Where Mr. Wells deals with the Continental movement, which has weakened or destroyed Monarchy and broken up the religious unity of various nations, we have again the same confused attitude which we find in his dealing with the English one, only it is rather more remarkable that he should be so wrong about the foreign business. For, after all, it is natural enough for a man attempting to write a broad outline of History to go wrong upon the modern English record, seeing that the modern English record was not only everywhere taught officially, conventionally and wrongly in Mr. Wells’s boyhood, but is still in the main so taught. On English matters from the Reformation onward all our official History is propaganda: The Stuarts always wrong, Magna Charta a whig document, Cromwell a noble-hearted hero (and poor), etc. etc. etc. Only a good deal of original reading among modern writers and hard thinking of one’s own as well, can set one right upon it. But the Continental record has been dealt with by the greatest scholars from all points of view and with the fullest freedom for two generations. There is no excuse for going wrong upon its main lines. For instance, the tremendous struggle between the more civilized traditional part of Germany, led by the Emperor, and the less civilized northern part, led by the Protestant Princes, was decided adversely to the Catholic Church at the Peace of Westphalia. Mr. Wells prints a good little map of the results of that Peace. But what he certainly does not understand, and probably has never heard of is that those results were due to French policy. It was French deliberate support of the anti-Catholic side in the Empire towards the end of the struggle which prevented the evil of the Reformation in Germany from being undone, and which left the Catholic civilization and tradition of the German Empire in ruins. He is also lacking in what should be part of the mental furniture of every educated man, and that is the history and quality of what is called religious toleration in the struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whether religious toleration be necessarily a good thing may be left to debate; whether Mr. Wells regards it as a good thing no man can tell, because he is all for it where a Catholic culture is tolerating anti-Catholicism in its midst, and yet quite indifferent to an anti-Catholic culture oppressing Catholicism in its midst. That is a very frequent phenomenon in men who feel strongly and think weakly. I have heard men propounding with violence the duty of the State to forbid tobacco, wine, large families, free marriage of the poor, socialistic literature, Sunday trading, and Heaven knows how many other things—and everyone of them would have told you that he loved toleration!