Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/635

 920 SHORT NOTICES 627 Europe. But, though Castlereagh had little sympathy with democratic principles, the statement (iii. 27) that he approved the repressive njeasjires of Austria and Prussia is at least too strong ; for he protested against the Carlsbad decrees, pointing out the folly of forming a league of the govern- ments against -the peoples. The same writer's little book. Securities for Peace (London : Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1919), is in a sense complementary to that on the period of the congresses. It deals with the efforts made during the nineteenth century, both by private societies and by diplomatic action, to devise a system of securities for peace, which is rightly assumed to be the condition normal to a healthy world. It begins with the activities of the London Peace Society in 1816, and ends with a discussion of the League of Nations, its history and prospects. From the point of view of historical science there is little to criticize in this book, which, as a clear and concise account of the development of the peace movement, should be widely useful. On p. 60, ' Drage Doctrine ' shoiild be ' Drago Doctrine ' — an obvious misprint. W. A. P. To the series of Johns Hopkins University Studies, Dr. Early Lee Fox has added The American Colonization Society, 1817-1840 (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Press, 1919.) In 1777 a committee of the Virginia legis- lature, of which Jefferson was chairman, recommended that the slaves should be gradually emancipated and returned to Africa. Forty years later the American Colonization Society was organized by a group of private individuals with the object of settling the free negroes in Africa and elsewhere, and with the hope of government co-operation in the scheme. Their hope was never realized, and if the society's efforts were judged by the few thousands of negroes whom they transported to Liberia, their African colony, it would be difficult to regard it as of much historical importance. But this Dr. Fox, who has done a most valuable piece of research in the society's records, rightly deprecates, and by placing the work of the society in its perspective in the controversy over slavery during those years he shows the significance of its objects, so partially realized, and the influence it exerted upon public opinion. Colonization, a policy born in the middle states, seemed at one time likely to get general support and to offer a mode of dealing with the negro problem on which all sections of the union could combine. But the society, failing to get the co-operation of government, never £ad the funds for any really large effort, and thus was not strong enough to resist those attacks from the two extremes to which any middle policy is exposed — in this case, the planters of the far south, who suspected that abolition was in its programme, and the aboli- tionists of New England and the north-west, who feared that it was not. In the struggle with the abolitionists the Colonization Society was worsted, its northern supporters fell away, while southern opinion solidified in favour of the maintenance of slavery, and its efforts to bridge the widening gulf of opinion between the two sections of the country proved entirely unsuccessful. It did useful work in founding the negro republic of Liberia, in checking the slave-trade on the African coast, and in enabling many negroes to take advantage of offers of emancipation, which were con- ditional on their emigration. Dr. Fox shows how many slave-owners SS 2