to attack in such circumstances requires very great preponderance in numbers and must be able, if need be, to sustain formidable casualties.

In the Eastern campaign our position is less satisfactory. We have indeed by the singular skill of our soldiers and sailors and by great good fortune escaped from Gallipoli. Our troops are at Salonica, now strongly entrenched: but they are not powerful enough to advance effectively and are being contained by a small force which is strongly entrenching itself and will thus make an advance in the future difficult. We may presume that another attempt on Egypt will be made under German auspices. Meanwhile the Austro-German armies are engaged in the almost unopposed invasion of Albania in order to destroy if possible the remainder of the Serbian army.

What deductions do we draw from this? They are two. The first is that our position is a serious one, and that no good purpose will be gained by blinding our eyes to the fact. It is foolish and silly to go on talking as if victory were certain, however we manage our affairs and whatever we do. The second deduction however that we can make is that the causes of our ill-success are largely due to ourselves. We have made serious mistakes-mistakes which are obvious-and if we correct them we may reasonably hope to retrieve the position. We have a very large body of men: we are rapidly creating out of them an army. We are rapidly making up for our deficiency in equipment. Our output of guns and of munitions is becoming very large. We have revived the General Staff and have put at the head of it one of the most able of all our generals. We may hope that a change will gradually take place in the face of the war. But we must not disguise from ourselves that an arduous struggle is before us. Even with skill and good fortune it will require time to recover the position, and it must not be forgotten that Germany is unremitting in her labours. During this period of comparative inaction she is maturing schemes against us. She knows that to gain a decisive victory it is this country that must be

attacked and weakened. Schemes are being developed against the Suez Canal because there most easily can she injure us. More Zeppelins are being built and raids on a larger scale will be carried out as the season advances. And no doubt other schemes are being matured.

Nor have we any reason to count on a speedy exhaustion of Germany's powers. She has still reserve forces in training. Each year in Germany and Austria one and a half million men reach military age. She is suffering from discomfort in food but not from famine, and discomfort is one of the best incentives to military action. She will be able to replenish many of her stores by her Eastern enterprise.

There is then a formidable task before us, but one to which if we set our mind to it we are equal. There are, however, two things needful.

The first is adequate finance and good management. The really ultimate question is whether we are able to secure adequate funds for carrying on the war with increased vigour for another year and a half.

The second is unity, efficiency and strength in the supreme direction of affairs. A war cannot be carried on, on the principles of compromise which prevail in Home Politics; and if each member of the Cabinet feels himself in a position to purchase his adherence by demanding concessions which will mutilate the policy adopted, he is doing his best to secure failure. Let the House of Commons and the Government realize that the only condition on which they can represent the people or enjoy the confidence of the country is by prosecuting the war with vigour, determination, and success. A country in which fivesixths of the able-bodied men of military age have voluntarily offered their services is not likely to put up with half measures, and has little patience for the contemptible groups of people, whether Home Rulers or Socialists or Liberals or Pacifists, who even in a supreme national crisis cannot forget their own partisan aims. Above all it demands a leader who will respond to the aspirations of the country,

and will have the courage to adopt and carry out a strong and consistent policy, who will himself give a lead and will not be frightened to ask from the nation the sacrifices which are necessary for the successful prosecution of our cause and which it is our duty and our privilege to make.

ENGLAND.

England. Von EDUARD MEYER. (Stuttgart und Berlin. 1915.)

NOTHING was more remarkable at the outbreak of the war than the extent to which the mobilization of the German people included the University teachers. A flood of pamphlets and speeches poured from them, till after a time it became so obvious that neutral opinion would not be bullied by learned authority that the word went forth for them to hold their tongues. Needless to say, they ceased as promptly as they began, and this book, representing the most uncompromising Prussian standpoint, may be regarded as a summary and the final word of the political Professoriate of the German Empire. Alas, this political campaign has destroyed several international reputations, and the writer of this book is no exception. He is Professor of History at Berlin, and is a recognized authority on ancient history; but his réchauffé of modern history in this book, in which every incident in the past that can be found to England's discredit is related in such a way as to suggest that what we were once we are still, and that the world has not moved forward at all, will hardly be received with favour anywhere but in the most Prussian Prussia. Thus his sketch of Parliamentary corruption in this country in the past will hardly convince anybody without further evidence that corrupt practices are still widespread though disguised; and whatever can be said against England's treatment of Ireland in the past, a writer who, in his desire to shew that Ireland is on the verge of rebellion, states that 'Redmond and his followers have lost all influence,' and quotes the result of fictitious bye-elections to prove it, can hardly be classed any longer with sober historians. Needless to say, his account of the events that led up to the war, of

