Education: War Study

Over 200 patient researchers, poring for years through masses of records and data which, if filed, would require 200 miles of shelving, will soon have produced 200 stalwart volumes entitled The Economic and Social History of the World War, a survey than which nothing more monumental was ever undertaken in the history of History.

The giant compilation is the project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Archives in the Central Empires were found scrupulously complete and orderly. Britain’s War archives would have required 35 miles of shelving, every inch of the miles being packed with significant documents, two or three hundred to the inch. U. S. investigators claimed for their country “the almost unique distinction among civilized nations of possessing no national archive building.”

General editor of the series is James T. Shotwell of Columbia, whose most notable service in an active career as author and editor was a year’s work in London (1904-05) on the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Professor Shotwell’s assistants were recruited rather from among economists and men of affairs than from historians. In England, the board includes Sir William H. Beveridge, John Maynard Keynes, Professor W. R. Scott. In France, Professor Charles Gide, M. Arthur Fontaine, Professors Henri Hauser and Charles Rist. The Austro-Hungarian Chairman is Dr. Friedrich von Weiser. Of the collaborators, 25 have held cabinet offices.

Each national board of editors has sought to avoid political history, save as it illuminates the common theme, the country’s socio-economic history. Each board includes an estimate of “War Costs,” statistical and imponderable, leaving the final balancing to later years.