With one other conversation on the subject of Ireland I leave it. It was at a tête-à-tête dinner, on May 1, 1921, at the 'Senior' (United Service) Club of which he was an honorary member:

LORD MORLEY. If I were an Irishman I should be a Sinn Feiner.

J. H. M. And a Republican?

LORD MORLEY. No.

J. H. M. Not every one is as staunch to the creed of Home Rule as you. Mr Hardy, for instance. Mr Hardy, for instance. He told me lately that he had come to the old conclusion-that the Irish are a people who cannot live without a grievance.

LORD MORLEY. That's true. But we and the Church have made them so. There is something wayward, diabolical in them.

Nothing gave him greater pleasure in his later years than the conversion of the Times' to Home Rule. He once described it to me as the greatest event in Irish political history since the conversion of Gladstone. The Times' and the Morning Post' were the two papers he read regularly almost to the end. His appreciation of good writing in the Press was quite independent of his political sympathies. Of the 'Morning Post,' whose opinions were always at the very opposite pole of his own, he once said, 'I disagree with nearly everything they say, but it's the best polemical writing of its kind since Junius.' And of the same paper on another occasion, 'They seize every point.' He was proud of having been a journalist, and no topic was more likely to engage his attention in talk than that of his old profession. One of the first questions he would put to a traveller from a foreign country was the position of the Press; what was its influence on political life; what talents did it attract, what opinions did it help to form, what part did the leader play in its economy? He was keenly anxious to accept an invitation to the 'Manchester Guardian' centenary dinner, but his doctor forbade it, and he acquiesced with the remark, After all, at my age one doesn't contemplate centenaries with any pleasureI am too near a centenarian myself for that.' There can have been few distinguished journalists who did not at one time or another take counsel of him as the Nestor

of their profession-Mr Wickham Steed, Mr C. P. Scott, Mr J. A. Spender, Mr Massingham, Mr Gardiner, Mr F. W. Hirst, Mr Hammond, Prof. Hobhouse, were among them. He was fond of telling how he was in the middle of writing a leading article when the summons came to him from Mr Gladstone; he rose and obeyed the call, was offered the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland, went to consult Chamberlain, who looked black as thunder-he knew what it meant,' but advised him to accept, did accept, and then returned and finished his article.

He urged me one night at the 'Senior' to 'leave everything, the Army, the Bar, and the University, and devote yourself to literature.' I gave my reasons for doing otherwise; they will assuredly not interest the reader, but his reply to one of them is interesting. I pleaded the res angusta domi, and said the prospect of depending for one's bread upon literature appalled me. He said, 'It never appalled me; I don't agree that a man can write better if he is financially independent; I got 7001. a year by writing for the "Saturday Review," and I had nothing else to depend upon.' When I put to him the same somewhat otiose question as Jeffrey put to Macaulay, 'Where did you get your style?' he answered without a moment's hesitation not, as might be expected, From French models,' but, without a moment's hesitation, From the practice of journalism.' But I think he meant the leisurely journalism of the Fortnightly,' which is not quite the same thing as the breathless leader-writing of the daily Press.

(To be continued)

J. H. MORGAN.

Art. 13.-THE ALLIANCE OF HANOVER.

The Alliance of Hanover. A Study of British Foreign Policy in the Last Years of George I. By James Frederick Chance. Murray, 1923.

FOURTEEN years-a relatively long period in these days of rapid historical productivity-have passed since Mr J. F. Chance made a contribution of no ordinary value to the history of our Foreign Policy. His 'George I and the Northern War,' published in 1909, not only threw clear light upon the Northern policy of George I up to Nystad and upon its influence, hitherto insufficiently demonstrated, on the change in some of the chief aspects of European politics; but it directed more attention to the diplomatic materials for this section of the history of British Foreign Policy than had hitherto been bestowed upon them. Since that date-in 1911 and 1912— he has, in four valuable contributions to the English Historical Review,' with the aid of documentary evidence, elucidated the progress of Northern affairs after Nystad and the antecedents of the Treaty of Hanover itself, as marking a new stage in European politics at large. His present work deals with a period of not quite three years, as definitely limited as it is brief, beginning with the year 1725, which, in the opening words of the last of Mr Chance's essays just cited, 'saw a revolution in European politics.' The death in February of Peter the Great, whose achievements and policy had alike been a constant source of anxiety to George I and his advisers both British and Hanoverian, could not, under a successor desirous of carrying on as well as extending his designs, otherwise than threaten the interests of Great Britain and her policy in alliance with France. And the Treaties of Vienna between Austria and Spain (April and May) united those two Powers on the basis of the acknowledgment of the Pragmatic Sanction by Spain and of the furtherance of the Spanish designs on Gibraltar and Port Mahon, and on the formation of the Ostend Company for trading in the East Indies. Thus, even before the conclusion of the Secret Treaty between the two Powers in the following

Vols. XXVI-XXVIII.

