Welsh Journals

more powerful people around him. His passion for national unanimity and fear of the workers denote attitudes of mind often found in those bourgeois who feel politically threatened. The 'Finality Jack' element in his schemes went clean contrary to his basic conception of a developing progress. He clasped at single issues to fill his mind and push out doubts. He was like the man who thought that if one said something enough times it became true. As an editor he had tried to hold the balance of opinions fairly in his columns, and that is what he should have kept on doing. There was no cure then known for his disease. It would have been best for him to weigh pros and cons in an office, not to have ventured into a world he could not mould with an ex cathedra screed from his chair. For all its faults this is a good book. Its exposition is clear and pleasant to read. Much of what is said is useful and thought-provoking. At times its very repetitive quality is helpful in keeping the reader's mind fully aware of the whole picture. Study of some recent work, much of which is concerned with Morley, might have stimulated the author to fresh efforts at interpreting his subject's mental make-up more thoroughly. Neverthe- less, the discerning can see all that is fundamental. No envious Caliban lurking around with secreted records could add appreciably to Dr. Hamer's work, though the gifted might have significant contributions to make. Last but not least, one is left with this thought: how much more appropriate it would have been had Morley written the life of Bright and not those of Cobden and Gladstone. A funk on a funk would make good reading. MICHAEL HURST. St. John's College, Oxford. LORD HALDANE: SCAPEGOAT FOR LIBERALISM. By Stephen E. Koss. Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1969. Pp. ix, 263. 81s. (£4'5), Compared with many of his contemporaries, Richard Haldane has been well treated by history. A sympathetic two-volume biography by Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice appeared a decade after his death. Twenty years later, Mr. Dudley Sommer published a briefer account which made use of some additional sources. Then, in 1964, Professor Heuston produced an excellent fifty-page sketch in his Lives of the Lord Chancellors. Both Haldane and his sister had written useful autobiographies. In offering a new study of Haldane's career, Dr. Stephen Koss describes his work as 'a chapter in political biography and a commentary upon Liberalism in decline'. Dr. Koss is concerned chiefly with the causes and consequences of Haldane's exclusion from office in May 1915. He