A Century in the Foreign Office
British Foreign Secretaries-1807-1916. By Algernon Cecil, (Bell & Sons. 15s. net.)
MR. CECIL makes his history of a century's work in one depart- ment of the British Government exceedingly. attractive. The biographical form allures readers who have not the seriousness needed to study solid diplomatic history, but he adds with considerable art an historical continuity by which his figures are as threads woven into the larger whole. We have reason to feel proud that such a profound student of the subject as we knew Mr. Cecil.to be has found so much to praise and so little to blame. lie does blame Palmerston for his imprudences and apparently ill-bred contempt for the feelings of others. " Pam's " great merit (apart from the popularity that no one can grudge him) lay in brilliant escapes from scrapes into which he ought never to have fallen. Mr. Cecil does also sec the arriviste in Canning, the clever man, brilliant wit and good worker, who had not the magnanimity which is so plain in most of the figures of this aristocratic gallery. What a tale of personally disinterested hard work there is here ; of demands for wisdom in its truest sense ; of irksome respon- sibility ; of thankless labours ; of successes unpublished anfi of blame shouldered for the faults of others ! - - Mr. Cecil begins with Castlereagh and ends with Lord Grey, the British diplomatic protagonists of European. Wars, both high-minded men who deliberately worked beyond their physical powers for their country and for Europe. In the middle is Lord Aberdeen, pathetically sad, courageous and pious. Perhaps they may be thankful that they were for the most part spared one degradation, which those three at any rate could not have borne—namely, the need to stoop to thy worst exigencies of party politics and to truckle to those wh° were ignorant of the meaning of the work that engaged thou We- cannot go into details of -history-here; bat one of the raost. interesting points that no reader can fail to mark is hOW
Castlereagh sowed the seed of the League of Nations. Though Canning could speak scornfully of an " Areopagus," though the mystic Alekander could . impede Castlereagh and dis- courage hard-headed statesmen by honest misrepresentations of the effects of a Holy Alliance, yet it was Castlereagh who pressed and used the methods of international conferences, favoured again by Lord Grey, and so began to pave the path through the century for the League. Lord Clarendon and Lord Salisbury are the subjects of the principal studies besides those which we havC mentioned. Mr. Cecil writes with dis- tinction, and adds piquancy by occasional traces of a caustic, epigrammatic style, in the true " Cecilian " manner.
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