Our Own Times
Ms. COX MEECH has 'written a big chatty book. The work when complete will cover the first twenty-six years of the
present century. This, the first volume, takes us from 1900 to 1914. We should say frankly that the book appears to us unexpectedly good. The fact that we are driven to use the word" unexpectedly" is partly the fault of the publishers, for the presentation and general get-up of the Volume is thoroughly inferior. Its price, of course, is not exorbitant, but this is surely no reason why the lay-out and format should be so unpleasing.
When we say that the book is unexpectedly good, we must not be understood to suggest that it is anything but superficial. Mr. Meech is not drawn to seek after the hidden causes and deep-lying tendencies which lie below the shimmering surface of public life. But at any rate, if he has not the taste for the depths, he has a very good eye for the surface. Above all, he has that first and most necessary of all qualifications for the general historian, a genuine and unflagging interest in public events, a true sense of the drama of men and things, of the rise and fall of statesmen, the struggle and stress of party warfare, and the heavy tread of national advancement or decline. The book begins well with a portrait of Joseph Chamberlain, walking over from the Colonial Office to the House in the open- ing year of the century, while de Wet was still uncaught, Protection yet unsung, and Labour a cloud no bigger than a man's hand upon the political horizon.
Mr. Meech has very wisely assumed almost no political or historical knowledge on the part of his readers, and a foreigner who had no idea at all of English public life would find the book perfectly comprehensible. Again, it would form an excellent book to put in the hands of a schoolboy. Indeed, we only wish that such histories of our own time as this were more frequently used for such purposes. It is far better to start history at the end than at the beginning. To the youth for whom the Witenagemot and Domesday Book are unsub- stantial shadows, which he cannot relate to anything in his general experience, it is immensely refreshing to learn that history is equally concerned with the beginnings of the motor ear, with how his mother goes to the polling station, and how the world drifted into the War. If he is taught such things he will begin to realise that history is something that matters to him as well as to his pastors and masters. For such a purpose this book of Mr. Meech's, with its photographs and its pen pictures, its pleasant easy style, its quick movement, and its sense of drama, should be very welcome.
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