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Canning had to confront the problems not of our day, but of his own. So confronting them he discerned the danger which lurked in a League of Sovereigns, fulfilled with the doctrines of Legitimacy, apprehensive of a recurrence of revolution, and more anxious to maintain the European order than to satisfy the aspirations of nationalist minorities. Canning, though the friend of order and the foe of anarchy, perceived, what the autocrats did not, that the Revolution had released forces which might be utilised, in the interests of true Conservatism, but could not be arrested. The diplomatista of Vienna had been over-careful of the rights of dynasties and supremely anxious to restore a balance of power. Canning thought more of the welfare of peoples, and primarily of the prosperity and greatness of his own people.

No one can, indeed, be admitted to a first class in the school of English statesmanship-if an academic computation be permitted-who does not satisfy this primary test. Vague aspirations for the good of humanity may suffice for the philosopher; the politician must give evidence of a passionate love of his own country and an ardent ambition to advance the interests of his own countrymen.

Not the

'Philanthropy whose boundless mind

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Glows with the general love of all mankind—
Philanthropy, beneath whose baneful sway
Each patriot passion sinks, and dies away,'

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but he who with the pen of the anti-Jacobin could

'Lash the vile impostures from the land.'

With Canning, patriotism began at home, but did not end there. He saw in the prosperity of England tho well-being of Europe, and in 'her stability the safety of the world.'

J. A. R. MARRIOTT.

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SOME RECENT BOOKS.

The Russian Revolution-Gladstone's Colonial Policy— Bryce-The War Diary of Unser Fritz-Democracy and Mr Wells-Unemployment-Science and Human Progress-Drake and Captain Flora Sandes-St Perpetua -Islam- The Druids-Anglo-Irish Literature - Sir James Frazer-Lesser Poets and Peacocks.'

RECENT dreadful events have brought home to us the fact that a bloody Terror still is rampant in Russia, and that all the moral whitewashings of shallow sentimentalists cannot hide the fact that Bolshevism is an ugly and brutal beast. Point is given to the recent revelations in this country and in Moscow by the publication of Mr Lancelot Lawton's frank and fearless work, 'The Russian Revolution' (Macmillan), which is a contribution to history of absolutely first-rate value. Lenin, the arch-builder of the Soviet system, failed. His militant Marxist Communism has brought ruin to the people and the industries of Russia. Theory has been defeated by experience. Hatred, treachery and espionage still poison the founts of social life there; yet so far has disaster gone that it is impossible to see any rebuilding of Russia except upon the bases of government at present established there. Marxism, now a proved madness of the theorists, has been thoroughly tested, and, in the phrase of Disraeli, is not only dead but damned. Possibly the death of Lenin was in its time a calamity; for he whose ability was immeasurably beyond that of any of his colleagues, except Trotsky, and it was beyond his also, saw that his theories and plans had fallen to ghastly failure; and had he lived it is probable that before now he would have restored some form of democratic representative government on sound economic lines. But he went; and the prospects of Russia under the present dictatorship of secretaries' are hopeless. Yet through this enlightening book one sees how greatly the collapse of the Empire was helped by reaction from Tsarist blindness, tyranny and corruption. The country, through 'practical Socialism,' and unpractical Communism, is bankrupt, commercially, financially, and of ideals. Out of the mouths of the children words of wisdom may Vol. 249.-No. 493.

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come; and of all the victims of that red chaos none have suffered more than the children. The streets swarm with them, outcast, homeless, vicious, starving, doomed. Said one small boy to another, as overheard by Mr Lawton, 'Look at that house over there. . . . Underground there is poverty, nakedness, hunger, sickness. And in the room just above a ball is often going on.' Such a plain contrast is evidence of social ruin; and it persists, whether Tsarism or Communism rules. This volume, besides being far-reaching, thorough and fair-minded, reveals, not unsympathetically, the personalities and movements, the agitations, even the epidemics, of the Bolshevist régime. No future historian of the most extraordinary social and political experiment the world has yet seen will be able to do without it. It is written with authority-and then, in contrast to it, showing the mischief likely to be done by books written in a hurry, comes the complacent little 'Russia in 1926' (Dent), of Mr and Mrs R. F. McWilliams. Unlike the Lawtons they knew no Russian, they had never visited the country before, and altogether spent only a fortnight there. They were rather pleasantly impressed. It is needless to say more.

