1 FEBRUARY 1935, Page 18

[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR, —At the Balkan Conference

of 1930 a delegate remarked that the surest method of promoting peace between the Balk an nations would be to make a bonfire of the text-books of history. Nowhere has so-called " history," even the mediaeval variety, been so often used, or misused, for political purposes, and Balkin contemporaries of our Edward III have been cited as if they had lived yesterday. Hence the growth of that excessive form of Nationalism, which the late Luigi Luzzatti, the eminent Italian statesman, once defined to me as " the caricature of patriotism."—I am, yours, &e.,