Art. 11-BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY PAST AND PRE

SENT.

1. The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783-1919. Edited by Sir A. W. Ward and G. P. Gooch. Cambridge University Press, 1922-23.

2. History of Modern Europe, 1878-1919. By G. P. Gooch. Cassell, 1923.

AMONG the taunts that Juvenal has flung at his age and that our age is in no position to repudiate, the lines which satirise the exhaustive industry and the petty reward of the professional historian may properly be reckoned:

. . . crescit multa damnosa papyro;

Sic ingens rerum numerus jubet atque operum lex Quæ tamen inde seges? terræ quis fructus apertæ Quis dabit historico quantum daret acta legenti?' Any one, however, who should venture to follow his memories of the classics a line or two further and describe the writers of history as genus ignarum quod lecto gaudet et umbra, would require for his correction to be made acquainted with the school of Cambridge historians of whom Sir Adolphus Ward and Dr Gooch, the editors of the new History of British Foreign Policy,' are such eminent representatives. An immense industry has gone to the making of this book-an industry speaking even a little too much, as some may think, of toil and trouble. The Foreign Office has been persuaded to give up its secrets to a later date than is commonly allowed; so that in regard to that part of the story which precedes 1885, it is probable that something like finality has been attained; and, for the rest, the reader has to deal in the main with the profound learning and powerful apprehension of a student who is coming more and more to occupy the place in the world of English historical studies left vacant by the death of Acton. Dr Gooch does less than Acton did to provoke thought and cares less than Acton cared for the little personal touches that help the student more than the Cambridge school of history is always willing to recognise to a right understanding of the past, but of his calm detachment, his clear insight, and his wide information there can be

no doubt. No man in this country, as those who have heard him lecture at the British Institute of International Affairs can testify, is in a better position to see the things that have lately been as they really are and as they will presently appear; and it need be no subject of regret that he has traced the diplomatic history of the Great War twice-once for the student in the Cambridge History and again for the wayfaring man in a volume intended to complete Fyffe's well-known sketch of European history from 1792 to 1878.

An extreme objectivity characterises Dr Gooch's work and that of most of his colleagues. They retail no personalia; they risk no speculation; they seldom pause to let drop a philosophic observation, to sketch a portrait, to risk a luminous epigram, or to draw a large conclusion. Events are strung together on the threads of time or place or circumstance, not caught up into the finer but stronger webs of an idea or a personality. The method has its conveniences and its defects. Of the latter the treatment of Salisbury's foreign policy in 1897-98 might be quoted as an example. Neither Dr Gooch nor Mr Dawson appears to have perceived the connexion between the weakness of British policy in regard to China in the former year and its firmness in regard to the Sudan in the latter. Yet the affair of Wei-hai-wei is closely linked to that of Fashoda; and Salisbury's apparent pliability in the one case stands in a strict relation to his determination in the other. He foresaw the approximate coincidence of the two issues; he judged that the more distant was also the more important; and he was resolved to have his hands free and his strength unfettered when the greater matter came to the fore. Such connexions as this are readily perceived when the standpoint of the student is subjective, but not at all so easily when it is the reverse. And because diplomacy is precisely a balancing of scattered advantages and disadvantages in the mind of the diplomatist, it can never be satisfactorily studied nor engagingly presented by means of sequences of fact arranged upon a basis of locality or some other category of circumstance. 'The play's the thing,' and the policy is the man.

The tale, then, that these volumes contain is very plainly told, without much passion, without much art, Vol. 241.-No. 478.

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without much sense of the presence of individual wills weaving or thwarting collective destinies, and, in shortalmost as if the contributors had received the funereal admonition supposed to have been addressed to the compilers of the Dictionary of National Biography'— without many flowers for reflexion or remembrance. For this, no doubt, the modern practice of fitting, or attempting to fit, large subjects almost as if they were the component parts of a jig-saw puzzle into all too nicely defined limits of space, instead of recognising that, within the broader classifications of size, every subject possesses a kind of natural length, must be held partly responsible. An author's freedom to write well and to give his thesis full expression is now more than ever restricted by the high rate of printers' wages and the high price of paper; and an editor has an increased obligation to provide against idle repetition. It cannot, however, be said that Sir Adolphus Ward, one of the most precise and painstaking of overseers, has invariably succeeded here. Even if the appearance of overlapping is sometimes unavoidable in a collaborative enterprise, it is not easy to defend the arrangement of the material relating to the outbreak of the Crimean War, which in these volumes is a twice-told tale that had better have been told once only and in greater detail. For the rest, one or two solecisms strike the eye strangely in a work dedicated to Diplomacy, and presumably not impatient of the claims of diplomatic and social etiquette. The expression Tsar' of Russia, where the Emperor is intended, is inaccurate, and has been, for some while, criticised and condemned by sticklers for propriety in these particular matters; whilst the practice sometimes employed by contributors to these pages of alluding to peers by their actual rank in the peerage is not borne out by social custom. Only the ignorant, or the facetious, would speak of Lord Curzon as 'Marquess Curzon,' and, though this particular reproach is not incurred, solecisms precisely similar are to be found where & punctilious exactitude might have been expected.

