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the special features that distinguish Sir George's history. To many like the present writer, to whom The Early Life' remains an affectionate memory and a model of 18th-century history worth all the dry analyses of the same facts, it is no surprise to find all the principal characters, both on the English and the American side, living again under the author's touch. Everybody will not agree with Sir George's conceptions of all his characters, but at any rate nobody after reading these volumes can fail to have a vivid idea of a living man from his pictures of Franklin, Washington, Arnold, the Adams cousins, Jefferson, Greene, Putnam, or of Fox, Cornwallis, Burgoyne, Wesley in his old age, North and George III. Even if the pictures are distorted, you feel at least that they are presentations of the men as they appeared in the flesh to many of their contemporaries. The number of historians of whom this could be said is not large. It requires, indeed, the wide sympathy of a man of affairs, in addition to the power of historical study, to enable a writer to throw himself into the past and enter into the lives of bygone men sufficiently to make pictures so arresting and so vivid of persons so diversified.

It is perhaps natural that the best pictures are those of Americans, for the author does not conceal that his sympathies are chiefly with them. The only important failure, however, is the portrait of Sir William Howe. The reason of that is, no doubt, that the writer has not himself quite made up his mind about Howe. He likes him as a Whig, and he admires him as a general in the field; he feels that he was put in a false position by the vagueness of his instructions and the incapacity and vacillation of his superiors. At the same time, though he condemns Howe, as any one with a military eye must condemn him, for his constant failure to seize oppor tunities, he cannot quite decide how far this was due to Howe's instructions, how far to his own vacillation: and, when it comes to the debate in Parliament about Howe's conduct of the campaign, he reserves all his indignation for the Government. The fact is that, whatever may have been the ministry's delinquencies, Howe had ample discretion and, as Pitt said of Cumberland, 'full powers, Sir, very full powers,' which left him

no excuse for the defeat at Trenton and the extraordinary voyage he took to Philadelphia at a time when a proper support of Burgoyne might well have ended the war. Howe, with his views, should never have undertaken the command, or, having undertaken it, he should have sunk his views and smashed Washington as he might on several occasions have done. Perhaps, however, no one could do full justice to Howe; a vacillating character is the most difficult of any to seize at the time or afterwards.

Besides the portraits, Sir George's description of battles and of historical scenes will dwell in the memory. One of his own earliest interests in politics was for the reform of an abuse in the army; and he has always had a knowledge of military subjects and an interest in military history possessed by few civilians. When to this is added a power of clear and straightforward narrative, it is not surprising to find that Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga and the guerilla warfare in the south become in these volumes more real than they have ever appeared before. It is no bad test of military history for a lecturer to attempt to explain an action or a campaign from the text of an author to a class of soldiers. Anybody who takes Trenton, for example, as described in these volumes, as a basis for such a lecture will find that it fully answers this test. It is the same with Bunker Hill, the same with Saratoga. Apart from the battle-pieces, one would especially note the description of Congress, its committees, its futile debates, its bores and its cranks; and it is interesting to find that Sir George, who has no doubt suffered from plenty of parliamentary bores and cranks in his time, can, without defending their folly, show that there was some method in the madness of Washington's obstructors. Also to be noticed is the very fine chapter at the end of 'George III and Charles Fox,' Vol. I, on the ArnoldAndré episode. It could hardly be better told.

One final word about Sir George Trevelyan's general attitude on the American Revolution. Unscientific as the Whig explanation of the causes of the Revolution may seem to us in view of recent research, it appears much less open to question that, in its broad outlines, Vol. 224.-No. 445.

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the Whig view of the Revolution, followed pretty closely by the author and generally accepted both in England and in America, is right. Somewhere in these volumes the author points out that this war was never regarded as a foreign war in England. It was essentially a civil war, in which two parties in the State felt so strongly and so conscientiously that it is absurd to call either side disloyal. Chatham would never have allowed his son to resign his commission had he regarded it as a foreign war. Except in a purely technical and legal sense, nobody dreams of calling Hampden, Pym, Falkland and Oliver Cromwell disloyal to the king; they were no more disloyal to England than the cavaliers. And so it was in this war of the American Revolution; it was not a case of disloyalty in the Americans and their supporters in England, but one of such extreme divergence from their opponents' views that there could be no other issue but battle unless one side gave way. I rejoice that America has resisted,' said the greatest Englishman of his day and one of the greatest of all time; and it is absurd, when such a man speaks so, to accuse Fox of disloyalty and want of patriotism, even if, as is reported merely on an obiter dictum of Gibbon, he rejoiced at Saratoga and Yorktown. He felt, no doubt, as many of the most patriotic Englishmen also felt, that it would be a worse calamity for England to be victorious than to be beaten in this struggle, since the fetters being imposed, as they thought, on America would be imposed on England also in her turn. The fate of nations must not be tried by forms,' said Francis; and this is really the last word on the subject.

