Book Reviews [pp. 568-572]

BOOK REVIEWS.
ducers' Association" and "Half Million Club"
have with blare of trumpets been striving to do,
put at least one California industry squarely
before the world. The coming Horse Show
promises to outrival its brilliant predecessor.
MR. CLEVELAND has
Consular made a big bid for a certain
Reform class of praise by placing
(?) some of the smaller consular
offices under the Civil Ser
vice regulation. Mr. Cleveland is obtaining his
reward for his virtuous deed from a few mugwump papers that know about as much about
the Consular Service and its requirements as
Horace Greeley did about farming. Putting up a
row of school books as a bar to the scheming
politician is absurd. Competitive examinations
will no more keep bad men out of the service
than they will put good men in. What it will
do, and what Mr. Cleveland expects it to do, is
to take all responsibility from his shoulders for
his appointments. There would never be any
difficulty in obtaining good men and gentlemen,
for the Consular and Diplomatic Service if the
President did what he is paid to do -look into
the career and qualifications of every applicant
before appointment and hold in office a man
w hen he has proven himself a success.
Degeneration.
THE author of this remarkable book very
clearly defines for his readers, in his dedication,
the scope and aim of the work. Morel, soon fol I Degeneration. By Max Nordau. I). Appleton & Conmpany: New York: iF95.
A thorough turning over and out once in ten
years would be a benefit to the English or
French Consular Service. What our Counsular
Service needs is men of affairs, not scholars, but
it will never get them by any method as long as
the pay is so pitiable. Mr. Cleveland's little
move may be considered a joke.
THE OVERLAND would
(Gold be glad if every one of its
not many readers would read
Necessary. carefully and honestly Sen ator Stewart's masterly paper in this number on Silver. There is a large
class in this country of intelligent voters and
tax-payers who dismiss the silver question as in
the past they dismissed the slavery and the
tariff questions the remark,- " It is too deep for
me." Day after day the same tax-payers will
wade through column after column of the Durrant Trial stuff and fathom a mystery, to their
own satisfaction, that has puzzled our best lawyers for months. It will only take half an hour
to go through Senator Stewart's paper, and you
won't mind that after you have once started;
for it is as interesting as it is convincing. Read
it, and the silver question will not remain such
an awful mystery, even if you do not agree with
all the distinguished writer may say.
lowed by Lombroso of Turin, sought for light on
many obscure points of sociology. They claim
to have found it in the notion of the gradual degenerating process of evil parents and loose
moral surroundings. Here Nordau, an ardent
admirer of these renowned professors, takes up
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