It is precisely this unforgivable Europe that is described in Lord Loreburn's book. Europe, monstrous and moribund, whose feverish tossings have seemed so full of the energy of life! It is Europe considered nationally, diplomatically, with all its subtlety and all its guile, its wisdom and its incredible pompous unreality. I do not desire to revive the bitterness of our disillusion; Lord Loreburn's pages, an analysis as dispassionate as may be of the whole miserably intricate business of the telegrams of July, 1914, destroy whatever remains of the unphilosophic hope that all the evil was compact and corruptingly on one side. His analysis of that speech of Sir Edward Grey which Lord Eustace Percy calls an instinctive effort to deduce policy from morals is sufficient proof that in international affairs, at any rate, the death-bed repentance is not enough. Nor is virtue enough after a century of diplomacy.
Dr. Dillon has made a splendid effort to write his book as if he knew nothing whatever of the diplomatic history of Europe. There is the customary literary flourish about the Congress of Vienna; the rest is an almost maddening farrago of facts and fancies, gossip and editorial opinion, small-talk and criticism, of the dreary business at Paris. The points—that the Treaty virtually creates an Anglo-American hegemony; that the small nations were outrageously treated; that the Fourteen Points were cynically sacrificed—are good points. But the chief value of the book is that the very heaping up of trivialities must discourage even the most ignorant of minds from the belief that the Treaty of Versailles represented the active intelligence of the nations which made it.
Which brings me to the book of Lord Eustace Percy. I do not understand all of it nor agree with all I understand, but I am fain to mark its superior importance. It is, in the first place, a book written in the interest of civilization. It is true that there have been civilizations, not altogether contemptible, without Christianity; and it is arguable that there may be civilizations hereafter not based on state sovereignty. But the author's point is both true and indisputable, that the revolution which threatens both of these institutions may drag all civilization with it unless a high intelligence commands and canalizes its forces. Lord Eustace considers the League of Nations as the potential champion of the idea of the state and commonwealth, the possible medium by which we may come to the spirit of a united Christendom. That, no doubt, is his
