The United States of America began eight years ago to deal with the drink problem on a national scale. Professor Gilbert Murray has ranked that experiment in the New World with another great experiment in the Old World, the League of Nations. These two stand for him as earnest of world progress.

The vast majority of people in this country dismiss Prohibition with a shrug, and complain that it has nothing to do with them. They are hostile to it, as an idea, just as they are hostile to Bolshevism as an idea, but with this difference: the latter is a useful pawn in current politics : the former is not. I doubt very much whether the Liquor Popular Control Bill (known as the ‘Oxford’ Bill), and its rediscussion in the House of Lords in an amended form, has done more than annoy the Brewers and hearten the Temperance Societies—not that the ‘Oxford Bill is a measure of Prohibition: it is a measure of the country’s interest in liquor control. The Observer, which is a regular champion of the Bill and Temperance in general, takes to task the Government spokesman in the Lords debate for dismissing Prohibition in America by a contemptuous reference to Bootleggers. Yet American fiction and drama, as studied in this country, are largely responsible for this. The strength of Socialism in England could hardly Be gauged by the references of music-hall artists.

In the Ardennes, in what is now Belgian Luxemburg, there lies a wide tract of land some one hundred and fifty miles in extent, covered with mountain and forest, well wooded and well watered, which for long centuries formed the Sovereign Principality of Bouillon, under the suzerainty of France. Its tiny capital (known to every tourist) stands at the bottom of a little valley, where the river bends sharply round a precipitous rock crowned by a grim castle, once the home of the gallant crusader Godfrey of Bouillon. Its history, and that of its later Dukes, of the great French house of La Tour d’Auvergne, warriors and statesmen, Huguenots and Catholics, Generals of the Fronde, and Cardinals of Holy Church, may be found written by the Maurist Benedictines in one of those monumental compilations which were the glory of the eighteenth century.

In the years preceding the French Revolution, the reigning Duke of Bouillon, Charles Godfrey de la Tour d’Auvergne, dwelt in his splendid Château of Navarre, near the city of Evreux, an anxious and troubled man. He had vast wealth and great estates, a park of one hundred thousand acres well stocked with game, a palace which was a miniature Versailles (Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and Charles Edward Stuart had been its guests, and the ex-Empress Josephine would one day hold in it her sad little court). He had his gardens and his orangeries, his aviaries and menageries, his great stables filled with plunging horses and lumbering state carriages, his hot-houses, lakes and fountains, his pagodas and oriental pavilions. His house was filled with statues and paintings, and tapestries and lustres and porcelain, silver and gold and costly gems, obsequious courtiers, guards and lacqueys.

After reigning for a period of something like a thousand years, the Bavarian dynasty of the Wittelsbachs came to an end in the autumn of 1918, when, as the reader knows, Germany became a Republic. Whatever the royal family may have felt about this event it is to be supposed that one of its members at any rate looked upon it with composure, if not with relief, because it freed her from the shackles of court etiquette and enabled her to pursue, unhampered, the charitable aims she has always had so much at heart. This was Princess Ludwig Ferdinand, née the Infanta Maria de la Paz, aunt of the King of Spain. She has indeed justified her baptismal name, and she is popularly called ‘Die Friedensprincessin’ (Peace-Princess). She devotes all her intelligence, resources and energies to good works, and her desire to bring about peace among men amounts almost to an obsession.

In the summer of 1918 a woman presented herself at the residence of the Princess at Munich, stating that she had an urgent request to make. She was barefoot, décoiffée, in rags. Nevertheless, Her Royal Highness, who is nothing if not accessible, gave orders that she was to be admitted. The meeting between these two oddly-assorted women was the starting-point of what may be destined to become a great movement, of which some account will be given further on. Apart from this, it led, directly or indirectly, to a conversion remarkable enough to merit description.

Bound up with the history of a neighbourhood and intimately connected with the past are the names of the fields. Those who are not countryfolk do not always realise that every field, like every village, has a name, or has had one at some time. These names are to be found in old tithe maps, and they are often of the greatest interest.

In many villages in the south of England you can find a field called Townfield. This name preserves the memory of an old feudal custom. The Townfield, a name which occurs in at least one document five centuries old, to be found in the British Museum, was the name given to the field of the village community. It belonged to a definite owner, who granted the field to certain of his tenants in return for specified services. The Townfield has no hedge, for reasons that will presently appear.

It was ploughed in acre or half-acre strips, by a team of oxen provided by the tenants, who all clubbed together for it.

These strips were each a furrow in length—i.e., 220 yards—and 22 yards wide, just as much as a team of oxen could comfortably plough in one day. The furrow represented, the length the team could go conveniently without turning, and a rod (5 ½ yards) was the room occupied by a yoke of oxen, four abreast. Our awkward ‘long measure’ thus originated in the harness and capacity of a yoke of oxen.

‘You see a field of bones,’ says this author, speaking of Scholasticism, ‘but the bones live.’ The same may be said of the categories on which his work is built up. Categories have an obstinate way of remaining skeletons. Thanks, however, to the constructive power of the writer, the bones take on flesh and sinew: they live. In the mass of history and voice ‘production’ we welcome like the natural voice this evidence of an authentic historical gift that makes categories—those troublesome things—ceme alive, that introduces us not merely to the abstract thought but to the thinker of the Middle Ages, not only to what was thought but why it was thought, and, above all, to the vision of life that inspired the thought. The narrative is enlivened throughout with the asides ‘(one might almost call them the captions labelling the pictures), which convey the author’s conclusions to our intelligence.’ Education had come out of the sanctuary into the library, it had not yet left the library for the counting-house .... it had not yet begun to teach men how to make a livelihood, it was still engaged in teaching men how to live ‘(p. 68)—or this :’ Mediaeval man was by nature a philosopher, by instinct a believer, by education a scientist, but by choice an artist ‘(p. 236)— or :’ the analysis of thought was always his (the scholastic’s) occupation, as the analysis of man is ours ‘(p. 244). The power of conveying a swift impression in the flash of a word is certainly Father Jarrett’s, and we could go on multiplying instances by way of illustration, but let these suffice: ‘the strange pleasures of the water,’ ‘the cosier sense of home.’