1921 SHORT NOTICES 151 In his Social and Industrial History of England, 1815-1918 (London : Methuen, 1920), Mr. J. F. Rees has produced a good book. His narrative is clear, his style is crisp, and his facts are well chosen. He has given us, however, not so much an equally weighted history of industrial and social development, as a review of social effort, mainly that of the working-class, with such references to industry and politics as were needed to make this review intelligible. He is at his best in his account of trade unions and Socialism. His portraits of Owen and Place are good, and indeed wherever he has allowed himself elbow-room, he says little which is open to criticism. Only in the generalizations which occur here and there as background or introduction does he give a wrong lead. For example : We know that in the first part of the eighteenth century England remained, despite land enclosures of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a country of open fields (p. 6). Should not the reader be cautioned that these enclosures embraced whole counties, and that in some outlying parts of England the open-field arable of the east midlands was unknown ? Again : Before 1760 the pure wage-earner was exceptional. There were comparatively few who were completely separated from the land and dependent for their living on finding employment in a factory (p. 16). Here the whole truth is not revealed. What is fairly true of a large section of our textile industries is not true of portions of it, e. g. the silk weavers of Spitalfields, and altogether untrue of many other occupations. What were the mass of Londoners in 1700, if they were not wage-earners ? What, too, of the many thousands engaged in finance and commerce in offices, warehouses, ships, and ports, in building roads and digging canals ? A third passage runs : All that can be said of the chief industrial magnates is that they sprang from the class of small farmers which was disappearing in the eighteenth century (p. 21). Mr. Rees really means that he has not space to say more. Very much more could be said, and requires saying, of the merchant manufacturers who were the forerunners of the great employers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And we imagine that Mr. Rees would find it hard to prove that the clothiers of the west of England, the iron-masters of Staffordshire and South Wales, or the contractors and engineers of Scot- land and the north of England had, most of them, yeomen ancestors. Mr. Rees tells us that ' Chartism was a reaction against the factory system '. Here again the part is taken for the whole. It is untrue of the Chartism of London, of Birmingham, of South Wales, or of Leicester. In each district the Chartists had their particular inspiration or irritant. The only common factor was the social misery in which the majority of the working population was in those days plunged. On p. 78 August 1844 seems to be a misprint for August 1842, the month of the ' general turn-out '. The index- makers have not selected the most important references and given these alone, nor have they added explanatory sub-headings. C. R. F. In The Secret Treaties of Austria-Hungary, 1879-1914, vol. i, Texts of the Treaties and Agreements (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1920), Mr. A. C. Coolidge has produced an excellent translation
