The English Martyrs are, for the majority of English people, the men and women burnt under Mary; in especial the Protestant bishops, Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper. So the history books have it. Our Protestant historians know nothing of Catholic martyrs—in England. The Protestant martyrs are the English martyrs. Foxe with his Book of Martyrs settled the matter a long time ago. Why re-open it? Foxe decided for the Church of England, and therefore for the English people, who were to be accounted martyrs; his decisions were not to be gainsaid. After all to accept the authority of Foxe is a much simpler process than to seek the decision of Rome. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was the Anglican martyrology; it was set up in parish churches, side by side with the Bible, for all to read. Its literal accuracy and complete truthfulness were no more questioned than the accuracy and truthfulness of the Bible itself.

The influence of Foxe, then, largely accounts for the refusal of Anglicans, and English people generally, to receive as martyrs the Catholics who died for their faith in England between 1535 and 1680.

Very broad-church historians, it is true, in their desire to be fair all round, freely award the martyr’s crown where death for conscience’ sake can be detected; and so will not deny a small percentage of martyrs to Catholics.

J. R. Green, for instance, in his Short History of the English People really does apply the word martyr (once) to the priests who suffered under Elizabeth :—’ The torture and death of the Jesuit martyrs sent a thrill of horror through the whole Catholic Church and roused at last into action the sluggish hostility of Spain.’

Hester (Tottie) and Clara Pater gave me their brother’s Rituate. The white and violet volume is now in the library of Blackfriars, Oxford. He would have been pleased, no doubt, had he been told that his house in St. Giles (’ with a plastered front of some antiquity, with a pleasant row of trees in front of it; at the left .... a little passage leading to the back of the house, the inner arch .... surmounted with a quaint carved face’ ) was fated to be occupied by Dominicans and that learning and sanctity would dwell where his learning and his aspirations had stretched imploringly towards holiness.

His aspirations: hear him (how unlike the Mr. Rose of Mallock’s New Republic) as he meditates on the Discobolus at rest: ‘With the heavy discus still in his left hand, he is preparing for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely, upon the business in hand. The very finger is reckoning while he watches, intent upon the cast of another, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself, but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no impediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved just that, was the Greek’s truest claim for furtherance in the main line of human development.

The problem of this book is important, and the solution given one we are unable to accept. James II, we are told, pursued two aims, the restoration of popular monarchy and toleration. He was defeated by the newly rich. He died virtually a martyr for the faith. With almost the insistence of a litany Mr. Belloc warns us that the ‘academic historians’ have very much erred in their ways. They are not denounced by name—a curious mercy in view of the fact that on this reign both Catholic and Protestant writers are in substantial agreement. Even the psalmist felt it excessive when he said all men are liars.

We learn that in spite of foreign parentage James was intensely national. It is indeed touching to know how much British bravery appealed to him. The sentiment, however, cannot have been overwhelming. It was not sufficiently strong to stay his feverish de money from Louis XIV at the beginning of his reign, on his humble excuses to that monarch for summoning a Parliament, or his resolve to regain his throne with the aid of Frenchmen. It did not preserve him from a ruthless disregard of the law of the land. In the Hales case, for example, he removed four indocile judges and the Solicitor-General. To secure the repeal of the Test Act he obtained the resignation or dismissal of half the Lords Lieutenant and eight hundred magistrates and filled their places with his own nominees.

‘If all the nonsense which, in the past quarter of a century, has been talked on all other subjects were thrown into one scale, and all that has been talked on the subject of education alone were thrown into the other, I think the latter would preponderate.’

This sweeping statement—which I borrow as a useful diving-board, a plank from which I may comfortably plunge in medias res, is not my own. Neither would I have it thought that I identify myself with the opinion so tartly expressed, nor held to be casting any undeserved reflection on the writers who, during the course of the present century, have dealt so laboriously and so voluminously with educational principles and theories. Education is proverbially a dull subject. It is also a subject on which every man thinks he has something to say. Naturally, therefore, it becomes the focus of a considerable amount of dull nonsense—dull because only the man of practical experience can find, or make it, interesting—nonsense because it is pre-eminently a subject in which the apparently obvious is most often wrong.

My words are a quotation. The novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, in whom there has lately been a revival of interest, puts them into the mouth of that estimable and excellent clergyman, Dr. Opimian, the most charming character in that most charming novel Gryll Grange, which was the fruit of the Indian summer of its author’s genius. Peacock wrote this novel in 1860 after many years of silence.

A Recent paragraph in a Catholic paper stated that ‘the Francisco de Vitoria chair of international law was inaugurated on 10th November last at Salamanca University. The object of the chair is to make better known the teachings of the Dominican Friar Francisco de Vitoria on the rights of men.’

The fact that Spain numbered among her illustrious sons the man, who, rather than Grotius, may be regarded as the founder of international law in Europe was evidently forgotten by a section of the press in this country when it greeted with surprised protests her request to be granted a seat on the permanent Council of the League of Nations.

To scholars and jurists Francisco de Vitoria has long been known.

The first volume of the ‘Classics of International Law,’ published at Washington in 1917 is devoted to him. It contains the Latin text, with an English translation, of his great ‘Relectiones,’ ‘De Indis’ and ‘De jure belli,’ with an introductory sketch of his life by the Belgian Professor E. Nys. The General Editor of the Series, James Brown Scott, President of the American Institute of International Law, writes: ‘The General Editor is unwilling to allow this volume to go to press without a tribute in passing to the broad-minded and generous-hearted Dominican, justly regarded as one of the founders of International Law, and whose two tractates here reproduced are, as Thucydides would say, a perpetual possession to the international lawyer ....