CURRENT LITERATURE
DIPLOMATIC PORTRAITS. By W. P. Cresson. (Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. London: G. Allen & Unwin. 16s. net.) THE policy enjoined by such a theory as the Monroe Doctrine cannot remain static for over a hundred years. Some South Americans proclaim the death of Monroismo, hoping that they speak the truth. Others, and we think wiser people, believe in its necessary development while they disagree about the lines on which it will benefit the world. Dr. Cresson who, since he served as a diplomat in Russia, has made himself an authority on the Holy Alliance, now gives a series of " portraits " of ten of the protagonists in international politics through the years that led up to President Monroe's message of 1823. The Emperor Alexander plainly interests him most of all. Of John Quincy Adams he writes with some amusing irony as well as admiration. Napoleon, Castlereagh, Metternich, Talleyrand and Chateaubriand are among others portrayed. With smaller figures such as Gentz we have the pegs on which a consecutive history is hung and the "Doctrine" is shown to have been an inevitable result of the Alliance. The author needs all his ingenuity to make this form successful, to compose separate pictures of col- laborators, particularly Adams and Monroe, without repeti- tions or apparent gaps. It is the history of a period that we especially need to study now, and though Dr. Cresson makes no direct comparisons , between the Napoleonic Wars and the last Great War, nor between the Holy Alliance and the League of Nations, it is quite plain that many analogies are constantly present in his mind. The story also impresses another truth—namely, that although we and the United States may differ and even squabble together, yet in big events the Atlantic becomes narrower than the seas between Great Britain and the rest of Europe ; the members of the family understand each other and think alike.
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