served in the fleet that defeated the Armada. In 1588 appeared his work A prooued practise for all young Chirurgions, concerning burnings with Gunpowder, & wounds made with Gunshot, Sword, Halbard, Pike, Launce or such other.' Clowes was a master of vituperative controversy. He writes very hardly of the 'wicked brood of beastly abusers of Phisicke and Chirurgie, daylie more and more increasing, to the utter undoing of many'; and he describes his consultations with more than one such 'shameless beast.' His text is thus more entertaining than scientific; but a valuable element is the description that he gives of actual cases treated, though his style deteriorates and becomes more involved as he turns from abuse to the description of mere surgical procedure.

We may terminate our subject with a description of an amputation in which Clowes gives a good idea of the conditions under which operations were then performed:

'The maner & order of the taking or cutting off a mortified or corrupt legge or arme, which commeth oftentimes by reason of wounds made with gunshot. . . . If a legge is to be cut off beneath the knee, then let it be distant from the joynt iiij inches, & iij inches above the knee; & so likewise, in the arme as occasion is offered. These things being obserued and noted, then through the assistance of almightie God, you shall luckelie accomplish this work by your good industrie & diligence. After his bodie is prepared & purged, then the same morning you doe attempt to cut off the member, be it legge or arme, let him haue two houres before some good comfortable Caudle . . . to corroborate his stomache. And in any wise omit not that he haue ministred unto him some good exhortation by the Minister or Preacher. . . . All which being well considered, you shall haue in a readinesse a good strong fourme & a stedie, & set the patient at the very ende of it; then shall there bestride the fourme behinde him a man that is able to hould him fast by both his armes. . . . Let there bee also an other strong man appoynted to bestride the legge that is to be taken off; & he must hould fast the member aboue the place where the incision is to be made, very stedily without shaking; & he that doth so hould should haue a large hand & a good gripe, whose hand may the better stay the bleeding. . . . And I haue knowne through the skilfulnesse of the houlder not much aboue iiij oz. of bloud lost at a time' (pp. 25, 26).

After describing the operation itself, and the preparation of 'buttons' or pads to stop the bleeding, he goes on:

'And when the houlder of the member aboue doth partly release the fast holding of his hand by little & little, by which meanes you may the better perceiue & see the mouthes of the veynes that are incised & cut, upon the endes of those large veynes that are incised & cut, you shall place the round endes of these small buttons, & upon them presently, without tariance, place a round thicke bed of Tow made up in water & vinegar. . . . And you shall tye the large bed to, with a ligature which they call a choke band, . . . & after it hath remayned on a small time, being thus fast tyed, then you shall place upon these a double large bedde of soft linnen cloth; & then with a strong rouller of foure inches broade, & three or foure yards long, let it bee artificially roulled; & whereas the bloud beginneth to show through all in that place, you shall specially lay a good compressor or thick bolster made of Towe wrought up in water and vinegar the thickness almost of a man's hand. . . . Thus let him lye with as much quietnesse as may be' (pp. 28, 29).

Who can measure the misery and pain from which we have been delivered by surgical progress? Who can compute the honour that we owe to the memory of Florence Nightingale and Lister, of Simpson and Pasteur, who have removed most of these horrors from the circumstance of war, have at once steeled and softened the surgeon's hand by changing agony into oblivion, and have magically transformed our hospitals from houses of pain into palaces of hope?

CHARLES SINGER.

Art. 9.-THE STUDY OF BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY.*

ONE result of the war has been to turn our attention from domestic to foreign affairs. For a long time the British electorate had been so wrapped up in our own constitutional struggles that it was almost completely blind and deaf to other issues. It has been brought back to the affairs of Europe as it were by an earthquake. People who never thought seriously about the relations of England and the Continent, and were content to leave foreign policy to our Foreign Secretaries, begin to form opinions of their own, and will in due season express them at the poll. A new period of our history has begun, in which a democracy, hitherto indifferent to external problems and exceptionally ignorant about them, will demand information about these problems, and cannot without gr at peril to national interests be left as uninformed as it is.

