Book Reviews and Notices ment of the military requirements and tactics which he considered necessary to assure Britain's success. Vetch's detailed defense of his proposal, as Waller ably shows, indicates that, unlike so many of his contemporaries, Vetch understood the extent to which all of Britain's possessions in America, from the Caribbean islands to its most northerly territories, were interrelated, and that their individual and collective success and future prosperity depended upon closer economic and political integration. As "a citizen of the empire," whose prosperity he placed above any provincial loyalties, Vetch saw in his plan to attack and win Canada an opportunity to join the interests of the Crown with those of its American subjects. Here was a "Glorious Enterprise" which would benefit all Englishmen everywhere. Efforts to achieve this grandiose project at this time failed twice; and Britain's only success in reducing the Gallic threat to its North American colonies was the capture of Port Royal (1710) and the addition of territories (Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay) which France ceded to her three years later at Utrecht. Waller sets forth the details of these events, and the significant role which Vetch played in them, carefully, never losing sight of their larger meaning. The account of the numerous difficulties which plagued Vetch while he was governor of Nova Scotia provides much insight into the functioning of the imperial admiriistration and the effect or English domestic politics upon developments in North America. Vetch spent the last eighteen years of his life in England answering the call or imperial officials for advice on how to develop Nova Scotia and to improve the administration of the colonies. Dujring these years he never succeeded in satisfying any of his own ambitions, and he died in jail for debt. Waller's study, based largely on manuscript and printed sources, is a capable and interesting appraisal of a significant career in the early history of 18th-century America. The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776- 1790. By E. James Ferguson. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., 1961. xvi +358 pages, biblio. essay, index. $7.50.) Reviewed by Lucius Wilmerding, Jr., author of The Spending Power. During its brief existence the Continental Congress was faced with two tremendous difficulties. While the war continued, it had to find the means of defraying the charges incident to keeping its armies in the field. Afterwards, it had to settle accounts, ascertain its debts, restore public credit, and retrospectively impose upon the several States an equality of financial sacrifice. How those difficulties were resolved or put in train of solution is ex- 415