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gown-not academic but of the smoking-room-sit down to his daily Greek Testament made one feel how nearly manliness is allied to religion. He had withal that almost uncanny' comprehension of lower animals on which Mr Fletcher very happily dwells. But it was not always so with men and women. What came easy to him must be easy to them; birds and beasts were different.

In his country life he was like Walter Scott; and guests at Baron's Down must needs recall some of the best chapters of Lockhart as they watched him with rustics or in the fields. Yet, oddly enough, with this robust outdoor life, there was an ominous touch of nervousness about health. If his boys were ill at school, he worried their dame; and in the photograph (p. 112) you see the muffetees which, with the 'woolly bear' and the rug over the knees in the study, were in general use. After the farming, his care for the garden was directed by his wish to introduce boys to botany, and to help a son in the Schools at Oxford. Mr Fletcher seems hardly to do justice to the successes at Baron's Down and Eton and the exotics and rockwork of Finchamstead.

That such a Headmastership should have been prolonged after the bloom of it had passed, that so vigorous a character should have lingered into the shadow of disability, is too piteous for words. If he had retired from Eton earlier, if after his seventieth year he had not been tempted back to the Provostship-how vain are our regrets, now too late! Some measure of consolation is such a book as this by such a writer. It sets Warre again before us in his prime, and teaches a new generation what splendid efforts, what generous characters, have gone to the building of their School. We thank Mr Fletcher for doing what no one else could have done, and for giving us not only the 'veluti descripta tabella Vita senis,' but also the portraits. It is a book to read with pleasure for its careful research and literary merits as well as the humour of it and the Eton stories. To Etonians it will be useful, dear and true; to our countrymen an inspiring picture of, not the greatest of all schoolmasters, but certainly one of the great Englishmen of his generation.

H. E. LUXMOORE.

Art. 2.-THE CONFERENCE OF PARIS.

1. A History of the Peace Conference of Paris. Edited by H. W. V. Temperley. Froude. Vols. III-V. 1920-21. 2. What Really Happened at Paris. Edited by E. M. House and C. Seymour. Hodder & Stoughton. 1921. 3. La Paix. Par André Tardieu. Paris: Payot, 1921. 4. La Question Adriatique. Par Adriaticus.' Paris:

Roustan, 1920.

5. Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs. Vol. 1, Nos 1 and 2. 1922.

THE great history of the Peace Conference, edited by Major Temperley under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs, is now nearing completion. The fourth and fifth volumes discuss exhaustively the Austrian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian treaties, together with cognate matters such as the condition of the successorstates (except Poland) and their guarantees for the toleration of racial and religious minorities. We still await a sixth volume, which will of course deal with the Treaty of Sèvres, and presumably will also pay some attention to the problems of Poland and the new Baltic States. It is to be hoped that this volume will appear quickly, as the public is at present particularly in need of light on the Turkish question. In his prefaces to the fourth and fifth volumes, the editor again reminds us that the History owes its existence to the public spirit of an American financier, Mr T. W. Lamont, sometime Economic Adviser to the American Peace Commission. Mr Lamont may rest assured that historians and students of politics in this country are profoundly grateful to him. He has every right to be proud of his foster child. The History, taken as a whole, reaches a high level of scholarship and impartiality; and it has done more than any other book about the Conference to kill misunderstanding and misrepresentations on both sides of the Atlantic. We are sorry that Major Temperley is unable to couple with the name of Mr Lamont that of any Englishman or English learned institution. The book has been written by Americans and Englishmen conjointly; and it would have been only fitting that the financial responsibility should be divided between the

two nations. Possibly we may yet discover, when the sixth volume appears, that the balance has been redressed in our favour.

The editorial foreword to the fifth volume is a reasoned defence of the principles which have been followed from the outset in relating the events of the Peace Conference. The History, in spite of its title, deals with many other matters besides the Conference. It looks before and after. In a general way it traces the main modifications of the peace settlement up to the spring of

1921.

It also contains some excellent chapters which relate to the war, and to the period before the war. Indeed, one of the outstanding contributions to the fourth volume is Mr Namier's account of the downfall of the Hapsburgs, beginning with a masterly analysis of the political situation which was created in the Dual Monarchy by the Ausgleich of 1867. Still the Conference and its decisions form the main subject of the work, and it is in relation to the Conference that the method of the History has been chiefly criticised.

