A SCHOOL HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1275, 2 November 1911, Page 4

A SCHOOL HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

— c The name of Mr. Rudyard Kipling is a sufficient guarantee for the interest and originality of any book on which it appears, ancl Mr. Fletcher has but recently won his spurs as an able and stimulative writer of history. Naturally, then, their long-promised history has been looked forward to with pleasurable anticipation. Now that it has at last been issued_ the reviewers are by no means unanimous in their opinions. Good as it undoubtedly is, it is frankly somewhat of a disappointment; for Mr. Ivipliko's contribution is confined to a number of short poems of the ballad type, dealing with the more crucial ancl poignant moments in the life of the nation, but the text of the book is the work of Mr. Fletceer. Still there is cause for gratitude to both writers. The work has been done, as Mr. Pepvs would have said, "mighty well." The disciples of Dr. Dryasdust, that tutelary divinity of abbreviated histories, will read it with dismay. Names and dates and details it of course contains, but they are reduced to an irreducible minimum, and for the tables of kings, lists of events, glossaries of terms, and other examination appurtenar.ccs, familiar to the ordinary school text-book, we look in vain. For the writers have set themselves the difficult task of disengaging, as it were, the soul of our national history, and awakening in young readers' that love of country which is only vital when it rests on the firm foundation of the past. They have not for a single moment aimed at the Olympian coldness which marks the writings of the superior person. The story they tell is a story they love, and every incident in it ha;; served them to the heart. The book is full of emotional feeling—passion and prejudice, or conviction and faith, according as you read it in the spirit

of sympathy, or in that of antagon">hi. Anil in uiic spirit or tin; other Von neft compelled |<i read jk ( f ()r jt i.'ih a i|iinlil,y only ton ran: in school l;ool(H, t.lii; (111 /I. I i l,y of life. One conviction liol.h its writers '" 1 1<' Mt.rinifily. Tim only real value, of I.III! hiiit.ory of past ages lies in the. lefiHiiiii fliitl, it l/'ii.rlieij for modern hiii'v, lliiitory, /in Imikkjiak taught mi lomk iipi, iii pnst polities; politics 'ire. prenent Jii:;|viry. And reme.mlier|HK 'lie idruiiif Imperialism that antiunion nil the writings of Silt. K.ll'm.mi, we. need not, he, surprised to lilld I.lie hook Imperial in outlook. 11l file mime compass it would he hard In (ind no spirited and ko inforiiiin;/ ii. picture of the welding together of flu: curly raws, Briton, Hii.,voii, lljtiie, mill Nonnan, into the |"i" Knjjlinli people, or of the part phiyed in the process by Imperial Home, And the introductory eliapon the physiological history of flte land, and the ethnological history of iI.M earliest inhabitants is one flint, eould not fail to arrest and hold tho at feu I,ion of intelligent boys mill /firln. From ml,art to finish, too, Um liir.for.y of Fngland and its dcpt'iiileiirieii in thrown into relief iiK'iitir.f n. skilfully-suggested background of Kiirope.an and world history, Flanders, Normandy, Franco Mitj ArpiitiiJiie, which in the his(orier, of our youth were only bo mii-iiy disembodied names, are * hero /liven form and substance. The gradual development of Flanders into the. Low Countries of the six-l-eoiith and seventeenth centuries, and tlm Belgium and Holland of modern days in etehed in a few incisive phnu'/'ii. The wane incisive brevity, condensing n, chapter into an illuminative. tie.nl/ftiice, meets us at every turn. For the writers arc concerned with essential things, and devote their energies \n making plain the path through the desert of facts over which the feet of young readers too often pathetically stumnle. Racial, social, economic, military, naval, religious, political questions arc faced jind handled in a manner to stimulate further inquiry. And after all that is, or should be, the real aim of all school histories, and the goal nf any sound system of education. Jt goes without saying that in such a book the expansion of tho Empire is adequately dealt with, and it was a happy thought which led its writors from time to time to summarise results, and to add maps which make clear to the most casual observer the stoadv and irresistible march from the day of small thing 3 to the day of _ the world-wide dominion on which the sun never sets and the flag is never hauled down.

But the central thought which runs like a silver thread through the whole story and gives it unity is the thought of personal responsibility. The writers unceasingly enforce the lesson that national privilege spells personal duty, and unfortunately it is only too easy from the story of the past to point the moral of the inevitable retribution that follows on duties neglected. Again and again Britain has allowed the Navy to decay and the Army to become a negligible quantity. and again some unlooked-for crisis has arrived, and we have paid for our penurious economy in wasted lives and treasure poured out like water. In these days of great armaments and rival nationalities no lesson is more urgently needed to be enforced upon us as citizens, and it cannot be enforced upon us # in too yqung years. As we havo said above, the book contains some admirable maps, emphasising the inter-relation of history and geography, and it abounds with illustrations. These are of somewhat v aricd merit, but one and all arc full of life, and some catch and reflect the spirit of an epoch or a moment big with fate in a way to bring its meaning home to . the hearts and imagination of the young. That picture, for instance, of tho brave Elizabethan ships plunging southwards through the waters of uncharted seas, ■ or the delightful map, which no real boy could resist, "which an l?f°t showed to King Henry VII in the year 1500" ! Happy are the boys and girls who have such a vivid book put into their hands, a history written from the standpoint of common sense, which exalts patriotism over politics, and refuses to bow the knee at conventional shrines, or mouth and mumble party shibboleths. For England and the Empire are once again on the anvil, and once again king "hammered, hammered, hammered into shape" under the bitter discipline of domestic quarrels and foreign dangers, and thero never- was an age since "our rude island story" first began when men needed more urgently to bs delivered from the bondage ' "of false opinions and imaginations as one would," and taught to confront facts bravely in "the white light of truth."