King Edward VII.'s activity, and of the final negotiations, is one that we cannot accept as in the least true to fact; but it would be useless to answer the learned Professor, whose sources of information over and above what his Government has published appear to be newspaper gossip, who rakes up the old baccarat scandal, who accuses Lord Haldane of having said that he went to Berlin in the spring of 1914 to get secret information as to German army organization and of having lied in saying so, and rakes up against Mr. Winston Churchill utterances which he is supposed to have made as newspaper correspondent in the Boer War. It will, however, be useful to quote passages from his book in which he expresses his antipathy to the AmericanEnglish way of thinking. The American who sympathizes with the Allies is to him even more objectionable than the Englishman. He speaks of the

'dreams of lasting peace between nations and of international arbitration, which have found such an extensive response in America, whose type of mind has become quite feminine. . . . The profound disinclination for universal military service is both in England and America the deepest reason for the hate of Germany, the outcry against German militarism and therefore this present war. The opposition to militarism which unites the two nations in hatred of Germany is accentuated by the hatred of monarchy, which is in the blood of the true American, especially when a monarchy is as vigorous and formative as that of Germany. To this should be added the effeminate type of mind of the American increased by the fact that school education is almost exclusively in female hands, and the enthusiasm for the fraternity of nations and perpetual peace, which looks strange in the case of a nation which in the course of the Nineteenth century has conquered more territory than any other and is driven into a war with the greatest ease. . . . From the moment that the educated German lands on the pier of New York to the moment when he leaves it he feels himself under a compulsion which is strange and repugnant to him but from which he cannot escape. Everywhere he meets firmly regulated customs and imperious views which demand of him an unhesitating submission and limit his inner freedom. Anyone who really knows America will find that the most peculiar problem set before him by this "country of contrasts" is the task of understanding how this people is possessed with the belief that it is a free nation or rather the free nation, while actually it is under an oppressive constraint, which it does not feel as such, being brought up in it and taking it as a matter of course: the constraint of countless views hallowed by tradition in social life and particularly in religion, which limit the free expression of opinion and independent thought, the pressure of public opinion and what passes for it, which appears in the intolerable nuisance of obtrusive interviewers and the intrusion of publicity into all private affairs of the individual and his family.

Only by a hard struggle, in view of the impossibility of compelling complete conformity, has the idea of religious toleration triumphed in England and America, and even now far from the degree in which it exists in the leading States of the European continent.'

When one thinks of the iron pressure exercised by the Prussian Government on the State Church, which has prevented it from becoming completely Unitarian in the last twenty years, when one remembers that on one pretext or another the Old Catholics of Austria have never yet been allowed to have a bishop, and that the Ruthenians have been kept in obedience to Rome by main force, one rubs one's eyes as one reads these words!

Education in England is in a parlous state!

'The budding gentleman goes to Oxford or Cambridge and is prepared for the higher life: he has to go through educational courses of a general character such as are usual in England, develop himself in sport and the art of parliamentary debate and learn how to spend with elegance as much money as possible. Really scientific studies and interests are out of his ken and are not required: the repeated attempts to remodel these old universities after the type of the Continent and America have completely failed, as neither the teachers nor the students can be found. The great men of science in the teaching body generally do not give instruction but are required at the most to lecture two or three times a year; many boast that they have never lectured at all. [Can this be a distortion of the old story about Canon Rawlinson ?] Thus the scientific life of England has played its part mostly outside the Universities. The thought which animates all classes in Germany, that every ability contains an obligation towards the community, and thus that the learned scientific worker is in duty bound to exercise his powers in education and try to raise up a scientific succession, is completely foreign to the Englishman in this as in other directions. That is why, in the last generation, England has gone back so much in all departments of science, and lost the lead which it formerly took in so many special studies, that there is everywhere a want of younger scientists, that the scholars whom England possesses are mostly quite one-sided in their development, and limit themselves to a narrow specialism beyond which they cannot look out and rise to a comprehensive view.'

And yet we read on page 83 of the incredibly short-sighted and narrow educational policy of the Prussian Government, which has neglected the teaching of English in superior schools to the detriment of German diplomacy!

'From the scientific point of view also ignorance of English is a severe loss for the students who leave our gymnasia, a loss which everywhere impedes, nay often makes almost impossible, their