_Mr. Wells as Historian._ By A. W. Gomme. Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson & Co. 1921. The small amount of space given to Abraham Lincoln and to Mazzini and one or two other such figures has also been a matter for criticism. When the time comes to revise the text I think that criticism will have to be considered. Mazzini is probably a better figure than Gladstone as a centre for the discussion of Nationalism in modern Europe—if indeed that is to be discussed about any particular figure. It is also a valid criticism from a Chinese reader that the history of China is far too brief in comparison with the history of the Western world. The _Outline_ contains no account of its philosophies and little of the struggle between the more nomadic north and the more agricultural south which runs so parallel with the European and Western Asiatic story. But, brief as the space devoted to China in the _Outline_ is, it is better than nothing, and I have given as much as either the existing analysis of Chinese history available for an English writer permits or the prepossessions of Western readers will allow. The West is learning with extreme reluctance the share of China in human history. § 2 A VOICE FROM THE CLASSICAL SIDE The feud which finds expression in Mr. A. W. Gomme’s pamphlet is one of much older origin than the publication of _The Outline of History_. Mr. Gomme is a teacher of the Greek language, and it is thirty years and more since I first attacked the imposture of the Greek teaching in our public schools. Long before I sank below the possibility of serious consideration by my fellow-countrymen by becoming a novelist, I was a writer upon education; and many of the novels I have written, since, like most novels from the Book of Tobit onward, they tell the story of youth going out into the world, have reflected strongly on education. The “classical” master, who uses up the time of our boys in his devious and wonderful exercises, is generally a very poor Grecian himself, and he rarely produces a working knowledge of Greek in his victims. He uses up time, space and endowment in his futilities, and so he stands in the way of a proper development of lower form work leading up to the Modern Side. The classical interests are still very strong in the Universities, they are a bar to the proper education of the British Civil Service and so a world-wide nuisance, and as a patriot, a parent and a schoolmaster I have raged against them. It was almost more than I could have hoped for, in that long-standing quarrel, that Mr. Gomme should have done up his extraordinary ideas and limitations into the neat packet of this pamphlet and so placed himself, a sample of the scholastic classic, in my hands. But he has done it, and here he is, and we can see for ourselves how the classical side can criticise a book and what it thinks of the teaching of history.