The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 42, July 1938 - April, 1939 Page: 426

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

itself with legislative reform. Congress was not called upon, and
all changes were made by an Advisory Law Commission with the
approval of the governor. The author has included a chapter of
evaluations, which perhaps would have been better if spread
throughout the book. The main narrative, based largely on
Magoon's voluminous reports, often sounds like an apology for
the governor. The final chapter, however, rectifies this impression.
Doubtless, as Mr. Loekmiller concluded, Magoon made a good
governor and was much more popular in Cuba than his recent
detractors now claim. Perhaps the intervention could have been
averted, but Magoon did not enter the scene until the general
policy of the United States was formulated. Considering the con-
ditions facing him, it is hard to see how he could have given Cuba
a better administration. The present volume gives a good estimate
of perhaps the most creditable of America's Big Stick episodes;
but it does not make any generalizations regarding the policy of
intervention then prevailing.
RALPH H. PARKER.
Pomona College.
Bolivar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revo-
lution. By Victor Andr6s Belaunde. (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins Press, 1938. Pp. xxiv, 451.)
The contents of this volume consist essentially of lectures
delivered at the Johns Hopkins University in the Albert Shaw
series in 1930 in honor of the centenary of the death of Sim6n
Bolivar, the great South American Liberator.
We see Bolivar not as: a military genius, but as a statesman
and creator of constitutions. As a thinker and doer in the political
realm the man stands out with greater clarity than in those numer-
ous biographies in which the warrior necessarily overshadows the
statesman. The thought of the Liberator is outlined as "the ever
changing and sometimes contradictory manifestations of a great
mind." It is no all-wise Solon, a paragon of all the political
virtues which Sefior Belaunde draws with a sympathetic, yet
critical, pen. Bolivar was essentially human; he was guilty of
many mistakes and contradictions. His political thought evolved,
attained remarkable heights, and then deteriorated-all within a
relatively short span of years. His most penetrating speculations

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