and his list of errata. He attempts to speak with judicial severity of his "unfaltering nepotism", his sensuality, his occasional coarseness of speech and rankness of fancy, his senile gallantry, his traffic in slaves, and his verse such as "neither Gods nor men can endure ". He even labors the point of his iniquity in treating his illegitimate son like his legitimate offspring, which I should have been disposed to attribute to

him for a virtue. But then he establishes with overwhelming weight of evidence his creative beneficence and wide-reaching good-will, his wit, his gayety, his overflowing geniality, his vast curiosity and teachableness, his resolute patriotism and immense public services, his political sagacity, and the breadth and elevation of his statesmanship. The dark or dubious points in his record sink into negligibility or are remembered almost with indulgence as so many more tokens of his opulent humanity. Without special pleading, merely by showing him as he was and allowing him at the right moments to speak for himself, his biographer brings one finally to the question: What wiser, abler, and—yes, take him all in all-what better man did that fertile eighteenth century produce than Benjamin Franklin? If Mr. Bruce adds little to the store of facts in the case, he makes a very genuine contribution to our appreciation of them by the skill with which he has arranged them to illustrate his own sense of Franklin's abundance and versatility, by his lively apprehension of pictorial and dramatic values, the firmness and occasional felicitous pungency of his style, his fidelity to the aims of biographical portraiture, and by his unfeigned relish for all the qualities of his sitter.

STUART P. SHERMAN.

Life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton. By LEWIS A. LEONARD. (New York: Moffat, Yard, and Company. 1918. Pp. 313. $2.50.)

MISS KATE M. ROWLAND's biography of the last survivor of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was issued so long ago, and so much material has since appeared bearing upon the life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, that a new study of his life might be of considerable interest. Thomas M. Field, in 1902, compiled and edited a considerable number of the unpublished letters of Carroll and his father, and the Maryland Historical Magazine has been printing (in volumes X.-XIII.), a notable series of letters between these two men, which series has not yet been completed. Curiously, Mr. Leonard has made no use of either of these sources. In truth, his list of sources is extremely vague and meagre, and the chief additional information which he gives comes from interviews he held, about fifty years ago, with the late J. H. B. Latrobe, who knew Carroll, when the latter was in his extreme old age. Mr. Leonard is not a scholarly investigator, and appends no foot-notes to his pages, but he has essayed to write a popular book. Former Governor Martin H. Glynn writes an enthusiastic introduction for the volume. The proof-reading was rather carelessly done: e. g., "Sharf" for "Scharf" on page 35, and “Code" for "Coode" on page 37. There are occasional inaccuracies of statement: Brooklandwood is not Catonsville (p. 223); and Carroll died in a house on Lombard Street, and not Pratt Street (p. 257), while the common under