clearly an idealist's far sight into the future, yet it met discouraging and unmerited failure. Generally his ideals were limited to present requirements. Here he launched out for the needs of a then unseen and even now barely realised want. The School Office, on the contrary, meeting an immediate difficulty, took root and grew till we all wonder how the School could possibly have been managed without it. The blessing of it can only be fully appreciated by those who can remember a time when every 'excuse' had to be hunted down by a breakfastless boy in dark and devious pantries, and every request for 'leave' required a written answer from the Head Master's house. The Eton Mission was another noble ideal which has less completely though very finely carried on its aims. A blessing to the neglected parish of Saint Mary of Eton, Hackney Wick, it did not really grip our boys and it seemed overbuilt, but Bodley's most beautiful church redeems all the other Eton buildings of that time.

It was a noble bit of μɛyaλofvxía and a key to character, for Warre was great in soul as in body. He would have everything big. He found Eton great but insecure. He left it greater, and it still remains so. Yet bigness has its penalties;

'Urit enim fulgore suo qui praegravat omnes

Infra se positos.'

This was not true of him at school with his Masters or his boys-far from it-nor yet with his distinguished sons at home; but some few were overshadowed by the selfassertion of so strong a personality. In such masterful natures one may sometimes trace almost a kind of obtuseness which may use rather than enter into or understand individual services or dispositions. When, in 1886, Warre was ordered abroad, his school-work passed to a poet-scholar of more exquisite fibre, and it nearly broke him down. He never spoke, and Warre never knew, nor did it occur to him to ask. In any one else this would have seemed ungenerous; it really was the limitation of a self-centred intentness on the business in hand. No quality in him was deeper seated than generosity, not merely that of giving but the inbred nobility of the gentleman. It does not in every one go with piety; but to see Warre of an evening in cap and

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 Vol. 288.-No. 472.

B

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