Page:Englishhistorica36londuoft.djvu/300

292 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April volumes rather more compression might not be practised is a question which they will have to consider seriously. In those which have appeared there are not a few passages which seem to go over the same ground. In volume i, chapters v and vi might well have been recast so as to occupy less than seventy pages and yet nothing essential need have been destroyed, while the editor is generous in allowing to the author of chapter ix in the same volume a bulky disquisition upon the classification of treaties, for which any one interested could turn to a manual of international law. Such prolixity may be connected with the heavy price of the completed work. It should not be relegated to that class of books which only the larger libraries can buy. It will become so if nothing is done to reduce the size and price. The war and the peace are likely to be subjects round which for generations thought will centre. It is valuable, therefore, to have in compact form all the details, methodically and chronologically arranged, which those who discuss the war and peace will need. Part i, for example, describes step by step the military and the moral collapse of the central powers. In minor points of interpretation it is possible to differ from the views here given, but the points of stress are chosen with sound judgement, and fictitious importance is never allotted to talk or to negotiation as opposed to force of arms. It is, by the way, doubtful whether the ' blockade ' of the central powers was the lineal descendant of the Napoleonic blockade, as is suggested by the author of the second part of chapter i. The modern ' starvation blockade ' was very largely the elaboration of President Lincoln, and one misses in this chapter a comparison, or contrast, between the naval policy of the Union government in the civil war and the British government in this. The second part is the weakest section of the first volume. It consists in effect of four chapters. They describe respectively (1) the material effects of the war upon neutrals and belligerents, (2) the public and official war-aims of the belligerents, (3) the war-aims of labour, (4) the Bolshevik attitude at Brest-Litovsk. Here obviously the second chapter is the crucial one. In it one may expect to learn something of those irresistible forces of public opinion (see vol. ii, p. 57), which caused the statesmen to make the settlement which they ultimately made, which bolstered them up against the pressure of Bolshevik or labour extremists and, it may be said, carried them too far in an opposite direction. What we get is not an account of public opinion at all, no balancing of the views urged in The Times or the Nation, in the Hearst Press, or in Le Matin and Le Temps, no mention of opinion in Australia (see ii. 233), nothing of that spirit in England which culminated in the dispatch of a telegram to Mr. Lloyd George signed by the 370 members (see i. 267). Instead, the chapter is devoted to an elaborate panegyric of President Wilson, whose ' ideas, like those of no other great statesman of the war, are capable of being worked out as a complete political philosophy '. With the views in that chapter it is no part of this appreciation either to agree or to disagree. President Wilson, between 1914 and 1918, made a complete change from a ' Jeffersonian ' to a ' Hamiltonian ' outlook upon public affairs, and perhaps he was none the less great for doing so. All that is permissible here is to comment upon the presence in the book of a chapter which, both