Mr Gladstone was born and bred in the midst of Canningite influences, and belonged to a family which owned slave-worked estates in the West Indies. One of his first speeches in Parliament was a defence, not of slavery as an institution, but of the slave-owners, to whom he considered that less than justice had been done in the debates in Parliament in the early 'thirties. His classical training caused him to turn first to the Roman and then to the Greek methods of colonisation, and through these he developed the principle of local autonomy to which he clung for the rest of his life. Throughout his career two of his dominant ideas were fear of war, and of the 'appallingly heavy responsibility which the founding of Colonies threw upon Britain.' Dr Paul Knaplund's 'Gladstone and Britain's Imperial Policy' (Allen and Unwin) is a careful and well-reasoned apologia for Gladstone's Colonial Policy; but in the title the word 'Imperial' is used. Now the Imperial Policy of a nation like Great Britain is inextricably connected with her Foreign Policy and this aspect of the question

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is hardly touched upon in the book. The two principles mentioned above were all very well in dealing with those who, like the colonists, were mainly friends, but led to disastrous results in dealing with enemies. Gladstone was a member of a Government which through fear of war was led into the most useless war of the last century-in the Crimea. The Boers were enemies, and the retrocession of the Transvaal, which is called 'a magnanimous act and one that required much courage,' was undoubtedly one of the causes of the South African War of 1899. Gladstone refused to be alarmed by the advent of Germany as an African power.' He 'early

arrived at the conclusion that the Germans must be appeased even at the risk of offending the Australians'; and he was outwitted and bullied by Bismarck in New Guinea and the South Sea Islands. The same influences were at work in Egypt, in India, in Ireland and elsewhere, and we cannot but regret that Dr Knaplund has so limited the scope of his work as to ignore this dominant and inseparable influence in our Imperial Policy, and thereby to give a one-sided representation of Mr Gladstone's statesmanship.

To meet Lord Bryce-whose biography by Mr H. A. L. Fisher, under his earlier and equally honourable name of 'James Bryce' (Macmillan), has come to us in two volumes-was to realise his eager and breezy interest in most things, and to recognise his radiant sincerity. His biographer, with the frankness helpful to every effective work of the kind, accepts the fact that in Parliament and as a writer Bryce was not of the first rank; but yet the tireless and even passionate work he did for the Armenians and other victims of racial cruelty; his exhaustive studies of the Holy Roman Empire, and especially of the American Constitution; his qualities of mind and character were more useful to the world than many a trumpeted superman has been. The best chapter in these volumes is the last, which describes Bryce's personality. He did his duty earnestly; and he loved life, and with discrimination his fellow-men. He was cosmopolitan; he travelled to nearly every part of the Earth, and his favourite playthings were the mountains. He was a very true democrat, as is shown by the poor man in the American street who stopped

him as he was passing by to consult him on his private collection of coins. A tribute which not many ambas sadors have shared.

History written with truth is bound to be ironic, for it brings out sharply the weaknesses of the 'great men' who have played their parts on the stage of public life and often has exposed the folly of human predictions. Certainly 'The War Diary of the Emperor Frederick III' (Stanley Paul), a truthful and sympathetic document, has its ironies; and if the Exile of Doorn has sensitiveness, as is probable, his father's innocent words should be to him wormwood; for with its detailed account of the fighting in the Franco-Prussian War and of the re-establishment at Versailles of the German Empire, the ideals on which the then Crown Prince of Prussia thought it was based are expressed. It is needless to repeat those anticipations, for in less than fifty years the powerful steel edifice came toppling down, rotten through Prussian vain-glory, destroyed by the first heir of the idealist. It is natural that Fritz's record should be sympathetic, for he was a good man, though sentimental-often he and most of the actors in the story (but never Bismarck) have tears in their eyes-but also it is vivid, and infinitely the more interesting because the seven-months' campaign of 1870, the fruit of the vanity of the little Napoleon, was a direct cause of the vast fiery conflagration of 1914. Yet those early dreams of Frederick: that the new German Empire would be a main bulwark for peace and promote the prosperity of all the nations; and the further thought that Prussia did not need a navy, but only an arrangement with England whereby the British Navy should safeguard German rights by sea, in return for which the armies of the Fatherland should guard Great Britain on land! ... Hence the ironies.

His harshest critics cannot deny to Mr H. G. Wells the possession of intellectual courage; and much of his written work has been devoted to social experiments, rebuilding the structure of civilised life in divers imaginative ways. It was, therefore, natural, when Mr Wells was invited to address the Sorbonne, that he should rise to the height of his great argument and look briefly, but with some earnestness, at Democracy under Revision' (Hogarth Press), drawing a few bold

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