To such teaching the historian is compelled by the principle that historic truth requires the facts of history to be studied in the order of their historic importance. In the necessary work of selection, he must select not the good things, but the important things. But he will himself be false to this principle if he proceeds to treat important things as good because of their importance and in proportion to it. He must not identify the "City of Cecrops" with the "City of God"; or, like Hegel, confuse the kingdom of Prussia with the kingdom of heaven. If he submits to this Hegelian tendency, and regards the actual as the culmination and consecration of the whole process of history, he must expect to be faced with a Marxian reaction and see history interpreted as the preparation for some city not made with hands, but imagined in the cloudy dreams of propagandists.

A further warning seems needed, though it concerns a point of minor importance. When the judgments of historians about the facts of the past and their relative importance undergo change, and the change is in a direction which some group of propagandists welcomes, we must not assume that it is due to any infection of the propagandist spirit. It may be an honest change in purely historical judgment. Such change is quite likely to be in the direction which propagandists welcome. The historian, at best, sees through a glass darkly: the events of his own time, from which the hopes and doctrines of propagandists take their rise, have their lessons for the historian as such-they alter, and should help to clarify, his vision of the past.

The recent war is the outstanding example. From it, the League of Nations, and the noble propaganda which men of good will are carrying on to prevent future wars, have arisen. The horror it created has, for many, made the belief that war is a wicked and unnecessary thing into a passionate convictiona faith which they are impelled to preach. The Great War has also influenced the purely historical judgment of historians about the wars of the past. If I may, as a student of history, make a personal confession, I find that because of the Great War I am inclined to attach less importance to war as a factor in history. Though unparalleled in its range and destructiveness, it seems to me to have made far less difference to the course of human affairs than I should have expected. The ancient nations, for the most part, continue to exist, and the former lines of development have

been resumed to an extent which seems to me marvellous. I can no longer regard the wars of the past as being quite so important as they previously seemed. I find myself forced to the conclusion. that we historians have hitherto somewhat exaggerated the influence of military decisions upon the destinies of peoples. Such a change of emphasis in history would probably be welcome to those who preach that war may be and ought to be superseded. Yet my conscience tells me that it is historical evidence and not the infection of the propagandist spirit which has modified my view. My judgment may be mistaken; but I feel quite sure that it is an honest change in purely historical opinion. For one thing, it has gone along with another change less welcome to the advocates of peace, for the fact of the Great War has reduced the importance one assigns to the development of international commerce and credit as a force working for the prevention of war.

Again, I find my outlook upon the past changed by that war in regard to matters where there seems little room for propagandist bias. Having seen the large economic reactions of a depreciated currency, I am inclined to regard changes in the value of money as more important factors than I previously took them to be, both in the economic developments which are associated with the Black Death, and in the history of the Tudor enclosures. And, at least, I would plead that zeal for the purity and truth of historical teaching, and for its freedom from the propagandist taint, should not lead to the rejection of modifications in the views of historians about history, merely because some of those modifications are as it were by accident favourable to the purposes of propagandists.

As Lord Acton well said: "History must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own." And, indeed, it is in this way most of all that history can be an instrument of political education. It reveals conditions different from our own, and so teaches that men can live without things whose importance in our own lives tempts us to think them as necessary as the air we breathe. It makes us walk with fear and trembling in the light of our own hopes and notions, because it shows us men in the past holding, with a confidence as great as ours, hopes and beliefs which have proved to be delusions. It unfolds a record of progress actually achieved which at one time was unimaginable, and so saves us from undue conservatism. It shows us that the grandest and

most solid edifices have been built by processes that seem almost intolerably slow and were often almost imperceptible at the time, and thus it warns us against undue radicalism and the bias of the young man in a hurry.

If we are tempted to regard the Nation State as the one and only form of political organization, history sets before our eyes the Middle Ages with their approximation to a federation of nations; the world-empire of the Romans; and the City-State of the Greeks. And it reminds us that the wisest of the Greeks thought the City-State, or something very like it, to be the one inevitable setting of civilized human life, and believed, as Mr. Fisher says, that "fate holds no surprises garnered in her hand." But these lessons of history will stand out most clearly if historians, in setting the facts of the past in the order of their importance, choose, more than they have done, to take as their standard of measurement the importance of the facts for the generation in which they occurred; if, in other words, they make history a real story of the past and not merely an analysis of the antecedents of the present. And the lessons of history will not stand out at all, but will become blurred and illegible, if we allow the propagandist spirit, and the desire to prove this or that, to dictate what the lessons shall be. The ghost of the past has much to teach, if we listen and do not dictate.

