The medieval English town was called a borough. The name was old, but the thing was new. Where the town grew had perhaps stood an ancient royal fortress, perhaps not. Its site may have been a simple village, a cross-roads market, a fishermen's haven, or a cow-pasture. But neither wall nor court, neither king's peace nor toll-gate, neither kine nor herring, possessed the infallible charm of attracting an urban population. For that a more potent magic was required-European commerce.

CARL STEPHENSON.

RETROSPECTIVE REVIEWS: RECENT BRITISH

BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS 1

2

FOR the history of the last third of the nineteenth century A. G. Gardiner's Life of Sir William Harcourt will always have to be consulted. If Mr. Gardiner has not so great a man to deal with as Morley had, nor so entertaining a man as fell to the lot of Buckle, if he himself is less of a philosopher than the biographer of Gladstone and has been less near the seats of the mighty than the biographer of Disraeli, his work may nevertheless ask comparison with the wellknown lives of the two Victorians.

The Harcourt family could hardly have lit upon a biographer better equipped by outlook and sympathies to understand Sir William. As late editor of the Daily News "A. G. G." has long been famous for his critical attitude towards British imperialism. It can not be said that he has attempted to force his view upon the reader, but he has allowed his actor many chances to forecast the outcome of imperialism, and he is inclined to suggest that recent history has abundantly justified that forecast.

In two respects he deserves well of the historian. With careful economy he has made excerpts from letters to reveal Harcourt as he lived and jested, as he pounded the table and fell upon the Opposition. We have here brought before us not one of the great figures of English history but a House of Commons man, one of the best of them, a man who liked to fancy that he belonged to the eighteenth century but was more Victorian than he knew, a fine type of the old Whig adapting himself, under the stress of political exigencies, to the Newcastle programme and modern radicalism, a partizan to whom Liberalism was patriotism. And secondly, Gardiner has been at great. pains to answer those questions which the historian is prone to ask. We have suffered of late, since the demand for biography became insistent, from the biographer-relative, who, because he alone has

1 Books of like character which have already been reviewed in this journal during the last five years are: Margot Asquith, an Autobiography, XXVI. 525; J. H. Morgan, John Viscount Morley, XXX. 822; John Buchan, Lord Minto, XXX. 824; Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury (first two volumes), XXXI. 134; Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years, XXXI. 323; J. A. Spender, The Public Life, XXXI. 325; G. P. Gooch, Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell, XXXI. 780.

2 A. G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt (London, Constable, 1923, two volumes, pp. xi, 608, 670).

access to the letters, can not be dismissed lightly, but who fails in many instances to tell that which the historian is most anxious to know, and which could often be told if the biographer had only an understanding of the period with which he is dealing. Here Mr. Gardiner does not fail us, he has not been content with his memory of events but has taken the trouble to master the history of his period and to examine the problems involved. And further he has been careful to include, even at the risk of inserting passages dull to the casual reader, those documents that have to do with constitutional development and change.

Upon several episodes in British history the book gives us new knowledge. We learn a bit more about the break of Chamberlain with Gladstone in 1886. Up to that time Harcourt and Chamberlain had been close friends, and the correspondence between them not only serves to explain the clash between Chamberlain and Gladstone but gives us, for the first time, the history of Harcourt's well-meant efforts in the Round Table conferences to woo Chamberlain back into the party. No doubt J. L. Garvin, when he brings out the authorized life of Chamberlain, can, if only he will, add to our information.

The correspondence gives us some further right to comment upon Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule. Morley, Barry O'Brien, and Bernard Holland have published letters that enable us to see how far Gladstone relied upon the workings of his own mind in turning the Liberal party down the Home Rule road. It was a choice that was to affect the history of Liberalism; a half-dozen major policies of the party were put off for an effort to give the Irish a parliament, an effort that was to prove unavailing. Much was at stake in that autumn of 1885 and one can not wonder that Hartington and Chamberlain, as others, believed that they should be called into counsel; that not all the reflection and examination of constitutions should be done at Hawarden; that the Liberal party was greater even than its leader. Harcourt was as much slighted as the others but he was a good party man above all and followed, however reluctantly— for he was never interested in Ireland-the lead of Hawarden, not without writing letters that add to the story.

