The British

EMPIRE ON THE SEVEN SEAS--James Truslow Adams--Scribner ($3.50).

THE SUN NEVER SETS--Malcolm Muggeridge--Random House ($3).

In the flash of heliograph signals in the North Sea haze and the speaking of great naval guns, the world has lately read a certain statement about the British Empire. That statement is scarcely final in the fog of war, but it gives point to such books as Adams' and Muggeridge's.

Good, grey Historian Adams (The Epic of America) writes with unvarying civility and a firm point of view. It would be hard to find a single top-flight English historian so outspoken in his admiration of British achievement as this U. S. scholar. U. S. readers may feel that Adams' Anglophilia becomes at times a little humid, at times pompous; but by & large it is powerfully sustained.

His story opens in 1783 after the defeat of England by a coalition of Continental powers and her loss of the American colonies. Within ten years she was faced by war with France, and for 20 years stood, often alone, against a power that became mighty under Napoleon. The parallels between that time and the present are not neglected by Mr. Adams. Napoleon was blocked at the English Channel as Hitler is blocked at the Maginot line, and Napoleon forced Spain into the war to get a base for invading England. The French and Spanish fleets then feinted an attack on the West Indies to draw Nelson's fleet from the Channel. That this elaborate trick did not succeed was Nelson's glory: he guessed it, doubled back, saved Britain at Trafalgar.

The Adams narrative gives special emphasis to the two great political concerns of Britain in the 19th Century: colonies and reform. In the development of Australia, of Canada, of New Zealand, of India, Adams sees and insists on the greatness of early Victorian statesmanship, which worked out the democratic Commonwealth of Nations.

A historian of society as well as government, Adams does not minimize Britain's misery at home in the Tory reaction which for 40 years after the French revolution delayed reform. But when reform came it was not through violent revolution, as elsewhere in Europe, but through the Parliamentary process and the talents of English statesmen. Adams' story includes many instances of the way in which those talents opened up modern civilization; e.g., Sir Robert Peel's inauguration of the police force, Sir Rowland Hill's invention of postage stamps.

James Truslow Adams' handling of modern Britain is considerably less critical, less comfortable than his treatment of the 19th Century. Toward the end many readers may suspect that his attitude toward interwar British foreign policy is that the less said the better; he performs a complete weasel on the relations between Britain and Continental powers in the 1930s.

What Historian Adams fails to supply with respect to the last decade, onetime Manchester Guardian Correspondent Muggeridge heaps up with a highly artistic trowel. As a documentation of that decade, The Sun Never Sets is almost feverishly brilliant, almost invariably malicious, a story more rewarding, more exhausting and giving an impression of being less dependable than Frederick Lewis Allen's similar job for the U. S., Since Yesterday (TIME, Feb. 12).

Ramsay MacDonald has been flayed before, but never so mercilessly as Mr. Muggeridge flays him as "Mr. High-Mind"; Buchmanism has been ridiculed before, but seldom so savagely: "Like moral courage, moral victory, moral anything, Moral Rearmament represents an attempt to reconcile the contrary demands of flesh and spirit by including them in one comprehensive formula. Moral Cannibalism would probably make a strong appeal to cannibals, and Moral Rape to the inmates of lunatic asylums." So it goes, with reference to almost everything: fuddlement, vulgarity and ineptitude.

Yet as Mr. Muggeridge proceeds, his cold sickness about his own country gradually takes on power, the buzz of his crowding details mounts to a kind of hymn. Such fury may be a purging force. Certainly no piece of writing has yet made more vivid the last few ominous years for Britain: "Their world was passing away--London, that great city. None could revive it, none stay the process of disintegration. Feet treading, found no foothold; arms reaching, no guiding wall or comforting pillar found; mind thinking, nothing grasped. All was dissolving. Lost! lost! in the darkness of change. . . ."

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