There have been complaints that the first two volumes laid undue emphasis upon the activities of the underworld of experts, as though the findings of committees and commissions had been infinitely more important than considerations of high policy and the idiosyncrasies of the principal negotiators. This criticism is unfair. Experts were in fact responsible for most of the provisions of all the treaties, even where the subjects in hand were relatively simple; and any methodical commentary on the treaty must in consequence be very largely an exposition of the views held by financiers, economists, and jurists, about questions on which a layman is rarely competent to express any views whatever. No one denies that the remaining one per cent. (or less) of the peace-terms, which were seriously considered by the Ten, the Four, or the Five, were often of capital importance; but it is a serious though a very common error to represent the business of the Conference as simply a series of negotiations between a handful of plenipotentiaries. As a distinguished American economist puts it: 'The Peace Conference has been over dramatised. Interpretation of it in terms of tactics and strategy and dramatic incidents is superficial.' If the debates in the

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Council of Four sometimes proved to be fraught with momentous consequences, it was because each member of the conclave stood for national traditions, for national claims, for a national point of view, which carried far more weight than his own eloquence or mother-wit or personal prejudices.

But in fact we are not too well informed about the debates of the Four and of their successors who managed the later stages of the peace negotiations. And this is the main justification which Major Temperley has given for the method of the History. He is so far from assuming the Peace Conference to have been entirely or even mainly a dialectical tournament among the experts, that he is almost prepared to go to the opposite extreme. 'The Peace Conference,' he says, 'was undoubtedly in the main the work of four or perhaps very often three men. In not a few important decisions, as, for instance, Reparation, Compulsory Military Service, and Poland, it is well known that the solutions adopted were directly due to the influence of one or other of these commanding personalities' (IV, p. v). Here, we confess, Major Temperley appears to overstate his point. Formally the Four or the Three made themselves responsible, not ‘in the main,' but consistently and invariably, for every clause in those treaties which were concluded during their stay in Paris. In practice, however, they personally decided a very limited number of questions by means of confidential debates which frequently ended in a compromise; and even these debates were conducted with the help of experts, or were decided by a rough comparison of the material and moral forces to which the contending forces could appeal outside the Conference. We agree with Major Temperley that the truly omniscient historian, in writing of any question thus decided, would explain the decision by analysing exhaustively the arguments and the other considerations by which the Four were influenced. We also agree that, for the historian as he is at present situated, with at the best a piecemeal and hearsay knowledge of these Olympian logomachies, there is no alternative but to pursue a second-best method. He must, when possible, take the recommendations of the experts as his startingpoint; he must observe in the second place how far the

ultimate text of the treaty deviated from the recommendations; and, thirdly, he must be cautious even to the point of agnosticism about the current explanations of these discrepancies between the views of the experts and those of the responsible statesmen. Unfortunately there are questions, by no means unimportant, on which no experts were formally consulted; there are others on which the experts never agreed among themselves. In such cases even Mr Temperley and his collaborators are obliged to form some opinion about the motives of the 'Four.'

A volume entitled 'What Really Happened at Paris' naturally excites the hope that we may glean from it some knowledge of the kind that Mr Temperley believes to be unobtainable. But the contributors to this volume, with the sole exception of Colonel House, did not belong to the inmost circles of the Conference; and they write with an object which is considerably more modest than their title would suggest. They are specialists explaining to an American audience the exact force and significance of particular sections of the treaty. They define in each case the problem which had to be solved; they explain the reasons of justice or policy which suggested the solution; sometimes, with great modesty and restraint, they venture on a criticism. They were experts at Paris, but they are now private citizens. They warmly defend the conduct of President Wilson, but they do so from honest conviction. They represent a point of view which is often less official than that of the History, and is always strictly American. It is not uninteresting to collect their opinions about the relations of the Four with the experts, and of the decisions of the Four to the findings of the commissions.

Of the Four as individuals they have little to say that is new. We are told that no one was ever more ready than Mr Wilson to consult the experts and to give them due credit for their suggestions; but that he wore himself out by attending in person to business which ought to have been delegated, simply because he had not learnt how to work by proxy. As to M. Clemenceau, there is an interesting difference of opinion between Colonel House-who describes him as inspiring the affection of

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