The Life of George Mason, 1725 - 1792. By Kate Mason Rowland.
2 vols. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.) —George Mason was a Virginian planter who took a prominent part in American affairs during the War of Independence and the settlement which followed it. His great-grandfather, another George, fled from England after the Battle of Worcester, as the family tradition runs, and made his home in Virginia. There are reasons, it seems, for connecting him with a family of Masons in Stratford-on-Avon which has become extinct within the last five-and-twenty years. Miss Mason gives some extracts from the family records, among them, as might be expected, an "Indian outrage," and a witchcraft case. The career of the statesman himself has two aspects, that which regarded his native State of Virginia, and that which concerned the newly created nationality. Both are described with copious detail, and with continual reference to and quotation of contem- porary documents. To an English reader, this abundance of in-
formation is almost overpowering. The author would have done well to put the leading facts together in a convenient résumé. George Mason seems to have regarded the Federal .Constitution as having "an awful squint towards Monarchy." The executive seemed to him too powerful, a complaint that has not unfrequently been repeated by later generations. We have lighted on a sen- tence which has a curious applicability to the present conjunc- ture: "The Empire ought not to be dismembered without the assent of three-fourths of the Legislature."
Previous page
