A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT was Philip Guedalla, I think, who said that history never repeats itself, but historians always do. To say that history never repeats itself may be going a little far—it certainly does seem to plagiarise itself a little at times—but the habit of citing something that happened a century or so ago as a guide to what may be expected to happen in only super- ficially similar circumstances today is usually carried much too far. Mr. Dean Acheson, I see, has been at it this week. He has been comparing Britain's alleged complacency about the situation in the Middle East with British colonial policy which led to the War of Independence. All that can be said about that is that the two are about as similar as a pea and a penguin. But the War of Independence and the circumstances surrounding it have a strange fascination for analogists. Thirteen States in North America, the argument runs, formed the United States of America—just like that. Why can't the States of Europe do the same ? To begin with, because the States of North America were not States at all (till the war broke out); they were colonies. They had the same form of government, spoke the same language, used the same currency, inherited the same traditions, and numbered in all something less than three million people. That, as I say, to begin with. But it will do very well to end with too. Comparison with conditions in modern Europe is an exercise anyone is capable of developing for himself.
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