Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/468

 460 July Short Notices The collection of essays, for the most part brilliantly written, called The Evolution of World Peace (London : Milford, 1921), is in the words of its editor, Mr. F. S. Marvin, ' an appeal to history '. It is not a philoso- phic discussion as to the limits within which peace in itself is an end to pursue ; nor does it profess to give any final solution of the problems with which those who pursue peace are confronted. It is a collection of addresses delivered to an audience, intelligent and educated but pre- sumably not expert, which wishes to view history from a particular point of view. To see history from one point of view only is always dangerous, but the names of those responsible for the various chapters indicate that the danger is reduced to a minimum. It would be difficult to imagine a more stimulating treatment of the problems involved in nationalism than that of Sir Paul Vinogradoff on the work of Rome, or the chapters respectively on Innocent III and Grotius. With Mr. H. G. Wells's ' Apology for a World Utopia ' the stimulus is naturally that of imaginative dexterity rather than of scholarship, and I humbly venture to doubt whether Mr. Wells does not over-estimate the ' uniformity ' of the population of the United States. Miss Power's chapter on the teaching of history embodies the experience of a proved successful individual teacher rather than a formula for all. G. B. In his Short History of Antioch (Oxford : Blackwell, 1921), Mr. E. S. Bouchier has made a more difficult experiment in the writing of local history than in his previous studies of Syria as a Roman Province and of Roman Spain. The provinces of the Roman empire were organic members of a body politic, and their history begins and ends with that of the entity to which they belonged. The history of a single city even of such a celebrated and important city as Antioch hardly forms a unit from the historical or from the artistic point of view. In the time-dimension it is too straggling, for though Mr. Bouchier rightly breaks off in the latter part of the thirteenth century after Christ (which is the real interregnum between the ancient and modern civilizations of the middle east), he tends inevitably to minimize the break in the seventh century, when the city passed back, out of the Graeco-Roman world, into the middle eastern world (in the last phase of the latter, which was the Arab empire). The truth is that while the site, and even to some extent the walls and towers, of Antioch remained the same, its two periods of historical importance had little connexion with one another. Thus, in one sense, Mr. Bouchier's choice of subject presupposes a continuity of history in a place where a breach is more in evidence. On the other hand, from the point of view