question in California, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas
Nebraska trouble, the organization of the Republican Party, the Dred
Scott Decision, John Brown's Raid and the election of Abraham Lincoln.

Then follows a discussion of facts still more familiar. The author
takes up the upheaval of the Civil War and the difficulty with which
the Negroes effected a readjustment because of the large number of
refugees. He next discusses the role of the Negro in politics during
the Reconstruction period, the outrages which followed and the failure
of the carpetbagger regime. The remaining portion of the book is
devoted to the treatment of the Negroes in freedom and the problem of
social justice. In fact, almost every phase of Negro political history
from the formation of the Union to the present time has been treated
by the author.

* * * * *

_Negro Population: 1790-1915._ By JOHN CUMMINGS, Ph.D., Expert Special
Agent, Bureau of Census. Washington, Government Printing Office, 1918.
Pp. 844.

This volume is unique in that never before in the history of the
Bureau of the Census has it devoted a whole volume to statistics
bearing on the Negro. This work, moreover, is more important than the
average census report in that it covers a period of 125 years. The
compiler has used not only previously published documents but various
unpublished schedules, tables and manuscripts which give this work a
decidedly historical value. Never before has the public been given so
many new figures concerning the development and progress of the
Negroes in this country. It is a cause of much satisfaction then that
these facts are available so that many questions which have hitherto
been puzzling because of the lack of such statistics may now be easily
cleared up.

What the work comprehends is interesting. It is a statistical account
of the "growth of the Negro population from decade to decade; its
geographical distribution at each decennial enumeration; its migratory
drift westward in the early decades of the last century, when Negroes
and whites were moving forward into the East and West South Central
States as cultivators of virgin soil; its drift northward and
cityward, and in more recent decades southward out of the "black
belt," in response to the universal gravity pull of complex economic
and social forces; its widespread dispersion on the one hand, and on
the other its segregation with reference to the white p