Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/155

Rh

The reader is glad to note that the editor plans speedily to reprint the rare Parte of a Register, for continuation of which the papers here calendared were originally collected; and to give with that republication an elaborate introduction to the whole body of documents thus gathered by the Elizabethan Puritans.

lectures, delivered in Chicago in 1915, form the basis of Schevill's work, which sketches in broad outline the political and social development of Prussia-Germany from the collapse of the medieval empire and the rise of the "hard, resistant nucleus", Brandenburg, to the beginning of the Great War. The appeal to a popular audience justifies the style of presentation, which is vigorous and picturesque, and at times somewhat flamboyant. Here and there the author rises to real eloquence, as in his descriptions of the effects of the Thirty Years' War. He does not disdain colloquialisms, and now and then lapses into a solecism ("the then ruler", p. 36). The book shows evidences of too great haste in preparation in not a few loose and even incorrect statements. The following are instances: "[Prussia] by giving up the territory acquired in the three partitions of Poland" (p. 89, it retained West Prussia and received back Posen, cf. p. 229); "The reduction of military service from three to two years occurred shortly before 1900" (p. 130, it was in 1893). It would be very hard to show that Austria in April, 1849, "threatened with war" if Frederick William IV. should accept the imperial crown from the Frankfort Parliament (p. 118). The Socialist vote in 1912 was nearly four and one-quarter millions, not three and one-half, as stated (p. 174). Incorrect is the statement that "Germany compels school attendance only until the fourteenth year"—it is corrected, in fact, on the next page—as well as the statement regarding the loyalty of the Poles in East Prussia and Silesia (p. 230). In East Prussia the land in Polish hands increased 1900 to 1912, as a result of systematic, aggressive effort, by more than 27,000 hectares, and in Silesia in 1908 the Wasserpolacken captured five Reichstag districts in the uplands. The Expropriation Law of 1908 was not simply "dangled as a threat" (p. 232). It was put into practice in 1912.

Schevill's book really falls into two parts: an historical and an argumentative part. The first, down to the Bismarck era, is a sympathetic and at times brilliant sketch of the development of Prussia into a "patriarchal state" with "traditions of work and service". With considerable skill the author selects the fundamental points in the story down through Frederick's programme and the subsequent struggle with Napoleon to the catastrophic results of Berlin's "official neutrality". In