THE ATLANTIC SYSTEM

This is one of these books in which the mass of material is of vital interest to the student, and packed with information of value to the general high-type readers but from which the final chapter is the one that will be culled for quotations and controversial statements. Here is a scholarly but vigorous analysis of the devious diplomatic history agent ""the Atlantic system"", our relations with Great Britain from 1890 to the present, quarrels, misunderstandings, forces attracting and repelling; and, secondarily, the rise of the United States from verbal participation, to junior partnership, to equality. 1890 saw the first step taken with the Naval Act and the rise of Mahan, prophet of Anglo American solidarity and sea power. It saw too the establishment of the Pan German League. Step by step, with the two Venezuela incidents, the annexation of Hawaii the Spanish-American War, amoa, Alaska, the Panama Canal, the Boer War, the development of a comparable Pacific system, Morocco and the Algeciras incident, the Russia--Japanese War, the First World War, our failure to join the League of Nations, and finally Hitler and his tribes high spots (or low) emphasizing the steps establishing the inevitable bonds between England and U.S.- and successive endeavors on the part of Germany to split us apart. As in 1823 and in 1898 and in 1917 so in 1940, umetanes force us together, the ocean is proved not an abyss but a bond of union. Now the Fall of France has dramatized our mutual used. Isolation can no longer be used as oamoufinge. The final chapter not only presents the author's creed of intervention, but tears the isolationist creed apart, shows up the leaders for what they are, and gives the truth as he sees it.