First of all, what is the origin of this indifference or this ignorance? It is no new thing; it did not begin with the triumph of democracy in the 19th century, although it was aggravated by that fact. The smaller and narrower electorate of the 17th, the 18th, and the early 19th centuries was no better informed on these subjects than the electors of to-day. Nor was Parliament itself any better informed than it is now; on the contrary, judging from the debates, it was more ignorant. Lord Chesterfield, in a letter written on Feb. 9, 1748, says:

'We are in general in England ignorant of foreign affairs and of the interests, views, pretensions, and policy of other Courts. That part of knowledge never enters into our thoughts nor makes part of our education; . . . and when foreign affairs happen to be debated in Parliament it is incredible with how much ignorance.' ('Letters,' 1, 247, ed. 1827.)

Compare another complaint, written about a century and a half later, after three Reform Bills had raised the electorate from one to five millions:

'We are too much in the habit in this country of attending only to one subject at a time; and, when we are thinking about

An address delivered to the Royal Historical Society on Feb. 17, 1916.

Ireland, which is very commonly the case, we are apt to forget all else, and both our relations with foreign Powers and those between ourselves and our dependencies drop into the background. . . . While home affairs are watched with the closest attention, and conducted by all parties with high skill, foreign affairs pass from periods of contented but ignorant calm to periods of discontented or violent, but often equally ignorant, panic. There is not, it must be admitted, the same consistency in the foreign policy of Great Britain which is to be found in the foreign policy of the autocracy of Russia, of the constitutional monarchy of Italy, or of the Republic of the United States.' *

I might multiply similar quotations, but, whatever the régime under which we were living, whether it was aristocracy or democracy, the men conversant with foreign affairs and responsible for our foreign policy agreed in lamenting the public indifference to these subjects and the public ignorance of them. It is clear, then, that the defect is not the result of the form of government. Chesterfield attributes it to the defective education of the governing classes; Dilke suggests that it is the fault of the government for not educating the electorate so as to fit it for its responsibilities. Each is right, but neither supplies the whole explanation. At bottom the ignorance and indifference are the result of our geographical position. The sea, which, as Shakespeare says, serves England

'In the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house

Against the envy of less happier lands,'

by preventing us from close association with other nations and by developing certain qualities in our national character, created the state of mind which is summed up in the word 'insularity'; and from that fact the ignorance and indifference complained of grew up. Politicians have sometimes spoken as if the existence of the Channel rendered indifference to Continental affairs not merely natural but legitimate and advantageous. Mr Gladstone wrote of that streak of silver

Dilke, Present Position of European Politics,' 1887; pp. 282-3. Vol. 226.-No. 449.

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sea which cuts off England partly from the dangers, absolutely from the temptations, which attend upon the local neighbourhood of Continental nations'; and he based on this conception too absolute a theory of nonintervention. Other statesmen, hardly appreciating the defensive value of the silver streak, have been too ready to intervene. Their point of view is well set forth in one of Cromwell's speeches :

'You have accounted yourselves happy,' he told Parliament, ' in being environed with a great ditch from all the world besides. Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch--nor your shipping-unless you turn your ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot, and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma.' (Speech xvii.)

These two utterances represent the two principles which have alternately directed English foreign policy, but neither of them has ever completely dominated it. Our policy oscillates between these two poles. Examine that policy closely for some short period of years, and its changes and inconsistencies stand out in glaring relief. Look at it as a whole for three or four centuries, and its fundamental consistency is the most striking characteristic. Foreigners perceive this more clearly than we do. 'In sum,' wrote a French journalist the other day, all the perfidy of "perfidious Albion" through the centuries has consisted in demolishing seriatim every government and every people, which in a fit of megalomania has tried to treat the rest of Europe as a conquered country.' This is what was meant by the policy of maintaining the balance of power, which Mr Bright found so difficult to understand and so easy to denounce.

This continuity of action was the result of causes more permanent and more powerful than the will of the particular men who have from time to time directed English policy. We do not make foreign policy,' said a contemporary statesman; 'foreign policy grows.' Take any period of British history you like, and examination of it reveals the truth of this axiom. In order to understand the policy of Great Britain, one must