1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 279 interest, more especially at the present time, when the League of Nations forms an integral part of a great international treaty, and earlier schemes with a similar or analogous tendency have been repeatedly passed under review. But the assumption of the western powers — Great Britain, France, and the ' innocent ' United Provinces — that with them lay the responsibility of restoring peace to Europe — involving as it did the theory that the fortunes of the lesser states must be at the disposal of a combina- tion of the greater, was vehemently resented by the Austrian government as part of a treaty to which the emperor was invited to agree ; and the obnoxious preamble was reduced to an unobjectionable substitute. At the same time, in one of the proposed secret articles of the treaty, which referred to enforcement (if necessary) of submission to its provisions by the kings of Spain and Sicily, the addition en suivant ce qui a ete pratique dans plusieurs autres occasions was, at the request of the Austrian govern- ment, struck out. Not for the last time in the history of her foreign policy, the Spanish war of the Quadruple Alliance — or the war against Alberoni, as Professor Michael says it might have called itself, in something of the same sense as the allies of 1814 called their war one not against France, but against Napoleon — was pre-eminently Great Britain's war, though by no means popular in the nation itself, or even in the mercantile class as a whole, for whose benefit Defoe declared it to have been undertaken. The states - general, as observed, never actually joined the alliance ; they had post- poned entering till the Prussian treaty of 1715 should have been actually carried on, and when, after a long series of protests on both the Dutch and the Austrian side, this had been accomplished and the Quadruple Alliance had brought its war with Spain to a successful close, the adhesion of the United Provinces, whose trade with Spain had not really suffered interference from that war, was no longer a matter of consequence. It is certainly strange that the actual accession of the United Provinces should so long have remained a matter of historical belief : Lord Stanhope, in the (5th) edition now before me, speaks of it as a fact ; and in at least one later History, as Professor Michael notes, it is still affirmed. In the conduct of the war, though it was hardly possible but that differences should from time to time manifest themselves between Great Britain and France (as, for that matter, these two powers were alike slow to fall in with the ultimate (Italian) designs of the house of Austria), British policy was indisputably the controlling influence. More especially was such the case as the ascendancy of Dubois, now secretary. of state, fully established itself in the counsels of the regent, and, notwithstanding the fears of Stair, held out against the combined influence of Torcy and Law. Thus, after Stanhope's visit to France at the beginning of the year 1720, the fears of a separate pacification between France and Spain were dissipated and the second great diplomatic triumph of Stanhope's career, the adhesion of Spain to the Quadruple Alliance, was achieved. The revival, at this most untoward moment, of the question of the retrocession of Gibraltar under French influence found a curious episode in the immediate antecedents of this transaction ; but Count Senneberre's mission to London in 1719 fell flat, and Stanhope this time
