plan, must be put into readable form; and the accident that his Dumont may not appear must be guarded against. A committee like the British War Cabinet may break down on a fundamental question because it has never considered the means by which expert testimony is best elicited. A cabinet like Mr. Wilson's may cease to function because the principle of its action has been centred in a mind that fails at a critical moment to have contact with it. Little by little Mr. Wallas has forced the technique of social inquiry upon a new path. He has made us adjust our ethics to the facts of human nature and our perspective is different because of the hints he has given.
But he has done more. There are perhaps five or six living men who can disentangle the social history of England in the nineteenth century with the same knowledge and wisdom as Mr. Wallas. That has made him in a real sense the parent of what is rapidly becoming the most, significant part of modern English historiography. No country in the world to-day has a social history which surpasses in quality the History of Trade Unionism by Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the studies of English working-class life by the Hammonds, and the more specialized studies of which they are only the chiefest part. What, in the mass, it has done is to make the left wing of English radicalism scientific in a sense to which no other party in English politics can make claim. It has given to its ideas an historical perspective, a realistic background, and, above all, a knowledge of the slow fashion in which ideas must strive to make their way, which are the very breath of hope. For, in politics, the first condition of hope is the ability to be optimistic in the face of certain disillusion. Your enemies will defy your facts; half-hearted friends will destroy your ideas by compromising with their opposite; your followers will despair because you have not the firm outlines of Utopia. The certainty of progress lies in the ability to discount these things from the outset. That is why the study of history is, with all its limitations, still the one sure path to political salvation.
And that, it may be added, is the one great lesson American students of politics can draw from Mr. Wallas' Life of Place. An English liberal who analyzes the American equivalent of his faith cannot help but find it a little bare and meagre. It is negative rather than positive. It has not been rooted in the hard facts of its historic environment. It has not been nourished by continuous
