Mr. Nicholson continues to show, towards the general reading public, that instructive patience which the permanent civil servant must show to his transitory chief. He carries on, in his biography of Dwight Morrow, that implicit instruction in the control of world affairs which he began in the trilogy on Lord Carnock, the Peace Conference, and Lord Curzon.

But his subject here is very different and very unexpected. There is no adumbration, in the story of Lord Carnock, the perfect English civil servant and statesman; in the story of that magnificent aristocrat and administrator, Curzon; no adumbration of the story of the American school-master’s son, who became partner in J. P. Morgan’s, Ambassador to Mexico, was close to being Secretary of State to Mr. Hoover, whose prestige, at the time of his premature death, aged 58, clearly foreshadowed the Presidency, and whom Mr. Nicholson feels bound to call “the completely civilized man.”

There is just one connecting link between this book and the preceding Trilogy, and it is the reason for Mr. Nicholson’s writing it. All four books praise men who sought to attain to a mastery of the technique of world affairs, who sought, in fact, to know the true state of things, who were determined to discard notions preconceived to the accurate, orderly, sympathetic knowledge of them, and who were confident that their intelligences were capable of mastering the jungle-like complexity that faced them. Otherwise, this book differs—by a world—from its predecessors. The scene swings from European Diplomacy to Transatlantic Commerce, from Petersburg to Pittsburg, from Whitehall to Wall Street.