24 OCTOBER 1914, Page 23

" The faith of treaties is the only solid foundation

on which a Temple of Peace can be built up." In these words Lord Bryce concludes his brief but valuable pamphlet entitled Neutral Nations and the War (Macmillan and Co., 2d.), which aims at explaining to outsiders the reasons for which we are fighting Germany. Lord Bryce's great reputation, and his record of long labours to promote good relations between Germans and Englishmen, lend weight to his dispassionate analysis of Prussian militarism, and we hope that his pamphlet will be widely circulated in the United States and elsewhere.—Sir Edward Cook supplements his previous pamphlet by a clear and instructive record of Anglo-German negotiations from 1898 to 1914, called How Britain Strove for Peace (same publishers and price). He shows that England persistently strove to abate the pressure of armaments, that all such attempts were negatived by Germany, and that the only conditions on which we could have come to an agreement were that England should turn her back on France and Russia and agree to regard her treaty obligations to Belgium as " a mere scrap of paper."—Among other pamphlets of the week we may mention Serbia and the Serbs, by Sir Valentine Chiral (Clarendon Press, 2d. net); Workers and War, by G. G. Coulton (Bowes and Bowes, ld.); and three articles reprinted by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. from the special war number of the Round Table : The War in Europe (3d.), Germany and the Prussian Spirit (6d.), and The Austro-Servian Dispute (6d.).