Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/397

 Paul: A History of Modern England 387 first, of a brief chapter on " The New Unionism "; second, one on " The Triumph of RituaHsm " ; third, eight pages of " Conclusion " ; fourth, an index to the five volumes. The weakest part of the whole work is the conclusion, and while the chapters on Unionism and Ritualism have a certain interest and importance, the whole group seems rather designed to make up, with the index, the necessary four hundred odd pages than for any more useful purpose. The present volume, whose events coincide more or less accurately with an equally strenuous period in our own history, naturally suggests many parallels between American and English politics, and nowhere more than in a comparison of campaign amenities. Mr. Paul rather under- states than overstates the zeal of the lady who compared Mr. Gladstone to Judas. It was, she said, flattery to compare the disestablisher of the Irish church to Judas, One on this side of the water is not impressed by Mr. Paul's comparison of the violence of the Home Rule campaign with the " academic calmness " of the bimetallism controversy. But in " Home Rule, Rome Rule ", we come into instant touch with our similarly effective alliteration of " Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." Though we have probably never had a statesman whose eye was permanently injured like Mr. Gladstone's by the playful practice of using candidates for tar- gets after the English fashion, we have, on the other hand, equaled the famous unparliamentary performance here recorded, which took place on the floor of the Commons at the end of July, 1892. Finally, it would be unfair to conclude a review of this work without a further reference to Mr. Paul's cleverness. It is not history, but it is amusing, and in it lies perhaps the only method of lighting up the drear- ier stretches of a century which has at times a tendency to become parlia- mentary and prosy, commonplace and unromantic. There may be another means than the injection of Mr. Bernard Shaw's methods to attract the average reader to the contemplation of essentially good and useful but essentially dull reforms, but it has not been discovered. We may not be profoundly illuminated by the description of M. Waddington (p. 238) as a man "who had been at Rugby and Cambridge, but was nevertheless a [profound] scholar ", but we are tempted to read on. The serious-minded might take exception to the statement concerning the result of the 1892 general election (p. 233), that "One result of not letting Ireland govern herself was that she governed England" ; but it expresses a certain amount of shrewd truth, as much perhaps as an epi- gram can, and whets the appetite for more, beyond mountains of blue- books' and miles of statistics. The statement (p. 259) regarding the retirement of the Liberal whip, Mr. Marjoribanks, immediately after that of Mr. Gladstone, that " the crook disappeared with the shepherd ", is not perhaps so felicitous, save to the exceptionally light-minded. Entertainment is not, obviously, the chief duty of the historian, but it is not inadmissible to attract men by such means to the pursuit of serious matters for their own enlightenment and the good of the state. And we