Archduke, assassinated, as Dr Gooch concludes, by 'Austrian Serbs' on June 28; and her determination to settle conclusions with her adversaries once and for all whiles she was in the way with them, though it will always be rightly condemned by the peace-makers among mankind, is not at all out of keeping with the common theory and practice of the advocates of force without stint or limit. Germany, left, thanks to her arrogance and ambition, without a real friend in Europe, was in no position to allow her only useful ally to be torn asunder by the Slavonic hordes whose swords might probably, in course of time, be pointed at herself, possessed as she was of one of the torn members of Poland. Russia, rebuffed in 1909 when Austria had annexed the occupied provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was more than ever bound in 1914 to afford the Serbs assistance or else for ever to hold her peace. France was strictly tied to the tail of Russia, and England loosely to the tail of France. Apart from the violation of Belgium, which, however, as Mr Cruttwell shows in an interesting argument, did not legally compel our intervention, for the obligation was joint not several, there was nothing abnormally inhuman or unnatural in the inception of the War; and even that crime was one which, as our military conversations with Belgium clearly showed, had been clearly foreseen.

'It is a mistake,' observes Dr. Gooch, 'to attribute exceptional wickedness to the Governments who, in the words of Lloyd George, stumbled and staggered into war. Blind to danger and deaf to advice as were the civilian leaders of the three despotic empires, not one of them, when it came to the point, desired to set the world alight. But, though they may be acquitted of the supreme offence of deliberately starting the avalanche, they must bear the reproach of having chosen paths which led straight to the abyss.'

Two courses lay open when once the War had begunto treat it as a blunder or to treat it as a crime, for indeed, it was in some sense both. The exigencies of sustaining the war-spirit in democratically governed countries caused all the stress in Western Europe to be laid upon the latter aspect; in America, for a long while the President and great part of the nation regarded it

'Camb. Hist. of Brit. For. Policy,' vol. III, p. 18.

in the former. The hardening of the struggle, however, and the continuous growth of German brutality, gradually caused the memory of the origins of the War to be lost in its effects. Force came to seem the only remedy, and at the reckoning there was no effective appreciation— such as was shown by Castlereagh and Wellington in 1814 and 1815-of the fact that the enemy, when all has been said, remains a vital member of the European system. Lord Lansdowne, who among the leading Englishmen of his time had the international sense most fully developed, and whose much-abused letters during the War constituted, in fact, a high tribute to his large familiarity with foreign affairs, had no voice in framing the Peace; Lord Balfour, though present in Paris, was mainly engaged with the Austrian Treaty; and Mr George, in whose unaccustomed hands the future of Europe was placed, was fettered by the violence of his election speeches and the depth of his historical ignorance. Thus it happened that the Treaty of Versailles, which did lip-service to the idea of a League of Nations, reflected in its more telling, more operative features the French conception of tranquillity. History has shown all too plainly that our neighbours across the Channel love to have the pre-eminence, and the Peace and all that has followed upon it has shown that that love of preeminence is in no way dead. Europe-to repeat the epigram already quoted-exchanged in 1870 a mistress for a master; and now the rôle has been once more reversed, and we labour as our forefathers did so often, under the old fear of French domination-of the domination of a people who in the very hour of making Germany pay for her aggression can find time to celebrate the centenary of Napoleon, the embodiment of their own complementary disgrace. France-there's the pity of it-has entered a new epoch of world-history with her heart unchanged, and the prospect of the everlasting duel clouding even still her vision.

For ourselves, upon whom all the ends of the world are come, the lesson of History is plain. No balance of power, however perfect, is more than a makeshift when we have to do with people without understanding and who delight in war. We can throw our weight now on the side of Germany, and now on that of France in the

