For the better part of three years the writer of these notes has been occupied almost entirely in an intensely interesting enterprise. He has been getting his own ideas about the general process of history into order and he has been setting them down, having them checked by various people, and publishing them as a book, The Outline of History , which both in America and Europe has had a considerable vogue. In volumes or in complete sets of parts it has already found over two hundred thousand pur

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

It is a relief to turn from the vanity and peevishness of Mr. Gomme to two more serious antagonists. Mr. Belloc is something of a special pleader, and both he and Dr. Downey forgo few controversial advantages. Dr. Downey is not ashamed to write of my “showman’s gestures” and so forth, but they both have minds and tempers that are disciplined; they are intelligently interested in The Outline of History as a whole; a passionate objection to my existence does not appear among their motives. They re

I will revert for a moment to my suggestion of an Outline of History for Catholics from the Catholic point of view. It is, I submit, a very desirable thing at the present time. I suppose the Church, at its head and as a whole, has a policy, a definable relationship towards the States and nations of the world. As an organisation one feels that it should make for peace and human co-operation—wherever it operates. If any sort of men can be expected to have the same political ideas wherever they are