We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence.

REGINALD LENNARD

THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR

1. British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914. Edited by G. P. GOOCH and HAROLD TEMPERLEY. Vol. I.: The End of British Isolation; Vol. II.: The Japanese Alliance and the French Entente. H.M. Stationery Office. 1927.

2. From Bismarck to the World War.

A History of German Foreign

Policy, 1870-1914. BY ERIC BRANDENBURG. Oxford University Press.

1927.

3. The Genesis of the War. By Rt. Hon. H. H. ASQUITH, M.P. Cassell. 1923.

4. Twenty-Five Years, 1892-1916. By ViscOUNT GREY OF FALLODON. Hodder & Stoughton. 1925.

5. Before the War. By VISCOUNT HALDANE. Cassell. 1920.

6. The World Crisis, 1911-1914. By RT. HON. WINSTON S. CHURCHILL. Thornton Butterworth. 1923.

“།

SHALL not see the world-war, but you will, and it will start in the Near East." So Bismarck, shortly before his death (1898) remarked to Herr Ballin, as the latter was showing him over the great Hamburg-America liner that was to bear his name. That Bismarck accurately forecasted the future is undeniable; but the interesting question remains: how far had he himself helped to pile up the faggots for the conflagration which he foresaw so clearly and foretold so confidently?

This question cannot be answered quite so summarily as certain publicists have been prone to assume. There is, indeed, a strong pre-supposition that Bismarck's well-known ideas as to the "logic of history" would have led him to regard as inevitable a struggle for world supremacy between England and Germany. Yet it may be doubted whether that was actually the case. It is true that Bismarck regarded the Franco-German War of 1870 as the logical and inevitable sequel of the Prussian victory over Austria in 1866. Nor was the reason far to seek. "It is France," as Marshal Radom observed, "that has been conquered at Sadowa." To Sadowa, then, Sédan was the logical sequel. Was the Somme similarly implicit in Sédan? To that question we must return. Meanwhile, it is pertinent to observe that Bismarck, throughout his ministry, had consistently and even ostentatiously disclaimed any direct interest in Balkan affairs. "The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian

grenadier." "I never take the trouble even to open the mail-bag from Constantinople."

It may be thought that Bismarck did profess too much, that there may have been an excess of ostentation in these oft-quoted sayings. Still, some measure of confirmation comes from Paris. "Ce qui modifie l'évolution de la question d'orient, ce qui bouleverse complétement les données du problème et par conséquent sa solution possible, c'est la position nouvelle prise par l'Allemagne dans l'Empire ottoman." Thus wrote M. André Chéradame in 1903. The plain inference is that in the dozen years which followed Bismarck's fall there had taken place, in M. Chéradame's expert view, a radical change in German policy in the Near East. So true was this that, in 1914, the late Sir George Prothero could write: "The attempt to dominate the East forms the keynote of German weltpolitik." Prince von Bülow has himself said: "For many a year Turkey was a useful and important link in the chain of our political relations." Does Bülow's statement justify Bismarck's forecast? The words of an eminent German publicist, written after the outbreak of the war, would seem to supply an affirmative answer: "The war comes from the East; the war is waged in the East." So Professor Ernst Jäckh wrote in the Deutsche Politik for December 22, 1916. Was it true?

These questions are prompted, though not suggested, by the very important publication which stands first on the list of books prefixed to this article. It has long been urged as a grievance against the English Foreign Office that the archives have not been more accessible to serious historical students. As regards very recent history that reproach is no longer justified. Sir Austen Chamberlain (confirming a decision made during the brief tenure of office by Mr. Macdonald) has ordained that the "official documents bearing on the general European situation out of which the war arose "shall be published with all practicable speed, and three volumes have already been published. The concluding volume of the series (Vol. XI) was published, under the very competent editorship of Mr. Headlam-Morley, in 1926. That volume contained the relevant British documents between the date of the assassination of the Archduke on the 28th June, and the British declaration of war on August 4, 1914. We now have the first two volumes of the series edited by Dr. Gooch and Dr.