Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/300

 292 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April Africa and of the Belgian Congo's share in the war. In the course of this survey the writer raises a question as to the true meaning of Prince Lich- nowsky's statement that in the course of his negotiations with Lord Grey in 1914 the latter not only contemplated the partition of the Portuguese colonies, but the sacrifice of the Belgian Congo to German ambitions. This story is dismissed as * incredible ', in view of France's right of pre- emption, and the entire absence of any motive or justification for such action on the part of Great Britain. So may it be. Gerald B. Hubst. A Short History of Education. By J. W. Adamson. (Cambridge : Uni- versity Press, 1919.) Mr. Adamson is well aware of the difficulties and the dangers in- volved in the writing of a short history of education. He does not offer a history of civilization or of culture. To attempt an account, long or short, of the evolution of human culture, and with it to include a history of schools * of all known civilizations ancient and modern, European and Asiatic ', would be a gigantic task, and could not, as Mr. Adamson says, scope. He urges that the history of education is ' best narrated under national forms ' and he is, in this book, concerned to treat ' primarily of English education and its agencies '. But he finds it necessary to qualify the definition, by suggesting that the earlier centuries must be treated as less specifically English than the later. ' All western education to-day ', he says, bears the impress of two great powers, the Roman Empire and the Christian Church ; and through these a third power, the intellectual life of Greece, has operated. The fact gives a certain unity to the education of Christendom which is the more striking in times when the various nations were less self-conscious than they are to-day. Mr. Adamson, therefore, attempts two tasks — one to connect English education in the earlier centuries with the foreign stream of ideals and educational content, and the second to disconnect it, and to regard English education rather in the aspect of national development of education in accordance with the realization of extremely complex national needs. Of course when the outer shell of national organization begins, organization is a national specialty. The Reformation, which passed over ecclesiastical supremacy to the king, also carried with it the responsibility of a reorganiza- tion of education as essentially national as the new ecclesiastical organiza- tion. How far English education was, in any sense, national before the Reformation is not so easy to determine. The institutional and adminis- trative side of pre-Reformation education is not yet by any means so clear as it may eventually be. But no doubt there is good reason for Mr. Adamson to differentiate his method of treatment before and after the Reformation. Given the Reformation, the eventual national re- organization of education will logically become necessary. It is the movement from church control to state control. The evolution of a state system of education from the original -eccle- siastical organization is in itself a very considerable subject of study in its
 * profitably, be short ', There must, therefore, be a definite limitation of