THE ALLIANCE OF HANOVER : a Study of British Foreign
Policy in the Last Years of George I. By James Frederick Chance, M.A. (John Murray. 21s.)
This volume is addressed, not so much to students of history as to the specialist in short periods. A volume of more than seven hundred and fifty closely-printed pages covers but three years of the foreign policy of Great Britain. It is packed with historical incident, with names, facts and dates in profusion. The author shows himself as magnificently painstaking, as almost incredibly thorough in investigation. But the result is little more than a vastly expanded text-book, of which the expansion largely limits its value, .except for the specialist pure and simple. The period in itself is mainly of interest as an admirable example support- ing the case for " splendid isolation." The Hanoverian succession and consequent alliance flung England headlong into the welter of Continental politics ; so that she found herself vitally engaged not only with the crises relative to Gibraltar and thir &tend Company, but also with those of Sleswick and the Polish Protestants. And while the two former questions were obviously vital to a naval and com- mercial Power, the quarrel with Russia and the " blood-bath of Thorn " were essentially matters for Hanoverian rather than English consideration and action. In the complications of Hanoverian foreign policy England paid a heavy price for the solution of her dynastic problem between the podgy hands of George I.
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