THE STATESMAN'S YEARBOOK.*
THE twenty-seventh issue of The Statesman's Year-Book deserves special notice. It is not The Statesman's Year-Book of Mr. Frederick Martin's editorship ; it is not even The States- man's Year-Book of the first years of the present editorship. Obviously Mr. Keltie is no mere arm-chair statistician, con- tent to let his annual come out year after year in practically, if not precisely, the same form. On the contrary, he has taken to heart, or rather to head, a good deal of the criticism to which his work has been subjected ; and the result is that The Statesman's Year-Book for 1890 is not so much a new issue as a new book. For one thing, it contains some 120 pages more of letterpress than its immediate predecessor; and besides, it is printed to a much greater extent in small though legible type. This is but a secondary matter, however. The Year-Book has, in point of arrangement, been altogether revolutionised, and revolutionised in a way which will at the very least triple its value to the ordinary English consulter of reference-books. Formerly it dealt with the world in continents ; and under these continents, the different countries were arranged alpha- betically. Now the Year-Book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the British Empire, the second with foreign countries arranged in alphabetical order. Under the title of the British Empire, again, are included not only the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the ordinary political, geographical, and European sense, but India and our Colonies, Protectorates, and Dependencies, these last, again, being arranged alphabetically under the parts of the world in which they are situated,—Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australasia, and Oceania. Mr. Keltie has, with a view, doubtless, to the popular craze for Colonial "expansion," sought to give this year an exhaustive list of "all territories over which the British Government has any claim whatever, and to exhibit what information about them is obtainable of a kind likely to be useful to public men, avoiding such purely geographical information as will be found in any gazetteer." Into the second part of his work—that dealing with " Foreign Countries "—Mr. Keltie has introduced a number of new States that had no place in former issues of his annual. He claims, indeed, to have incor- porated every State, however rudimentary, for which a separate existence can be claimed. Thus, in Africa more especially, there are several so-called States which are unannexed, and about which, in the present "scramble for Africa," a good deal of curiosity is exhibited, and even more on the Continent than here. These have all been introduced. On the other hand, those countries which are claimed by European States are found under these States. Thus, Sokoto and Nyassaland are placed under the British Empire, while Abyssinia is assigned to Italy. In connection with the grouping of minor States under larger ones exercising sovereignty or suzerainty over • The Statesman's Year-Book Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World for the Year 1890. Edited by J. Scott Kahle, Librarian to the Royal eova bical Society. Twenty-seventh Annual Publication. Revised after
Official . London : Macmillan and Co. 1E90.
them, we may ask Mr. Keltie if he is justified year after year in treating Corea as an independent State. It is quite true that in 1876, 1883, 1884, and 1886, Corea, concluded nominally independent treaties with Japan, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Russia, and France. But it is contended by those who stand up for the real, as distinguished from the nominal sovereignty of China, that none of these treaties was actually agreed to without consent to it being obtained from Pekin ; and Mr. Keltie himself allows not only that since the seventeenth century Corea has acknowledged the suzerainty of China by sending an annual embassy and announcing the succession of a new Sovereign, and that its dependent relation is plainly recognised and clearly stated in the Chinese-Corean frontier trade regulations, but also that "the influence of China is paramount in the Kingdom, and no important step in the relations of Corea with other countries is taken with- out China's consent." Besides, when one thinks of the policy which China has been pursuing of late, is there not, to say the least of it, a chance that in Corea, as in Yunnan, the Pekin Government will assert itself ruthlessly and almost any moment ? Bat, SA a rule, Mr. Keltie's grouping is faultless, and his prgsis of the information that is forthcoming in regard to any little-known country—take, for example, Afghanistan as an independent State, and the Niger Protectorate as a portion of the British Empire—is the perfection of succinct- ness.
Although the hypercritical may discover one or two minor mistakes in Mr. Keltie's work—it is inevitable that such should creep in—he has rendered it very difficult for an ordinarily care- ful reader to make fresh and useful suggestions to him. Thus, he has carried his condensation of that part of his book which deals with the Constitution, &c., of the British Empire as far as it ought to go. He might, perhaps, when dealing with Local Government, have given a better summary of the provisions of the Act passed last year for Scotland ; under the head of "Education," he should have given some idea of the character of the recent Scottish Universities Act. In these days of hurry, the value of such a book as this would be decidedly enhanced by a number of tables, from which one could see at a glance the comparative condition, as respects different features of a nation's life, of what the Germans and the late Mr. J. R. Green term "World-Powers," or even of such short statements as that at p. 95, from which we learn in a moment that the total expenditure of the Mother-country in connection with the Colonies (exclusive of India) amounts to two millions sterling, and the total effective strength of the British forces in the Colonies (again exclusive of India) is upwards of 27,000 men. We close our notice of Mr. Keltie's book—now out of sight the best annual of its kind in the world—by quoting one of the paragraphs in it, because it points a moral, though it by no means adorns the tale of British social progress :—" Middle- class education in the United Kingdom is entirely unorganised, and is mainly left to private enterprise ; no complete trust- worthy statistics are available. There are a number of endowed public and grammar schools in England, but over the conduct of these schools Government has no control."
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