These, however, are trifles light as air, and their mention only to be pardoned to a reviewer for lack of

No flowers by request.'

graver errors in the principal work under review. When all has been said by way of adverse criticism, the 'Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy,' possessing, as it does, contributions from such high authorities upon the topics they discuss as Dr Rose and Prof. Webster, Major Temperley and Sir Valentine Chirol, Prof. Alison Phillips and Mr Harbutt Dawson, to mention some only of the more important collaborators, must long remain the standard book of reference on a subject till now in England insufficiently explored. The impress of the Cambridge School of Modern History is strong upon it-the impress of solidity, of caution, of abundant knowledge, of devotion to fact, of patient research-so that the completion of this great enterprise furnishes a fitting crown to the long and assiduous labours of Sir Adolphus Ward in the field of historical studies.

There are those, it is true, who, as has been already indicated, will look for something more than the book possesses-for vision as well as for fact, for penetration as well as for exactitude, for the delineation of personalities as well as of policies, above all for those high moralities which, as the late Lord Morley has justly said, are the life-blood of style and of greater things than style can ever be.' They will want to know not only what part their country has played in the past, but whether she has played it wisely, not alone whence as a people we are come, but also whither we are bound; they will ask which of our ministers have served idols and which the Living God, and what nations are, according to the law of intellectual and moral gravities, our natural friends and what our foes. The book answers these questions indeed, but it does not answer them directly, nor clearly, nor with unanimity.

They are, indeed, no easy questions to reply to, for the British people seem, in regard at least to their opinions about foreign affairs, to be of a more uncertain mind than most of their neighbours. The French, the Prussians, and the Italians are, with some individual exceptions, adherents of what is called Realpolitikthinly-veiled disciples of the most openly cynical of all the masters of political thought-the illustrious Machiavelli. They idolise their own countries, but they reverence nothing else; and the idea that any nation should look

upon the things of others without desiring to possess them seems to these children of earth, in their secret hearts, the wildest escapade of idealism. It is otherwise with the British. Sated with empire, encompassed by the sea, they have cause as well as opportunity to think on higher things; and their international philosophy is the product at once of a comfortable security and an open Bible. Conscious, like their kinsmen across the Atlantic, of the advantage of geographical isolation, they desire at moments to keep to themselves; and then again, conscious of a greater talent for politics and a greater interest in ethics than the ordinary, they desire to do their duty by their neighbours. And these two thoughts failing to combine in their minds in any intelligible manner, make them appear incomprehensible and enigmatic to their critics abroad. Dr Clapham finds occasion to quote an instructive passage from M. Albert Sorel :

'The English only make up their minds to fight when their interests seem absolutely threatened. But then, plunging into the struggle because they feel themselves bound to do so, they apply to it a serious and concentrated passion, an animosity the more tenacious because its motive is so selfregarding. Their history is full of alternations between an indifference which makes people think them decadent, and a rage which baffles their foes. They are seen, in turn, abandoning and dominating Europe, neglecting the greatest Continental matters, and claiming to control even the smallest, turning from peace at any price to war to the death.'*

It is a good thing to see ourselves as others see us, but the explanation, nevertheless, does not lie in some inordinate selfishness in our national character. It is to be found in something very human and in something a little divine-in a great wish, on the one hand, to keep ourselves to ourselves, and, on the other, in a modest desire to leave the world a better place than it was. And the result has been the development in our minds of a kind of neutral theory, typically English in its halfsanguine, half-cynical moderation-the theory of a balance of power among the nations of Europe, whose equilibrium it is our particular function to maintain or

L'Europe et la Rev. Fr.,' 1, p. 40.