Volume 35, Number 6 · April 14, 1988
Goodbye to All That
By James Joll
The Age of Empire: 1875–1914
by E.J. Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 404 pp., $22.95
In May 1898 the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, in a powerful and somber speech to the annual meeting of the Conservative Primrose League, divided the nations of the world into the living and the dying: 'On the one hand you have great countries of enormous power growing in power every year, growing in wealth, growing in dominion, growing in the perfection of their organization.' In the dying nations, on the other hand, 'disorganization and decay are advancing almost as fast as concentration and increasing power are advancing in the living nations that stand beside them.' And he went on to draw the conclusion:
Review, 3123 words
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