“The services which such a mind as Wilson's, broad, penetrating, exact and luminous can render to a nation can hardly be overestimated… Whoever gives a nation, and most of all to a nation at the outset of its career, sound just principles for the conduct of its government, principles which are in harmony with its character and are capable of progressive expansion as it expands, is a true benefactor to that nation, and deserves to be held in everlasting memory. Such a one was James Wilson.” Lord Bryce's eulogy of Wilson, conceived in the light of liberal democratic ideas, is echoed at many points by a recent biographer, who emphasises Wilson's contribution to American democratic thought and practice. It is regarded with suspicion by those who believe that Wilson could not have been a sincere democrat, and that he used democratic concepts as a device merely to achieve other purposes. “The difficulty with the picture of Wilson as a democrat,” writes one critic, “is his career in Pennsylvania politics,” and he goes on to suggest that Wilson exploited democratic concepts in order to bring about the dominance of the central government.

The examination of historical works, and especially school textbooks on history, for evidence of national bias, is nothing new. Between the wars the focus was on British and German histories, which were an object of concern to the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. Since the Second World War the subject of national bias in historical works has been taken up by the Council of Europe and UNESCO. A recent study has been concerned with current British and American textbooks, which have been examined for evidences of bias against the United States and Britain respectively.

The Pathfinder (1840) is the only Leatherstocking tale in which Natty Bumppo at all resembles the wavering hero of a Scott novel. Here for the first and only time we see him waver between the life he has always led — untrammelled by property, responsible only to his own strict code and conscience, free to follow his own bent away from white European society — and the life of a border family man with all that that implies in terms of a wife who must be kept content with her lot, children.who must be properly educated, property which must be acquired and protected. Yet The Pathfinder is not in the least like a Waverley novel. It is not even very much like one of the earlier Leatherstocking tales. Why, more than a decade after burying Leatherstocking in The Prairie (1827), did Cooper revive him again? And why revive him in this particular way?

In March 1914 The Dial editorial quoted Gilbert Murray. “The great difficulty that weighs on a poet at the present day is … his relation to the tradition that lies behind him.” What prompted The Dial to lift this reference from The Saturday Review was the appearance of some poems of Carl Sandburg in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. The Dial saw itself as the defender of this tradition.