Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/487

1922 the state as the only possible foundation of international law. Its sources (as distinguished from remoter origins) are customs and treaties. In a section devoted to 'objections centre le droit international' the author enumerates its defects in terms which recall Locke's characterization of the state of nature as wanting 'an established settled law', 'a known and indifferent judge', and 'power to back and support a sentence'. As to the first 'le droit international n'a pas de législateur, et, qui plus est, n'en aura jamais'. Therefore Wolff's idea of a civitas gentium maxima is fundamentally unsound. The hope for the future consists in the development of the international consciousness of right. Thus far the author. Whether the shattered fabric of international law can be reconstructed upon the old foundations time will show. It may be that the present age calls for a restatement of principle no less far-reaching than that effected by Grotius and his immediate predecessors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

One innovation distinguishes The Annual Register for 1921 (London: Longmans, 1922) from its predecessors, namely the end of its anonymity. The name of Mr. M. Epstein appears on the title-page as the editor, an most of the accounts of foreign countries are signed, several of them by very well-known names. The identification of the author is the foundation of commentary, and the usefulness of this standard work of reference should be increased by the change. On one small point we must suggest a criticism: the selection of historical books for 'special notice' seems to us not very happy.

Another established and indispensable work of reference is The Statesman's Year-Book, of which the issue for 1922 (London: Macmillan) has appeared. The conditions under which statisticians work are happily returning to the normal, although in some parts of the world no watchful correction can keep pace with their fluctuations. It is to be hoped that the two maps given with this issue, of Upper Silesia and the Burgenland, will be of service for some time.

The hundred and twelfth volume of British and Foreign State Papers (London: Stationery Office, 1922), which deals with the fateful year 1919, is likely to be one of the most-consulted in that valuable series. One or two omissions may be mentioned, for instance that of the German Observations' on the Treaty of Versailles, the allied 'Reply' to which is given; but these hardly detract from the usefulness of a collection which, though not in the narrowest sense an official publication, may be used as confidently as if it were so.

Two years ago we noticed that the Bollandist Fathers, who completed the volume of their Analecta for 1914 (xxxiii) in 1919, went on in 1920 with vol. xxxviii, and proposed in time to make up the arrears due to the German occupation of Belgium. They have already completed half their undertaking, though necessarily on a reduced scale. Tomes xxxiv