THE BARE FACTS
IT has been well said that it is useless to discuss whether the next war will destroy civilisation, until we are more certain that civilisation will survive the last war. The evidence seems to show that the injuries to civilised life, caused by the war of 1914-1918, are more serious than anyone imagined in 1924 or 193o : and it is by no means certain that we have come to the end of the unnoticed cracks in the building. Professor Carr's admirable summary of the chief events affecting the relations between governments since 1918 is a plain account of the bare facts. The facts are less distressing than astonishing to anyone who remembers 1918. Such history ought, at any rate, to be a warning to prophets : for no one foresaw in 1918 the essential features of international relations in 1937• Professor Carr divides his facts into groups—The Enforcement of Treaties (192o-1924), Pacification (1924-193o), The Return to Power Politics (193o-1933), and The Re-emergence of Germany : The End of the Treaties (1933-1936). But there is an Epilogue on the Spanish war, which seems to show that we are near the end of something even more fundamental than the Treaties following the Great War. The book will be found very useful indeed, not only as a text-book but as a reliable account for the use of everyone interested in inter- national affairs. Professor Carr's experience in the Foreign Office has given him what is best in the tradition of diplomacy, a capacity for calm in the midst of crises and alarms.
But bare facts are not enough. It is to be hoped that Professor Carr will give us later on his interpretation of the forces which have brought us from the hopes of 1918 to the resignation, if not despair, of 1937. Bare facts have a way of seeming inevitable. But that is an illusion. Bare facts ought to be clothed in some fig-leaf of theory; for historical nudism suffers in a change of the weather. If our teachers can tell us only what has happened and not why it has happened, they play into the hands of impatient realists who know well enough at least what they can make to happen, if they are reckless. It may be difficult to say how to make peace. But it is easy enough to make war. The only trouble a realist may feel about war is that victory is not inevitable. But anyone sufficiently reckless can persuade his fellows that it is. Deeper down than the shadows on the water, which historians call France and Germany and the rest of the " Powers," lie the confused emotions of ordinary men. Some desire peace ; and they mean by peace being left alone to do their daily round. Others are restless. They desire something new, as an escape from monotony or from depression. The fundamental problems are not economic, but psychological. But history which disregards what ordinary people are feeling, at one date or the other, and does not give an account of the personalities that move the so-called " Powers," may be too colourless to affect the situation. It is true that the historian should preserve a certain scientific detachment ; but there is a great difference between the detachment of an investigator and the detachment of a surgeon operating upon one, of his
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