The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 43, July 1939 - April, 1940 Page: 407

Book Reviews

finding of a necessity? Are there two kinds of martial law,
qualified or preventive, where the civil courts still function and
the military authorities are called out for the purpose of preserving
order and aiding the courts, and punitive, where military courts
are established and used in the place of the civil courts? In
labor disputes and class warfare, should punitive martial law be
discouraged and the less drastic device of preventive martial law
be used ? This list of legal and social problems in itself indi-
cates the significance and timeliness of this book and its value to
the political scientist and jurist.
Although the normal reader may conclude from the author's
manner of presentation that there is too much confusion in the
cases with respect to the questions just put, it is comforting to
find on close analysis that this difference of opinion is in con-
nection with border line cases about which there is no crystallized
public sentiment, and that the courts are practically unanimous
in refusing to license unbridled freedom of the governor to
initiate and enforce martial law. The judiciary cannot therefore
be blamed for the fear which some people justifiably entertain
as a result of the frequent use of martial law in recent years.
If fascism is martial law, as Walter Lippman says in his recent
book, An Inquiry into the Principles of a Good Society, then
fascism and dictatorship can be avoided only by the elimination
of the fundamental causes leading to unrest and class warfare
in our social and legal order. Perhaps our legislative bodies
can help, but more likely there must be some attitudinal changes
in the people and especially in our labor leaders and economic
royalists.
W. PAGE KEETON.
The University of Texas.
The Delegate from New York : Proceedings of the Federal Con-
vention. From the Notes of John Lansing, Jr. By Joseph
Reese Strayer, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1939. Pp. viii, 125. $2.00.)
Discovery and publication of the Notes of John Lansing, Jr.,
one of the three delegates from New York to the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, preserves and renders accessible interesting

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