A HISTORY OF EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY, 1914-1925. By R. B. Mowat.
(E. Arnold. 16s. net.)—Mr; Mowat has followed up his work on European diplomacy from the days of Napoleon to 1914 with an account of the diplomacy from the beginning of the War down to the signing of the Treaties negotiated at Locarno in 1925. We demur to his calling it " history," because it is too soon to put the events into his- torical perspective, but full credit is due to him for an accurate record of events so far as they can be known to the public. The summaries of the Treaties of Versailles and Lausanne are well done and useful. But descriptions of the way in which Herr von Simons parts his hair or a reference to the façade of the Cerele Nautique at Cannes make for light and pleasant readliig rather than for history. Mr. Mowat makes a better story than usual of the struggles of the unlucky Emperor Karl and the negotiations carried on by Prince Slide of Parma. They evidently interested him. On the other hand, he seems to us to write less than adequately of the Separatist business in the Rhineland, and like other hasty or condensing writers he skips from the Tsar to the Bolshevists without any indica- tion that the ancien regime was overthrown by a party abhorred by the Bolshevists : Kerensky and his period of power are ignored. Mr. Mowat spent a year lately at the University of Wisconsin, and possibly part of his book was prepared there, for he makes many references in his footnotes and text to American opinion and American news- papers with which we are less familiar than with our own. It may be an'American penchant which led him to repeat from Colonel House's Intimate Papers a one-sided account, of which the details are probably misrepresentative, of an interview with that much-tried diplomatist, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, to whom we and the United States owe an unpaid and unpayable debt. In his last chapter Mr. Mowat points out truly, we fear, that some of the spirit that has been visible in Turkey, Morocco, and China is due to the loss of prestige1Which Europe brought on herself from 1-914 until the Conference at Locakno. There arc a few misprints, such as 1922 for 1921 towards the bottom of page 219, and. 1912 for 1919 on page 331.
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