Monthly Bulletin - Clpdigital.org

REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS—OCTOBER 1913 369
the strictures of the severe Victorian moralist. Later, when the war
was over, Wellington and his army were quartered in Paris, and general,
officers, and privates alike seem to have found plenty to amuse
them during their sojourn, and, in marked contrast to the conduct of
Blucher and his men, to have established themselves on very good
terms with the inhabitants. Some of the officers, indeed, found the
lure of Paris so irresistible that afterwards they made their permanent
home there, and, like the inscrutable Capt. Gronow, on whose journals
M. de Monvel has drawn freely for information, became the arbiters
of a society which they and their successors in the next generation infected
with a severe attack of Anglomania.. .
It would be possible to quote indefinitely from this charming book,
but that would be apt to convey the false impression that M. de Monvel's
work is principally a volume of entertaining gossip. So far from
that being the case, the author displays throughout a definite constructive
purpose, which is to illustrate the somewhat remarkable fact
that, despite the most radical differences of sentiment and manners between
France and England, there are, as he says, politics apart, 'few
nations who have maintained a more uninterrupted intercourse with
one another, and probably fewer still whose thought and culture have
acted and reacted so closely one upon another.' " Nation, 1913.
(Call number 944.36 B05)
European Cities at Work
By Frederic C. Howe
"Without delving very deeply for causes, or analyzing methods in
great detail, Dr. Howe gives us rapid and interesting sketches of the
municipal activities of many German and some British cities, and of
the results achieved by them. This makes fascinating reading. Pleasanter
than romance is the series of pictures which the book calls up
before our minds—pictures of well-planned cities, of beautiful streets,
magnificent railway stations, suburbs laid out with a view not only to
convenience, but to comfort and coziness. More rewarding than most
traveler's impressions are the thoroughly informed comments of the
author upon municipal causes and effects.
The implied, and sometimes expressed, contrast of American with
European cities gives zest to the book. Certainly in America 'the city
has grown faster than our city sense,' and we have not yet learned 'to
think in big-community terms.' As we read of the surprisingly large
number of things which the German city successfully does—not only
of municipal lighting and street-railway systems that actually pay a
profit and of public works undertaken in a big-visioned way, but also
of forms of taxation which place the principal burden upon the rich,
and of compensation and insurance laws that protect the working-man
—when we read of all this we inevitably begin to feel that we are sadly