eternal strife for the mastery of Europe; but with neither have we any real part or lot, for our ways are not their ways, nor our thoughts the thoughts that govern them. Only across the Atlantic, or perhaps sometimes among the smaller, less protected nations of the globe, do we find that real kinship of pacific ideas upon which all true co-operation must be based. It is not the least important contribution of the 'Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy' to our knowledge that it traces from point to point the embarrassed but irresistible growth of an Anglo-American understanding. We, as well as our kinsmen, had at the beginning much to forget, yet from the beginning there was a vein of affection running through our dislike. 'The feeling had not yet died away,' observes Prof. Newton of the period of the Treaty of Ghent (1815), 'that in seceding from the British Empire the Americans were renegades, but,' he adds significantly, 'still entitled to an exceptional consideration which Great Britain would not concede to other trespassers on her rights.' And he goes on to point out that though the Treaty mentioned had failed to decide the very questions that had provoked the Anglo-American War of 1812, the inconclusiveness of the settlement did not lead to war (as Alison had supposed it safe to predict it would do), but rather gave opportunity to that 'mutual reluctance to drive matters to extremes,' which England and America share in common. Even whilst Castlereagh was Foreign Secretaryso early as 1818-an immense progress in amity was made by the conclusion of the Rush-Bagot Agreement in favour of a practically complete naval disarmament upon the great lakes that separate Canada from the States; and this wise arrangement engendered a temper which has enabled the two countries to leave three thousand miles of frontier undefended unto this day. Thus, not disagreeing except in opinion, the two nations have managed to pass, without actually coming to blows, through the not inconsiderable differences of a century -through the disputes arising out of the Slave Trade, the annexation of Texas and the Oregon Boundary, out of the arrogance of Palmerston, whose attitude towards the States stood as usual in unhappy contrast to that of Aberdeen, and finally, out of the uncertain frontier Vol. 241.-No. 478.

M

between Venezuela and British Guiana-until at last, after one abortive attempt in 1897, a general Arbitration Treaty was arranged between the two countries in 1908. The recent War and still more what we call the Peace ought to have brought to the sister peoples a deeper understanding and a fuller sympathy, and would, perhaps, have done so, if it had not been for Mr George's reversion to a type of statesmanship reminiscent, with vagaries, of the old nationalist standpoint of Canning and Palmerston, and bound to issue, with modifications, in a revival of the worn-out policy of Balance of Power.

By such insufficiency in high places was lost the confidence of America in the advent of a world of just weights and equal measures. The League of Nations, initiated by the American President, remained as a sign to be spoken against and an aspiration for which mankind was too evidently not prepared. But if the lessons of our diplomatic history have not been here misread, if in our great peace ministers we possess the true interpreters of our minds, if we have with our kinsfolk, as we have not unluckily with the French, a community of hope and purpose, if in the political detachment-the splendid isolation-that we share with them there is latent a search for and yearning after peace and goodwill, then on the foundation of an Anglo-American understanding light may yet arise in obscurity and the darkness of warring nations pass into the sunshine of a brighter day. Dreams, perhaps, and nothing more than dreams! Yet not wholly forbidden to a generation which has seen a British Sovereign and an American President drive in high procession along the streets of London and past the effigy of George III.

ALGERNON CECIL

Art. 12.-THE PERSONALITY OF LORD MORLEY.

I.

WHEN the last will and testament of the subject of this memoir were given to the world they were greeted in many quarters as an act of apostasy without precedent in the history of letters. The distinguished biographer's direction to his executors, enforced with such sacramental words, that they should neither aid nor abet any biography, seemed to some like the abjuration of a life's vocation. It has excited much speculation, most of it very wide of the mark, and some impertinence. True it is that there is a rule of law that a man's rights in his reputation die with him-actio personalis moritur cum persona-and such an attempt at their posthumous protection may seem to some to savour too much of an imposition of the 'dead hand' upon the living. But if the legal rule is to become an ethical obligation no man who had ever done the State some service would be justified in burning any of his letters, however indiscreet, or in destroying any of his diaries, however introspective. Few, indeed, there are who would accept public life on such onerous terms. All the political biographies that have been published conceal far more than they reveal, and Lord Morley, who in his younger days had enforced the doctrine that the more unseasonable the truth the greater the necessity of proclaiming it, had no desire to go down to history as a practitioner of what the casuists call the 'economy' of it. He had written a memorandum on our foreign policy before the War which was a kind of apologia for his resignation, and when I urged him, unwisely as I now think, on a comparatively recent occasion (June 24, 1922) to publish it in the interests of historic truth, he replied:

No! the truth can never be known. It will never overtake the legend. I have read many books of late, dealing with events in which I took some part, and all of them are wrong. "History" always misleads. Far more depended on the conversations of half an hour, and was transacted by them than ever appeared in letters and dispatches.'

And when I answered that this came with an ill grace from one who had written so much history I was met