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The Americans had real grievances in the restriction of trade and the attempts of the Governors to impose taxes on them; they did not always realise the nature of these grievances, though they had a subconscious knowledge of them. Consequently they caught at every slight new encroachment rather despairingly, like children who cannot quite see how they are unjustly treated but pathetically seize on the last word said for their explosion of anger. If only wiser men had been in power, it may be true, as the Tories maintain, that the colonists would never have been satisfied with the last concession until the radical grievances had been removed; it may also

be true that no English politician at the time could fully understand the real hardship and injustice of the Americans' relation to the mother-country. But men like Chatham, Burke and Fox showed that they could learn ; and, given a breathing space, they would undoubtedly have prepared the way for mutual discussion and understanding. Chatham and his school and Fox saw dimly that no more gratitude was due to England from the colonists for relieving them of the French danger than to the colonists from England; they would in time have come to see the reason for this, that England only needed the Americans as customers, while the French excluded English goods.

The proof that the Whigs were right in their theory that the colonists ought to be treated sympathetically and with the same or cognate rights to British citizens in the homeland seems to us to follow from the history of the century and a half following the American Revolution. As Mr Fisher truly points out, we did not mend our ways with the colonies for some time after the American Revolution; but he is wrong in thinking that the lesson has not gradually sunk in. In spite of hesitations and reactions the general trend of our colonial policy has more and more been approximating to the ideal held up by Chatham, Fox and Burke-that of trusting the colonies and giving them freedom compatible with our own constitutional ideals. The relations of the colonies to the mother-country have often seemed vague and based on no common formal understanding; but, thanks to the practical liberty allowed them to choose their own way and live their own lives, they have felt that their dependence on Great Britain for security and for nothing else has made this indefinite tie one more worth fighting and dying for than the far more explicit tie of commercial relations, which the Americans found so irksome that they finally wrenched themselves free of it. Certainly no more glorious example of the way in which we have profited by the mistakes of the American Revolution can be found than in the history of the last ten years in South Africa.

BASIL WILLIAMS.

Art. 9.-GERMANY'S FOOD SUPPLY.

THE German Empire, ever since its creation, has been confronted by the alternative presented to Great Britain three quarters of a century earlier: whether to remain an agricultural state, independent of supplies of food from outside, or to embark on a manufacturing career and lose, more or less, its power to feed itself. It is this vital issue that has been at the bottom of that struggle between the agrarian and industrial classes which has formed the substance of its subsequent internal history; not a difference in economic intelligence, not even a collision of pecuniary interests, but a far-reaching divergence of view as to ultimate ideals. So late as the beginning of the 'seventies, Germany still sent out more food than it brought in. As in the case of England, the impulse towards industrial development came from the newly-realised possession of vast deposits of coal and iron. But the economic advisers of the German Government have had the experience of England before their eyes as warning as well as example; ready as they were to promote manufacture, they were also anxious not to sacrifice agriculture. The Empire naturally started with a Prussian bias, the bias of the land-owning squire; and this agrarian leaning was confirmed by the electoral influence of the peasants, who still held in their hands two-thirds of the German soil. Accordingly the German Government has sought to promote equally both manufacture and agriculture; to protect squires and peasants by corn duties and advance agricultural improvement in all sorts of ways, and at the same time to build up by tariffs and subsidies a great export trade in manufactured products. That this policy of preserving agriculture has enjoyed a large measure of success, no one can now doubt. Germany during the war has been by no means completely successful in feeding herself, but she has been far more successful than this country could have been, if our navy, like theirs, had been driven off the seas.

Complete self-sufficiency, however, in the matter of food is not really compatible, for a country of Germany's size and natural resources, with a great foreign trade. A nation that sends out exports must receive imports to pay for them; and if, like Germany of late years, it also