Studies in diplomacy and statecraft

How rulers and statesmen have used or ought to use their powers, particularly in the sphere of foreign affairs, is the cen tral theme of the studies collected in this volume. With one exception they have been previously published, though not all in their present form. My thanks are due to the editors, publishers and societies who have generously given permission to reprint.

Franco-German Relations, 1870-1914, is a revised and enlarged version of the Creighton Lecture delivered in 1923. Published in the same year and reprinted in 1928, it has been out of print since Paternoster Row went up in flames in December 1940. The Diplomatic Background of the First World War, an attempt to summarise the voluminous evidence of recent years on the development of the European situa tion after 1871, is new, as are the conversations with two German ex-Foreign Ministers, Kühlmann and Jagow, which are appended to it. British Policy before the War in the Light of the Archives, an address delivered at Chatham House in October 1938 and published in International Affairs, January 1939, was occasioned by the completion of British Documents on the Origins of the War, edited by Gooch and Temperley. The appended conversation with Lord Grey took place early in 1929, when the writer was preparing two lectures on his foreign policy for the Hochschule für Politik at Berlin. Portions of Prince Bülow and his Memoirs appeared in the Contemporary Review, December 1930, and February 1931, and in History, July, 1933. Kiderlen-Wächter, The Man of Agadir, is expanded from an article in The Cambridge Historical Journal, 1936. British and Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, is an expansion and continuation of a brochure published by G. Bell and Sons for the Historical Association in 1936: it appeared in its present form in the Contemporary Review, October 1940-May 1941. Political Autobiography grew out of an address delivered to the Royal Society of Literature in 1936 and published in its Transactions, Vol. XV. It began to appear in its enlarged form in the Contemporary Review, November 1941.