Fifty Years of Europe
By . New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1919. 12mo, 414 pp. $2.50.
IT requires courage to attempt to tell the story of the last half-century in a compact, handy volume of four hundred pages; and it requires more than courage to do it so well that the critic can only now and then ferret out an error, and the reader seldom says to himself, ‘Why was this put in and that left out? ’
But Mr. Hazen is not merely a thorough student of the wonderful nineteenth century: he is also a practised writer of history, and his simple lucid style, sound knowledge,and careful discrimination combine to make this volume all that it aims to be, a skillful, comprehensive review of national conditions and international relations since 1870.
As is to be expected, the chapters dealing with European countries are much more adequate than the discussion of Far-Eastern situations. In fact, this part of the book is hardly satisfactory, and we must still wait for the historian who can comprehend in true perspective both East and West.
In the earlier chapters there is little that one would add or take away. That Mr. Hazen is not an economist accounts perhaps for certain omissions, but there seems a plain lack of balance in devoting almost ten pages to Germany’s constitutional conditions, while her extraordinary industrial and commercial development is dismissed with a brief paragraph; and in the discussion of the Turkish Revolution a brief notice of certain important aspects of the situation might well be substituted for a page of queries. A graver objection may be made to the survey of the war, comprising nearly one fourth of the book; for it is merely a review of what is now common knowledge. and the a,i hor’s excuse for its insertion seems scarcely adequate. ‘Contemporary documents’ are already sufficiently numerous.
In spite of some marks of haste, errors are few. In the government of Japan, the Genro or Elder Statesmen should not be confounded with the House of Peers; and it is an exaggeration to say that Germany had virtually annexed Shantung. ‘Virtual annexation’ belongs to the later years, the years of Japanese control.
Mr. Hazen puts us in his debt for a clear and interesting sketch of a great half-century, and yet one lays down the book with a feeling of uncertainty and disappointment. In the author’s own words, the keynote to the period, that which gives it unity, is German ascendency ‘acquired by force, maintained by force.’ Nevertheless, as one reads these pages, turning from France to Germany, to England, Russia, Turkey, Africa, the Far East, this unity is not driven home. Can it be? Is not the essential unity of the last two generations of the world’s history based on something far more fundamental than German dominance? And is not the overthrow of German imperialism merely an incident — a tremendous one, to be sure — in the working out, not yet completed, of much greater forces? That may be the reason why the closing paragraph of the book, with its Exit Kaiser, leaves one with a dreary sense of futility E. K. K.