On no subject does Gardiner help us more than on Victoria. Those letters from the queen which Buckle published in his Life of Disraeli, and the larger body of them recently brought out, give us a much clearer notion of the queen and her part in politics and of her aggressiveness in foreign policy. Blunt, long ago, in his diary had

sensed the queen's tendency, and Harcourt's correspondence with her and account of conversations with her confirm Buckle and Blunt. Both Gardiner's text and the appendix enable us to see how careful Gladstone and Harcourt were in keeping the queen within bounds. Like Disraeli, Harcourt knew how to deal with the queen and, if he did not lay it on with a trowel, understood how to inquire about the family. But he was a constitutionalist, and history will give him a place among those Victorians who had to stand firm in the last skirmishes between Cabinet and Crown.

Campbell-Bannerman 3 will be mentioned in history for his South African settlement and possibly for another reason: he was the first political figure brought up in the Victorian and more particularly in the Gladstonian tradition who not only foresaw but was sympathetic with the new social-radical Liberalism. His story is unusual even in the multicolored variety of English political life. Put down generally as a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, he hewed with such effect at the War Office and drew so well as chief secretary for Ireland that he had won an assured position in politics when Chamberlain's South African policy led him into sharp issue with the business imperialism of the late 'nineties. His allusion during the fag-end of the Boer War to "methods of barbarism ", daringly repeated when it shocked the mood of the time, was believed to have finished his political career. It proved to be his making; and his consistency, his doggedness, and his Scottish caution in the years that followed left him per varios casus at length undisputed leader of his party and heir to No. 10 Downing Street.

This biography is also important on account of its author, who was for years the editor of the old green Westminster and thus the dean of liberal journalism. His "Notes of the Day " upon the second or third page of that afternoon authority were read, from the 'nineties to the War, by almost every political family in London of whatever complexion. They were written by a man accustomed to spend his Sunday afternoons with Campbell-Bannerman at his London house.

Mr. Spender has succeeded in drawing a full-length portrait of Campbell-Bannerman that is more than competent. More cosmopolitan possibly than any other British statesman of his generation, Sir Henry was in politics a "little-Englander". At no time attach

3 J. A. Spender, The Life of the Right Hon. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, G.C.B. (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1923, two volumes, pp. xv, 351, 444).

4 Morley might be cited as another, but he had by no means the same deep and abiding interest from youth to old age in the problems of poverty and social reform.

ing himself to that still small circle called curiously the "great world" of society, he never took on the color of that class nor assimilated their tradition that the business of British politics was with the proper and brilliant development of the pawns on the European chessboard. He examined the Irish question unswayed by the prejudices of his contemporaries or by those political necessities that brought his leader suddenly around, and saw farther ahead in respect to it than most of the wise of his day. Perhaps it was his political gift that, while others were deriving their politics from the past, he was considering what the future would bring forth.

Would that Spender had seen fit to tell us more, would that he had shown us more of Sir Henry's correspondence during the years that saw the rise of Liberal Unionism, would that he had dared to share with us Sir Henry's racy and lively judgments upon his colleagues and opponents. To withhold them is not the new manner."

The long involved cross-play between Campbell-Bannerman and Rosebery is presented as well as it is possible for an author who was refused Rosebery's side of the correspondence. No doubt many more letters will have to find their way into print before it will be possible to pronounce lastly upon the deeds of Rosebery, but Spender's account and that of Gardiner, between them, give us some clues as to the Laird of Dalmeny both when he was prime minister and when he plowed his "lonely furrow". Certainly he was not a leader, unless possibly in foreign policy, where his whole conception ran counter to what Liberalism had stood for. When Morley, Acland, and others preferred him as Gladstone's successor to the old warhorse of Liberalism, Harcourt, they probably had no notion of what aid they were affording to the imperialists. While Conservatism. under Chamberlain was running after expansion, Liberalism was to lose its way, split its forces, and fail of exerting weight against the tendencies of the time. Not until Liberalism fell away from Rosebery or he from it, not until it gathered its forces round CampbellBannerman, did it find its way again.

Perhaps history will inquire why Campbell-Bannerman so lightly allowed Grey, in 1906, to go ahead with the military arrangement with France. That arrangement, which was to involve Britain more

5 It would be a satisfaction to have Sir Henry's comments upon Joseph Chamberlain. Historians are going to have a hard time to reconstruct that vivid personality, because those who came under his spell remained bewitched and those who resisted often misjudged him, imagining him an arch-conspirator, which he was not. But more than Beaconsfield he gave the push to that modern British imperialism which will no doubt be minutely examined by students of the backgrounds of the late war.