development the "expansion of Europe" is surely a misnomer. The logic of the situation, indeed, is rendered all the more perplexing by virtue of the fact that the author regards civilization rather than politics as his major theme. Now, while it is true that the " expansion of Europe" is taken ordinarily to mean the acquisition of territory and the diffusion of a type of civilization beyond the physical borders of Europe itself, the concept is susceptible of a much broader interpretation without straining the accepted definition unduly. The latter of the two courses of action obviously is the one of chief importance. Moreover, it should be made to include not merely the imparting of that civilization but the actual effects of it on the lands and peoples concerned. These effects, in turn, would apply to the Europeans themselves, to the areas in which they settled and to the native inhabitants of such areas. Quite as legitimately, on the other hand, the idea of the expansion of Europe" should be made to connote also the reflex influence of the contact with non-European lands and peoples upon the life and thought of Europe itself. In short, it means constructively what the Europeans have given and what they have received for the weal or woe of civilization the world over. 66 By comprehending in his survey of the expansion of Europe elements extraneous to it and by allotting to them so great an amount of space Professor Abbott has, in effect, limited his field of vision beyond the confines of that continent to little more than an account of European colonization. Except for his employment of generalizations applied to the very period in which given events occurred and unsupported by concrete contemporary evidence, he has not in reality perceived the blend of European with non-European in the formation of our present-day life and thought, much less traced it from its sources. Neither has he observed how mutual the influence exerted by the contact of the two elements was or how potent the course of action and reaction between Europe and the rest of the world for advantage or detriment to both. For example, alluding to the reaction upon Europe, he asserts that the effect of the first voyage of Columbus "upon European thought was immediate and profound", in that a "thousand years of ecclesiastical conceptions of earth and man fell at a stroke" (I, page 99). How could this have been the case at a time when, as the author admits on the very same page, "the truth was not yet known"? Statements of the sort are unsusceptible of proof, even if their meaning were altogether intelligible. Apart from these characteristics of the work, which relate more particularly to a definition of the phrase "expansion of Europe ", there are certain other features of it which suggest comment. To begin with, the author appears to have made no especial study of comparative colonization. Had he done so, he might have fallen into fewer errors and misconceptions-notably in regard to Hispanic America. It was unwise to reproduce Jacobs' sketch maps without ascertaining in advance their reliability. As the entire treatise is much more than an account of European colonization, so it is much less than a description of the foundations of the modern world; for, while it narrates the history of Europe proper, its chronological scope goes no farther back than the later Middle Ages. If the present two volumes are to be supplemented by a third "which will continue the narrative from the period of the French Revolution to the present time" (I, page ix), the author's sense of proportion is open to question. Were what has taken place during the hundred and twenty years since that event to be accorded anything like the recognition in space which has been given to the period 1415-1789, he would need to write at least four volumes instead of one. In many places, furthermore, a perusal of the text leaves the impression that what it furnishes is annals of politics and culture rather than a compactly organized presentation of historical causes, processes and consequences. This is noticeably the case when the author strives to demonstrate the existence of some vital relationship between oversea activities and contemporaneous happenings in Europe, although the association may have been one of coincidence merely in point of time. The A tendency to obscureness is another feature of the work. subject matter of the two opening chapters covers chronologically and materially much the same ground. The reader is often at a loss to know just when the Middle Ages ended, since he finds their termination made to range anywhere from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the early seventeenth, without a satisfactory explanation of the divergence. He will observe that a given date or epoch has been chosen as a starting point, only to discover that much of the text that follows it deals with conditions long antecedent. Conversely, he is quite as much puzzled about the practice of alluding to a celebrity like Giordano Bruno a hundred pages and more before his place in the realm of thought is estimated and of referring to a remote incident like the " height of English attack" on Buenos Aires hundreds of years before it occurred. One cannot always be sure, in fact, of just what century the author has in mind at any particular stage of the discussion, even with the aid of marginal dates. Passing mention, finally, of personages like Aurispa, Aphra Behn and Chaha Dingaan, would seem to suggest less of a desirability on the reader's part of "looking them up" than of a possible fear on the author's part lest he might omit something. In the opinion of the reviewer, nevertheless, Professor Abbott has written what is probably the best general history of European civilization, within the period chosen, which has appeared as yet in English. It aims to establish a new and rightful standard for the composition of historical manuals, in that it makes life and thought and not politics and war, the theme of major interest. It excels all previous works that have borne the same title or have purported to treat the subject it represents. Fundamentally, however, it does not deal with the "expansion of Europe." WILLIAM R. SHEPHERD. A History of British Socialism. By M. BEER. Volume I. An age that is as fertile in socialistic theorizing and experiment as our own cannot afford to be uninterested in the history of socialistic thought. Mr. Max Beer, in