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ENGLISH social history is most largely the creation of the past thirty years. The intimate life of working-men and women was not regarded by the classic historians as a fundamental portion of the national record. A brilliant chapter in Macaulay, statistics of births and deaths, some notes on changes in the fashions of dress and houses—it was with scraps such as these that the great Victorians treated us. For, after all, the ebb and flow of daily life makes little enough show in the pomp and circumstance of great events. It has little enough of the glamour by which martial triumph is invested or of the splendid excitement which surrounds a great debate in the House of Commons. Yet slowly we are coming to see that these are after all but the external trappings of the real drama. They serve rather to conceal than to display the events by which the nation was most deeply stirred. The great artist sees deeper; and the novels of Dickens and Disraeli remain to tell us of an England which has with difficulty found its way into accredited history. It is in the pages of palimpsests like Sybil that we glean some notion of why the Castlereagh of the Peace of Vienna had none of its splendid symbols for the common people, or why the majesty of Ricardo's name brought to them no echo of applause. The mean dependence of men like Croker, the scent and curls of genial fops like d'Orsay, the ruthless magnificence of roués like Lord Hertford, have turned now to dust and ashes. Those who awaken our enthusiasm are of different fibre. We respond rather to the persistency of Richard Carlile who made of prison the temple of freedom. Our veneration is for men like Thomas Hepburn to whom the whole vista of modern trade-unionism seems to have been revealed. The prophets of the time are not Peel or Lord John Russell or Macaulay, but men like William Lovett with a burning zeal for popular education, or Robert Owen who did not forget the tragedies of his childhood in his days of comfort.

It is to this new tradition that Mr. Wallas' book belongs. It