15 MAY 1920, Page 23

Great Britain and the United States. By J. Travis Mills.

(Oxford University Press. 2s. 6d. net.)—This "critical review" of the historioal relations between Great Britain and America is the substance of a lecture given last year to American troops on the Rhine. Much of it will probably be new to English readers, whose notions of the American Revolution are derived from text-books with a strong Whiggish bias. Mr. Mills, draw- ing on the best American historians, shows that there was a good deal to be said even for George Grenville's policy, if it was viewed in relation to the Empire as a whole. Mr. Mills notes the fact that "Washington's most ardent and most numerous recruits were Ulstermen "—not the Roman Catholic Irish, who emigrated later and helped to develop Tammany rule in the cities, but who, as Lincoln found, were most unwilling to fight for their new country. Mr. Mills's sketch of nineteenth-century controversies is clear and good, and his discussion of the Monroe Doctrine in its later and wider forms is suggestive. We may take comfort in the fact that, from Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson onwards, the best and wisest Americans have always sought to improve the relations between the English-speaking peoples, whose interests are essentially the same.