type of legal guarantee which might serve, for the peace of the world, as the inspiration of all ethnically mixed countries in solving the difficult problem of national minorities! English and French publicists could greatly help in creating and consolidating good relations between Italians and Slavs if they would treat the Adriatic problem with tact and a sentiment of equity. Unfortunately certain writers, both in England and in France, have not yet understood the situation, and are more or less violent partisans and upholders of the extremest claims of the Slav Nationalists. The propaganda of these somewhat indiscreet friends of Slavism has produced disastrous effects in Italy. Not only does it make more difficult the work of those who, resisting the claims of the Italian Nationalists, affirm the necessity of an Italo-Slav accord and compromise, but it plays only too well the game of the pro-German elements, which are always active in Italy, working to keep alive rancour and suspicion between Italians and Slavs in order to further Germany's political schemes, and only too delighted to present French and English public opinion as favourable to the excesses of Slav Nationalism and thus hostile to Italy. We do not ask foreign publicists to espouse the cause of Italian Nationalism against the Slavs, as in fact some have done in the intention of pleasing the Italians. England and France ought to be the common friends of both Italy and Serbia and mediate between them; public opinion in these two countries should not second the excesses of either Nationalist party, but should reinforce, both in Italy and among the Slavs, only the conciliatory and modern currents of opinion. The foregoing study presents to the English public ideas which the writer, with his friends and associates, upheld in Italy down to the winter of 1914-1915, while Italy still maintained its neutrality; and which they and he have continued during the course of the present war to uphold and spread in their country, meeting, it is true, many obstacles, but attaining also useful results. The article was written some months ago, when no one foresaw the tragic military reverse of October-November, and it is now published without any changes, as if no new facts had supervened in the military field, either to Italy's advantage or the opposite. The dolorous crisis which threw the military organisation of Italy into sudden confusion has destroyed neither our faith in ultimate victory, nor our sense of the duty incumbent on us to continue the fight; nor has it modified in any way the essential elements of the Italo-Slav problem in the Adriatic. If we would secure a just national settlement between the Italians and the Southern Slavs, there is but one possible solution of the Adriatic problem. What was true before the AustroGermans overran the Venetian plain is equally true now. Naturally all our arguments fall to the ground if the final victory is Germany's, and the Allies are beaten. But in that case so many other things would vanish into thin air-all, in short, that the world contains of what is just and what is good!-that, in the general disaster, no one would especially mourn the disappearance of the ideas of those who have always, in days of good and days of evil fortune, upheld the necessity of justice in the relations between Italy and the Slavs of the Adriatic. GAETANO SALVEMINI. Art. 12.-TWO DISTINGUISHED GLADSTONIANS. 1. Selections from the Correspondence of the first Lord Acton. Edited with an Introduction by John Neville Figgis and Richard Vere Laurence. Vol. I. Long 2. Recollections. By John, Viscount Morley, O. M. Macmillan, 1917. A HAPPY coincidence in publication has thrown into juxtaposition Lord Morley's 'Recollections' and a fresh volume of Lord Acton's 'Correspondence,' which keeps appearing, as one cannot but regret, under various auspices and with indifferent regard for the convenience of the reader or the credit of the writer. The two men, whose memorials are thus simultaneously submitted to the notice of the public, offer such interesting points of comparison and of contrast, both in opinion and career, that a soul like Plutarch's must have snatched greedily at so delicious an opportunity for moralising and storytelling within the category of similarity and opposition. Eyes much less acute than his would, indeed, discover at a glance enough common ground between the two to make it worth while to trace their distinctive features. Both men, with personalities too independent and knowledge too extensive for discipleship, moved constantly in Gladstone's company, found in him the statesman of their hopes, and entertained for him a regard involving a large measure of veneration-in Acton's case a far larger measure than history will justify or than friendship can explain. Their appreciation of him sprang in the first instance from a common belief in individualism, in the freedom of the individual from interference, such as we can hardly know again, at least in any passionate or philosophic sense. And both men, being students of history, gave, as was natural, much time and thought to a study of the growth and development of personal liberty, Acton seeking to grasp the movement in its long range and earliest origins, Lord Morley illustrating its character from that particular and unhappy phase of its fortunes which occurred in France before the Revolution. Then, again, the study of history has been for both preeminently a school of casuistry or, if we prefer, |