CHAPTER TWO EDUCATIONAL CO-OPERATION WITH INCE the Washington Conference, the United States and ourselves have created -and I hope will maintain-a new intimacy, which is already beginning to bear fruit, and which, if continued, as I believe it will and ought to be, will be of incalculable blessing to the whole of the civilised world. I am not going to ask for a more systematic study of American literature, because it seems to me that on the whole English people have given sufficient study to American literature. I do not say that in a disparaging way of American literature. I say it by way of praise of the British reader. The contrast between our careful study of American literature and our almost studied and systematic neglect of American history and institutions is very extraordinary. American literature is not very great in bulk, but much of it is very high in quality. We have a large number of books on individual American writers. Men like Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, and Longfellow have been studied at least as reverently and as appreciatively, and perhaps I may add as critically, in our country as in America. One of the latest publications of my own university of Cambridge is that excellent encyclopædic survey, the Cambridge History of American Literature. When I pass to American history, I repeat that I find the most extraordinary contrast. My place at this table is going to be taken at four o'clock by my friend, Mr Laski, and I have got on my notes a sentence from the preface to his last volume of essays. This is what Mr Laski says: "The study of American history and politics has barely been attempted in Great Britain." That is a very extraordinary thing to say in the year 1921, but it happens to be only too true. There are extraordinarily few books written by English writers about American history and American institutions. I expect it has occurred to you all that in that famous vade mecum of the cultured man and woman, Macaulay's Essays, not one is devoted to America. A few years ago a most excellent little study, a mere outline history of America, was published by that remarkable man Goldwin Smith. To this day that outline is about the best brief bird's-eye view of the development of America. Perhaps it is a little humiliating if I add that he only wrote the book after he had shaken the dust of Oxford and England off his feet and had gone to the more bracing atmosphere of Canada. The best work done on American history by British writers has been devoted to the Colonial period, and we think above all of those massive works of Payne and Doyle. Only one British historian of the first rank has ever given serious study to American history; but there again, I hasten to add that Lecky did not look round for a subject and deliberately put his hand upon America. He determined to write a history of England and Ireland in the eighteenth century, and in the pursuit of his task he naturally came to the American War of Independence, and took it in his stride. But I am bound to say in his praise that his chapters on the American War of Independence and on the dispute between George III and the American colonies are one of the glories of British scholarship. Another author of quite different character has written a very delightful book on the American Revolution-Sir George Trevelyan. Sir George began his literary life by a fascinating book on the early life of Charles James Fox, and in later life-after he had retired from his long and somewhat stormy political career-he took up the theme where he had left off and continued Fox's life until it broadened out into a survey of the American War. You will find that book romantic, pictorial, scintillating with that literary charm which he inherited from his uncle, Macaulay, and which he has handed on to his own son, the biographer of Bright, Garibaldi, and Lord Grey. But his book on the American War of Independence belongs, if I may say so without offence, perhaps rather to the literary than to the scientific department of history. You will ask me, perhaps, to recommend you at any rate one really good book written in English and published in England on American history. For advanced readers there is nothing to compare with the seventh volume of the Cambridge Modern History, which is entirely devoted to the United States, and contains contributions by British and American scholars. It begins long before the United States ceased to be colonies, and it comes right down to our own time. If that volume had been published separately, it would probably have sold more and been more read and studied. Before I pass away from the first portion of my address, namely, British scholarship on America, I must naturally refer to the great work of Lord Bryce. It is above all a study of living, modern America. But great, memorable, and exhaustive as that book is, do not let us forget that in a certain sense it is unintelligible without a fairly careful study of the earlier history of the great nation to which he has devoted so much time and care and thought. I think we have reached the position that the amount of British attention devoted to America is extraordinarily small. One or two really good books, like those of Bryce and Lecky, a scholarly essay on the American Constitution by Sir Henry Maine, and one or two good surveys of the Colonial period, are an astonishingly small harvest when you compare the work of our British historical scholars on America with their work on almost any of the other Great Powers of Europe. Here is an almost virgin field. I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my conviction that it is a subject which well repays attention. Quite apart from its political interest, its historical and philosophical value is of the highest quality. If we are to learn much about American history and institutions, you will have gathered from my brief, and perhaps a little disparaging, account of British scholarship that we must go to American writers. Here the first thing that strikes one is something not altogether creditable to ourselves. We do not neglect American historians. The most celebrated American historians have nowhere had more numerous and appreciative readers. Where was Washington |