the first volume of his History of British Socialism, recounts a very important part of this history. He traces the development of communistic and socialistic opinion and argument in England from "earliest times" to the thirties of the nineteenth century, leaving for a second volume, soon to be published, the continuation of the story to the early years of the twentieth. The work is based upon the author's Geschichte des Sozialismus in England, which was published in 1912. In the first part of the volume Mr. Beer deals with English communistic thought in the pre-industrial era. Having long failed to give the industrial revolution its due we are now in some danger of running to the opposite extreme and viewing everything before the days of Arkwright and Watt as archaic. Wycliffe and John Ball, Sir Thomas More and Gerrard Winstanley are far enough removed from the smoke and roar of modern industry, but they have this in common with the modern socialist: they were protesting, all and several, against the evils of private property and individualistic economy. In the second and longer part of the volume Mr. Beer expounds modern English socialistic thought as it developed under stress of the transformation of industry that began in the last half of the eighteenth century. More than thirty years ago an Austrian jurist, Dr. Anton Menger, traced the historical development of the central economic tenet of modern proletarian socialism, the right of the worker to the whole produce of his labor, in a work entitled Das Recht auf den Vollen Arbeitsertrag in Geschichtlicher Darstellung. He argued that there were brave men before Agamemnon and held that the doctrines of Marx were based upon the writings of a group of earlier English thinkers, to three of whom, Godwin, Charles Hall and William Thompson, he devoted separate sections of his book. Godwin he regarded as the first scientific socialist of modern times, and from Thompson he asserted that the later French and German socialists had derived their opinions. In fact Menger went near to accusing Marx of plagiarism. In 1889 his book was published in English translation with an introduction by Professor H. S. Foxwell, which analyzed the thought of the early English socialists: Godwin, Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, Thomas Hodgskin and John Francis Bray. Foxwell agreed fully with Menger, whose book, he said, " conclusively proves that all the fundamental ideas of modern revolutionary socialism, and especially of the Marxian socialism, can be definitely traced to English sources.' The reason why the English socialist pioneers had been neglected and forgotten in England, he said, was because English economists after Ricardo devoted themselves largely to "sterile logomachy and academic hair-splitting" and because the early, home-bred English socialism declined rapidly after the middle of the century. The later socialist movement in England dating from the eighties was exotic and inspired by Marx and Lassalle and Henry George. "It seemed to have altogether lost touch with the parent school of Thompson and his contempories." It was Foxwell who revived for English economists the writings of the early English socialists. But Mr. R. H. Tawney, who contributes an introduction to Mr. Beer's work, is in error when he says that no other adequate exposition of their writings has appeared in English. Miss Esther Lowenthal's Ricardian Socialists, published in 1911, contains a detailed analysis of the theories of Thompson, Gray, Hodgskin and Bray. Mr. Beer places these and other early English critics of capitalistic industry in their historical setting and makes clear their place in the development of socialistic thought. He shows the influence upon them of Owen and Ricardo and their relation to the Chartist movement and the syndicalist trade-unionism that followed the reform of 1832. The story of the labor movement immediately after the Reform Act, when class warfare was the order of the day and the merits of the "general strike" were diligently canvassed, sounds strangely modern. In view of current interest in soviet theories the following extract taken by Mr. Beer from an issue of The Crisis, a proletarian organ, in 1834 deserves to be quoted : We have never yet had a House of Commons. The only House of Commons is a House of Trades, and that is only just beginning to be formed. We shall have a new set of boroughs when the unions are organized: every trade shall be a borough, and every trade shall have a council of representatives to conducts its affairs. Perhaps Mr. Beer is right in saying, "The English intellect, from its sheer recklessness, is essentially revolutionary. . . when the dynamic forces of society are vehemently asserting themselves, the English are apt to throw their mental ballast overboard and take the lead in revolutionary thought and action." R. L. SCHUYLER. From Pericles to Philip. By T. R. GLOVER. New York. The Macmillan Company, 1917.-xi, 405 pp. The title of this volume indicates at once what the author had in mind in writing it. Pericles stands for everyone as the personification of Athens at the height of its glory as a republic from a political point. of view, as a school of all Hellas from an intellectual point of view, as the cynosure of all eyes and the model for all from an artistic and literary point of view. Philip, on the other hand, represents a larger Hellas, no longer a city-state but a nation, with political hegemony exercised by a national monarchy. The author has done well in choosing as his period that which nine out of ten people have in mind when they think of Greece or the Greeks. There is no doubt that this period has been treated before by competent scholars; both Dr. Glover's text and notes make ample acknowledgment of the work and the views of previous writers. The author does not adopt an unduly critical attitude. He comes upon the field frankly as an earnest-and certainly a doughty-champion of things Greek and contributes his meed of assistance to his fellow students, not as a pleading advocate but as a fighting scholar. Four chapters, one third of the book, are devoted to Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, the three historians of the period. Professor J. B. Bury's Ancient Greek Historians seemed at the time of its publication to be the last word on its subject. But Dr. Glover has so ingeniously intertwined what the historians have to say for themselves |