March of Time

THE HUNDRED YEARS--Philip Guedalla --Doubleday, Dor an ($3).

Newspapers measure history in daily doses. Weeklies can take it in more concentrated form. Historians often swallow a century at a gulp. In The Hundred Years, Philip Guedalla, historian with a fine journalistic palate, combines these time-tasting methods. In 400 pages he has arranged the savoriest moments of the last 100 years in a bill-of-fare to suit the taste of journalistic historians, history-minded journalists and plain readers. Of the 14 years he dishes up, only six are pre-1900. Some of them:

1837. Sixteen million U. S. citizens were groaning: would the Depression never end? In Kensington, England, two old gentlemen called on a young girl at six in the morning, to notify her that she was Queen of England.

1848. In Mexico City, just after the signing of the treaty of peace had given California to the U. S., came news of a great gold strike there. In Paris the last of the Bourbons signed his abdication, and the gale of revolution that swept Europe ended the age of Metternich. The first carload of grain came by rail into Chicago.

1861. Tsar Alexander emancipated his serfs. In Charleston, S. C.. the guns opened on Fort Sumter. Queen Victoria buried her beloved Albert.

1881. While "the world almost stood still," Tsar Alexander and with him all hope of reform, was murdered in Russia. In Buffalo, N.Y. Mr. Rockefeller added another refinery to his booming little Standard Oil Co.

1905. Father Gapon's peaceful petitioners were shot down in hundreds outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, while Mukden was lost and the Russian Navy went to destruction in Tsushima. The Kaiser rattled his sabre at Tangier, made a crude attempt to trick Tsar Nicholas into an alliance. Mr. Balfour, innocuous leader of England's Conservatives, sank into innocuous desuetude.

1917. After two and a half years of blundering war, England tired of its tight-lipped professionals, put Lloyd George, an intelligent amateur, in charge. Tsar Nicholas renounced his throne while excited soldiers in St. Petersburg "swore eternal loyalty to something that they could not catch quite distinctly." Lenin arrived in Russia, half-expecting arrest, to find an uproarious reception. When his Bolsheviks had driven out Kerensky, "the poetry of revolution had been defeated by its prose."

1933. The burning of the Berlin Reichstag, said Hitler, "is the beginning." Twelve hours later he was the autocrat of Germany. In the U. S. 120,000,000 citizens were groaning: "Would the Depression never end?"

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