The Liberal
Experiment
By G. P. GOOCH
Mn. Fisnit's many readers will congratulate him on the completion of a long and arduous task. To offer a fresh, authoritative, penetrating survey of such familiar ground an author must possess encyclopaedic knowledge, broad Perspective, literary skill,' and above all the reflective mind. Mr. Fisher was bred on the classics. His first magnum opus was an elaborate study of the Mediaeval Empire. In middle life he specialised on the Reformation, Napoleon, and the nineteenth century. As a member of the Lloyd George cabinet he saw history in the making on the grand scale. With the detached serenity of advancing years the latest of our scholar-statesmen records and interprets for the general reader the fortunes of the modern world.
The whole work bears the stamp Of authority. Though we travel at a rapid pace, there is no sense of hurry and 110 striving after paradox. A restful dignity and a mellow liberalism pervade the pages. In such a spacious field 3. few 'ips are inevitable. Lessing, for instance, was not a Jew. List was a German, not an Austrian, economist. The Mysterious Holstein was not a Count. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 was not a secret pact. The population of Post-War Austria was six millions, not twelve. The Bolshevist invasion of Poland occurred in 1920, not 1921. But these are trifles. Mr. Fisher, trained in the learning of Oxford, Paris and GOttingen, won our confidence in the solidity of his scholarship long ago. The title of the third volume, which stretches from the Drench Revolution to our own days, is The Liberal Experi- ment. The noun embodies the doubt generated by the War Whether the governing ideas of the era which opened in 1789 have come to stay. Mr. Marvin, in a well-known book, described the nineteenth century as the Century of Hope. Such labels are suggestive but incomplete. The epoch had Many phases and many moods. It was the age of rampant Imperialism no less than of democracy ; the age of Metternich and Bismarck as well as .of Gladstone and Lincoln ; the age of Hegel and Joseph de Maistre, Carlyle and Pobiedonostseff, no less than of Bentham, Mill and Mazzini. And hoW does Marx fit into the Liberal Experiment ? Mr. Fisher lightens his burden by confining himself almost entirely to politics. There is little about the vast economic transformations hick have turned the old order upside down. There is equally little about the movement of ideas, which Benedetto Croce has recently surveyed with such insight, in his lectures on the nineteenth century. Chapter XXI, entitled " International Currents," with its glimpses of Spencer and Marx—" this fierce cosmopolitan atheist "—is tantalisingly brief. It is long enough, however, to indicate dissent from a gospel now greatly in favour with Single-track minds. In the brief opening chapter of the volume, entitled " Strands of History " (the three pages of Which should be expanded in a subsequent edition), Mr. Pisher expresses the convictions of nearly all historical scholars, " It would be too great a simplification of issues to regard the European story as nothing but a struggle of classes, a clash of economic interests. That would be to underrate the rich and varied stuff of human nature, the distractions of statesmen, and the waywardness of events." No one knows better that history can never be completely rationalised.
It is impossible in a short notice to accompany our guide throughout his course or to call attention to the richness of the feast. The book is full of judgements on men, institu- tions and events which tempt to quotation. Robespierre is A History of Europe. Vol. III. By the Rt. Hon. 1-1, A. L. Fisher. (Eyre and Spottiswoodo. 18s.) not the stainless knight portrayed by Mathiez, but a man- eating tiger.- The chapter on the Consulate and Empire contains a fine tribute to the Civil .Code. " Here was the pith and kernel of the revolutionary philosophy in a shape made practical for the use of men. Here was a combination of fruitful innovation and ancient usage. Hero. was liberty combined with order. Not since the Institutes of Justiniaa has any compendium of law been so widely copied." Castlereagh, the English Tory, compared to Alexander of Russia and Metternich, was an angel of liberal and enlightened good sense. The government of the Austrian Empire, " though sweetened by negligence and frivolity, was slow, secret, arbitrary, and confused." Metternicll "saw no mean between revolution and autocracy, and, since revolution was odious, he set himself to repress that which is the soul of human life in society, the very spirit of liberty."
It is no disparagement of the earlier portions of the volume to say that the closing chapters possess I he greatest interest. That on the Treaties of Peace is not merely a summary of 'familiar facts but a contribution to history, for Mr. Fisher saw Paris in 1919. His view of the settlement is eminently sane. Its substance, he reminds us, was dietat?d by inexorable facts—the collapse of the old Empires, the emergence of the new nationalities, the temper of the victors, the location of the great debate. " The cooler air of a Swiss city, recom- mended by the British, would have been niore conducive to a happy end . . . It was a gathering unique in history, for the War, which had disturbed everyone everywhere, had quickened every resentment, revised every claim, fostered every vision, and sharpened every appetite ; and with all these appetites, claims, visions, and resentments a handful of war-weary statesmen, each responsible to an exacting democracy in his own country and pestered by the ravings of a debased Press, was expected to cope as best it might." Mr. Lloyd George, he assures us, like .certain of his colleagues; was thrown off his balance by the " intense manifestation of national fury " in the General Election. The Prime Minister hardened, and the world is still suffering from his surrender to the passions of the crowd. The last and longest chapter contrasts the new dictatorships and the old democracies which survive. " With the passing of Europe under the harrow of war there passed also by insensible degrees out of the average thinking of average Men' that strong belief in civil liberty and peaceful persuasion which had been a distinctive feature of the nineteenth century." Mr. Fisher compares Lenin's ascendancy over his party to that of Parnell, and describes him as more formidable, more destructive, and more creative even than Peter the Great. Pilsudski was more of an autocrat than the reader would gather from these pages. After the coup of 1926, we are told, " he refused to be President of the Republic, but promoted a much respected professor to the place of power." The Professor had the place, but the Marshal had the power. After sum- . marising Mussolini's achievements he adds : " It' the price was the loss of liberty, it was a price which the Italian was prepared to pay." Hitler " stormed his way to power and threw an audacious challenge to the four greatest forces in modern civilisation, the Catholics, the Protestants, the capitalists and the Jews . . With every roar of the Nazi tiger, the small Powers tremble for their lives." The historian lays down his pen at a moment when the sharpest eyes are unable to pierce the surrounding fog. He is neither an optimist nor a defeatist. " With science we may lay civilisation in ruins or enter into a period of plenty and well-being, the like of which has never been experienced by mankind." Which -path 'shall we take ? Our guide, who knows so much about the past,' declines to forecast the coming years.
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