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followers, went to his doom without even the faint consolation that King George's message of unaltered affection would have brought him. Sir George did the correct thing; but the correct thing is not usually of much avail in the turmoil of revolution. He was anxious, and properly anxious, to be on good terms with the Provisional Government, into whose hands power had nominally passed. One believes that a man of resource, promptitude, and vigour might, nevertheless, have found some means of passing a message through the closed gates of Tsarskoe Selo.

The truth is that diplomatists are, by the nature of their profession, out of place in war or revolution. Theirs is a peace-time occupation. 'I want no diplomats,' exclaimed Mr Lloyd George to Prince Sixte of Bourbon in 1917, 'diplomats were invented to waste time.' The exclamation was perfectly intelligible in war-time, when the elaborate methods of formal diplomacy are inopportune. The political machinery of peace is put out of gear by war, for it was never made to stand the strain. The qualities that make a diplomatist successful are precisely those that are inappropriate to moments of crisis. To temporise is virtue in diplomacy, but is almost always disastrous in war. To pause, to consider, to consult here and there, to reconsider, to sound, and at length to decide upon a middle course-all this may be as wise in the one case as it is fatal in the other. Hesitation and doubt are as proper in a diplomat as they are unbecoming to the soldier. And the soldier's qualitiespromptitude, vigour, resolution, even ruthlessness-are necessary to stem or to steer the forces of revolution. No man who has been accustomed to work for the whole of his life in the atmosphere of the study, the drawingroom, and the banquet-hall-a diplomatist's workinghours know no intermittence-can be expected to adapt himself in a trice to conditions wholly different, when convention is engulfed in chaos, and rules of procedure cease to be any guide at all. Human nature itself becomes strange to the diplomat, for he has to deal with individuals the opposite of those among whom he has been trained to work.

The path of a diplomatist is normally smooth. It may contain traps, and there may be attractive bypaths

that lead to delusion and failure; but it will not take him, as a rule, over rocky places, up high mountains, or along dangerous precipices. Particularly was the career a pleasant one to the older generation. Sir George Buchanan was one of the last of those who were nominated for the service, with only a qualifying examination to pass that was little more than a formality. If a young man was born in the diplomatic family, had good looks and good manners, was gifted with a due portion of common sense and a knowledge of languages, he was considered a fit person to enter a career, the essence of which is to be a representative Englishman among foreigners. His work then took him, and takes him still, from one alien country to another, among Frenchmen and Germans and Turks, to South America, Japan, the Balkans. He learns to understand and appreciate every possible point of view. He makes friends in one place and another, and finds himself in warm sympathy, at different times, with perhaps incompatible ideas. If he is not careful he will lose all his convictions; he will hesitate ever to express any decided opinions; he will balance, argue for this and for that, criticise, scepticise, avow himself agnostic. The sharpest spur to positive activity is narrowness of conviction. Great men of action are made of different stuff from that which produces the successful diplomatist. The diplomatist's mind may easily become so broadened by the variety of his experiences that even his national prejudices wear off. He may become a denationalised and so an abnormal representative of the nation which he impersonates to his colleagues.

Into this pitfall Sir George Buchanan certainly never fell. He was the typical English diplomatist, courteous, distinguished, honourable. To a singular degree he was accepted by Russians as the true type of the great nation which he represented. As in 1914 he had striven for peace, but held national dishonour to be the only evil that was greater than war, so the British Ambassador stood through the revolutionary months for the British political practice of moderate reform. He acquired immense popularity in the land where he resided, and was made a freeman of Moscow-an honour which had previously been conferred only on one foreigner and Vol. 240.-No. 477.

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eight Russians. But his influence diminished as the revolution progressed. He pinned his faith to the Duma. He continued to believe in the leaders of the March revolution, Miliukoff, Kerensky, and the rest, when real power-if they ever possessed it—had passed completely out of their hands. He presumably forwarded to London, without controverting it, their deplorable advice that Trotzky, then a prisoner in British hands, should be released. He accepted the glib asseverations of Tereschenko that the Bolsheviks did not count for much,

and would soon be suppressed by the Provisional Government. Up to the moment of revolution Sir George Buchanan was an admirable and worthy representative of his country. He kept in close touch both with the Tsar and the Opposition leaders, and was trusted by all. In a land of intrigue his straightforwardness won him a notable position.

