MR. FISHER'S POSTSCRIPT
A History of Europe. By the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. Fisher. New and revised edition. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 3 vols. 30s.) MR. Flumes Europe is already a classic, though it is less than three years since the first of its three volumes appeared. Eighteen months ago the whole was compressed into a single volume, cheap and convenient, but necessarily lacking in the spaciousness of the three-volume form, to which (with a change of publishers) we now return. Little is altered in the text. There are one or two new maps, one or two new appendices, a new preface and a new epilogue. in the latter the author epitomises the three years that have passed since he ended the main work. In the former he indicates the emotions which the moment evokes— the moment being December, 1937.
What those emotions are half a dozen lines reveal : "Europe is still profoundly disturbed. Will the peace be preserved ? Can liberty survive? The two questions which I asked at the end of my book in 1934 are repeated now with an even greater measure of anxiety, though not without a spark of invincible hope that human sanity may in the end prevail." No wonder they are repeated, for what is it that the postscript with which this new edition closes records ? The disintegration of the League of Nations, the rape of Abyssinia, the humiliation (for so Mr. Fisher terms it) of successive British Governments at the hands of Japan, Italy and Germany, the tragedy of civil war and the outrage of foreign intervention in Spain. Amid themes so controversial the historian must plant his steps with singular circumspection and at one or two points Mr. Fisher provokes at any rate question. He speaks, for example, as though "the Powers of the League" were responsible for refusing Germany not only equality in actual armaments, but the re-entry of her troops into the Rhineland and full control of her waterways and the Kid Canal ; there is no obvious reason why the League should be saddled with the shortcomings of the Allied Powers. Nor is Mr. Fisher's view of the Franco- Soviet Pact everyone's view. It was never meant to be a bilateral instrument. It was what was left of the idea o; an Eastern Locarno, which Germany rejected, and it only became bilateral because Germany would have nothing to do with it. The German tendency to dissociate herself from a Pact, or from the League itself, and then denounce them as directed against her, deserves no implication of approval from the historian.
But these are mere incidents of Mr. Fisher's résumé, which, like the whole of his great narrative, is lucid, compre- hensive and admirably marshalled. Nothing better exemplifies the sureness and objectivity of his handling than the half-dozen pages (significantly enough, more than a quarter of the whole postscript) which he devotes to the civil war in Spain. The situation on the establishment of the Republic in 1931, the sanity of the liberal programme then promulgated and the series of mistakes and malignities by which political and ecclesiastical antagonisms blazed up into civil war, have never been more fairly or more intelligibly portrayed. Our debt to Mr. Fisher was already great ; it is even greater now. And he leaves us not entirely without hope. He looks on the Third International as one of the great dangers to the world— perhaps as a greater danger than it is—but sees signs that its endeavours are failing, and as the fear of revolution recedes, so will the risks of war. That may be, but is not necessarily, true. H. W. H.
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