BOOKS
0 wad some Power . . . ' is a thrice-stale quote, but it seems to fit a work on English history by a distinguished French historian, M. Elie Halevy's History of the English People, 1815-183o (Fisher Unwin). Apart from its main subjects—the awakening of Liberalism, the hegemony of Canning, and Catholic Emancipation—the book contains food for reflection on an interesting comparison of War reactions after 1815 and after 1918.
To write the story at the present day of German Colonies (Allen & Unwin), as does Dr. Heinrich Schnee, the late Governor of German East Africa, seems much like writing the famous chapter on Snakes in Iceland. But Dr. Schnee's book goes to show what well-equipped and organized terri- tories have fallen to the lot of the mandated Powers who now administer them. When Mr. Noel Baker, the Professor of International Relations in the University of London and sometime private Secretary to Lord Robert Cecil, writes on Disarmament (The Hogarth Press), we expect, and we get, a temperate and a balanced presentation of the subject. It will not be found easy to upset the positions which he advances in his chapter on Reasons for Disarmament.
If you want to find out about the negro mind, don't believe what the negro tells you, unless both of you are extremely well known to each other. Mr. Hans Condenhove does know his negro, for he has lived in East and Central Africa for z8 years with, but for the briefest intervals, natives as his sole companions. Thrice happy : he has never seen an aeroplane, or a motor-bus, or a portrait of Einstein. The result of his hermitage is : My African Neighbours (Cape), a charming study of birds, beasts, and black humanity, that is at once, tactful, conceited, impulsive, reserved, generous, and an inveterate thief.
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