When revolution came the British Government considered that it might be advisable to have in Petrograd a representative less personally identified with the old regime, and with greater personal bias towards socialism. They therefore commissioned Mr Arthur Henderson, the Labour member of the War Cabinet, to proceed to Russia, with full power to supersede Sir George Buchanan if he thought fit. They telegraphed to Sir George suggesting that it might be well if he were to come to London a few weeks after Mr Henderson's arrival to give the Government the benefit of his personal advice.' This ambiguous request was met by the Ambassador in a typically simple, straightforward manner. He asked whether he were being recalled. The reply came that there was no question of his being recalled.

This miserable duplicity marred what was otherwise a sensible, even if unusual, act on the part of Mr Lloyd George. The French Government, animated by the same perfectly intelligible motives, recalled M. Paléologue, and appointed the eminent Socialist, M. Albert Thomas, to his place. Since Russia was, in fact, at the end of her strength, and about to give herself over to anarchy with the recklessness of a voluptuary plunging into dissipation, it mattered little who were the foreign envoys; a strong man of action alone might have exercised some influence on the course of events. But to conceal from

Sir George the true nature of Mr Henderson's powers was to prepare the scene for an unedifying quarrel between two rival representatives of Britain. Fortunately both displayed the most perfect tact, Mr Henderson, after sounding the Ministers of the Provisional Government, came to the conclusion that Sir George was better fitted for the work than he himself was, and honourably retired.

The Ambassador followed him home a year later. His health failed under the strain of difficulty and danger, and his doctor ordered his return. Sir George tells with his usual charming ingenuousness how he swiftly revived upon crossing the frontier out of Russia. What he believed to be incipient influenza disappeared, and hearty appetite returned. He became, in London, the Ambassador à la mode.

Other books on the downfall of Tsarist Russia fill in for us the colour which Sir George Buchanan's political narrative omits. His own daughter's volume 'Petrograd the City of Trouble,' lighted up with more vivid flashes the bearing of Russians within the doomed capital. M. Paléologue's long work contains more penetrating observations on the Slavonic character, and abounds in excellent obiter dicta-as, for instance, 'Machiavellism was already old when Machiavelli invented it.' The volumes which we have had under review let us into the secrets of the diplomatic machinery, and they have the merit of telling of recent events. So many memoirs now divulge to the general public for the first time the tricks and perfidies of German policy between 1880 and 1914!

Sir George Buchanan's authoritative volumes must always remain of immense value to historians of this epoch and to all students of diplomacy. Some recent reminiscences, British and foreign, have shown that, if memory is sometimes a fickle friend, memoirs are often a valuable ally. Sir George Buchanan was in close contact with the tremendous events which brought about the overthrow of the Romanoff dynasty and the collapse of the Russian Empire; his word is the word of an honest man, his testimony unimpeachable.

A. L. KENNEDY.

Art. 12.-IRELAND, ROME, AND THE REPUBLICANS.

1. The Revolution in Ireland, 1906-23. By W. Alison Phillips. Longmans, 1923.

2. The Irish Revolution and how it came about. By William O'Brien. Allen and Unwin, 1923.

3. En Irlande. By Simone Téry. Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1923.

THE history of Ireland during the last twelve years is a sad history. Whatever causes are assigned for the miseries that have come upon the sister island, there is no doubt as to the fact that Ireland has suffered terribly during the progress of the revolution which has now been arrested, although it cannot yet be said that it is terminated, or that the forces of disruption and disorder are exhausted. The story of these troubled years is told with remarkable impartiality and insight by Prof. Alison Phillips in his fine book 'The Revolution in Ireland,' which may be commended to English and American readers as by far the most trustworthy account of the struggle, which ended in the concession by Great Britain to Southern Ireland of the largest possible measure of freedom that is consistent with her position as a part of the British Empire. That the British Government, with the best intentions, made many mistakes in the attempt to maintain the Union as it was accepted in 1801 is certain; but that the methods by which the Irish advocates of national 'freedom' supported their cause were in many directions discreditable and unworthy is no less certain. Prof. Phillips does not conceal the faults on either side.

'The British people,' he writes, 'who are at bottom neither cowardly nor ungenerous, will some day awake to the fact that it was the cowardly and ungenerous policy of their Government, culminating in the great surrender, which has been largely responsible for the woes of Ireland, and that they cannot rid themselves of a share in this responsibility by shutting their eyes and ears. The American people, whose sense of their own exceptional righteousness is apt to lead them into blundering interference in the concerns of other nations, have also their share of responsibility. It is hardly for them to affect indifference to the misfortunes which their ill-informed clamour helped to create.'

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