19 JUNE 1941, Page 20

Shorter Notices

The Eastern Marshlands of Europe. By H. G. Wanklyn. (Philip and Son. 125. 6d.) Tits book is the result, the author tells us, of nine years' spare- time study—" the outcome of journeying and reading, which for the last ten years have been possible for many people in Great Britain," and the result is an excellent compressed guide to the politics, history, economics and geography of the marshlands—the Baltic countries, Poland and the Danube lands. That vague person, the general reader, will naturally find a treatment which demands so much compression a little dull ; he will wish that Miss Wanklyn's purpose—or one of her purposes—of seeing " the result of the mixture of Machiavellian and idealistic policies apparent at the Paris Peace Conference on the small national groups which were created at that time " had shone more clearly through the statistical material, but he will find it a valuable addi- tion to his text-book shelf. Miss Wanklyn's conclusion on the Russian occupation of the Baltic is interesting. " Any attack on the small-owners or on the cultural or religious liberties of the Estonians and Letts, whatever the official version of such an upheaval, would arouse such fierce antagonism that the most ruthless of Governments might hesitate fully to awaken it. It is difficult to see either that populations who have been for centuries economically and culturally so far in advance of the Russians . . . could ever genuinely accept the Soviet system."