November, to whose condition of the eventual acquisition and partition of French territory unfounded rumours added that of a joint support of a Jacobite invasion of England, the interests of Great Britain and, with hers, those of her French ally were menaced. The Congress of Cambray, over which, to borrow Mr Temperley's phrase, the diplomatic world had been yawning since 1724, was dissolved. But the Alliance of Hanover, of September 1725, between Great Britain, France, and Prussia-whose inclusion in it was an afterthoughtwas the Anglo-French reply to the menaces in question. It was the work of Townshend, with the direct cognisance, though it was not to the personal liking, of George I. In August 1726 the Empress Catherine joined the AustroSpanish Alliance, and the two leagues now jealously confronted one another, each seeking to obtain the adhesion or support of European Powers open to its solicitations. The history of these, often most complicated, efforts and the documentary evidence of them occupy a main part of the volume before us. The accession of the United Netherlands to the Alliance of Hanover was secured in August 1726, that of Sweden not till March 1727, the Convention with Denmark, which covered the same purpose, following in April. In the autumn of the same yearthat of the death of George I-the hostilities, which at its beginning had broken out with Spain, died out. The Preliminaries of Peace, signed on behalf of Spain in August, were confirmed by the Convention of the Prado in March 1728, opening the way,' in Mr Chance's concluding words, 'to the Congress of Soissons.'

Manifestly, then, this volume opens, as it closes, with diplomatic achievements of the highest consequence, and it is to diplomatic rather than general political history that the sequence of problems and of their progress to solution here detailed pre-eminently appertains. It would, obviously, be unfair to expect here a general estimate of the policy of the several sovereigns and their chief agents responsible for the proceedings in this period of the several Powers, great or small, and, still more so, to look for a characterisation of the sources and effects of their personal influence. Nevertheless, opportunities are not foregone in this book for the adjustment or modification of existing notions on such heads as these.

George I, in particular, though for the most part remaining in the background, occasionally, in his own words or in utterances conscientiously repeated, shows himself resolute and decisive in the methods as well as in the principles of his policy, unhampered in his judgment of political problems either by defectiveness of insight or by narrowness of view due to ignorance, and, though incapable of veiling either personal or dynastic sympathies, never consciously unjust. Among the personalities of contemporary Sovereigns upon the relation of whose Foreign Policy to that of Great Britain some of the most important issues in the history of both turn, that of the Emperor Charles VI comes but little under our ken in the present work. He was loyally served in the conduct of his policy by Count Sinzendorf, and in the years covered by the present volume, apart from the impetuous counsel of Prince Eugene, by Field-Marshal Count von Seckendorf. But while Charles VI, as his efforts for the Pragmatic Sanction proved, had something of the tenacity, together with his share of the ill-luck, of his House, he was hardly equal in capacity to the pressure of difficulties which, during a long reign, his policy was called on to meet, or of marked independence in his judgment of them. Herein, at least, he differed from the foremost of the Princes of the Empire with whose death his own was nearly contemporary. King Frederick William I of Prussia plays a part of his own in the affairs and relations of the Alliance of Hanover; or rather, in the words of the historian whom Mr Chancewithout much felicity of touch-dismisses as the too patriotic Droysen,' his policy was that of a middle line, thankless and burdensome itself, with its turns and its oscillations hither and thither,' which demanded close attention and consideration from others, unless it were to become ambiguous and provoke the hostility of them all. Frederick William I, self-willed in speech and bearing beyond the descriptive powers of portraiture or caricature, successfully escaped conflict with both the Courts on whom the avoidance of a European conflict ultimately depended; the Treaty of Wusterhausen (October 1726) established his relations with Austria on a basis satisfactory to the Emperor in the year after that in which he had joined the Hanoverian Alliance; and on the