Early in 1938, before those steps had been taken that rendered all but inevitable the European war of late 1939, President Roosevelt suggested to Mr. Chamberlain a form of international conference intended to avert the danger. Mr. Chamberlain rejected it. This, wrote that greatest of all Anglo-Americans, Sir Winston Churchill, ten years later, meant “the loss of the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war”. Indeed, that the “proffered hand” should thus have been waved away left him “breathless with amazement”. Greater statesman than historian though he was, Churchill's judgement must nonetheless be respected. Yet so must that of a much lesser statesman and historian, Sir Samuel Hoare, later Lord Templewood. Writing after Churchill, this Englishman to the core and arch-defender of Chamberlain put the blame on Roosevelt: “It was, in fact, we who finally agreed to support the proposal, and Roosevelt who decided that the moment was no longer suitable for it”. Not content with this, he went on to assert that “in the months that followed, Anglo-American relations became increasingly intimate and culminated in the parallel efforts that Washington and London made throughout the Czechoslovak crisis”. The odd thing is that the judgements of both men are right, or almost right.

In the thirty years or so which separate James's The Europeans from The Ivory Tower, the transformation of America was accomplished, and the society James knew and wrote about in 1878 was indeed gone forever. What had taken its place he was not really to discover until his return in 1904. It is true that he had dealt in his work with the American millionaire and the ‘rape of Europe’, but the naivete of his conception of what such a figure as Christopher Newman would be like is easily demonstrated by the lives of such men as Frick, Vanderbilt and Jay Gould. These men and their contemporaries: Hill, Harriman, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Duke, Cornell and Morgan - a comparative handful of multimillionaires - had brought into being an industrial power as remote and different in its own way from mid-century New England, as they both were from the Europe James had come to know so well.

This list is compiled from materiel discovered subsequent to the publication of the Guide, and more particularly in response to letters and circulars sent to all British archives during June and July, 1962. Some reports in process of clarification have been held over for a future issue. Space does not allow the detail given in the Guide. Few of these reports have been verified by direct inspection, nor have proper names been checked. This is, as it were, a “first draft” of some speculative Second Edition of the Guide. Additions, corrections and further addenda will be very welcome and should be sent to me at L. S. E. I thank Mrs. Noomi Connelly for helping me in the compilation.