Shorter Notices
THE well-known warmth of American public opinion toward China, which always persists, even when faced with temporary bewilder- ment or disappointment, derives from many factors, but perhaps not least from the personal links established in one way or another between individual Americans and modern Chinese leaders. This book tells the strange story of one of these links. Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, during the last months of his life, while in the midst of giving the famous lectures on San Min Chu I (The Three People's 1fhanciples), which later became the Kuomintang Bible, read a book which greatly impressed him. The book, by an obscure American author, Maurice William, was called The 'Social Interpretation of History and was a thorough-going refutation of Marxian theory—economic interpretation of history, surplus value doctrine, class war and all the rest of it. As an alternative, Maurice William developed his own theory of " social evolution," based on the importance of the individual as consumer and .on the conception- of social progress attained by the harmonising of economic interests. Sun Yat-sen found thg book by " this American scholar," in both its negative and positive aspects, so much in accordance with his own views and the social philosophy he was then attempting to work out that he undoubtedly adopted many of the ideas and arguments it contained. It was not until several years later that Maurice William learned of the honour the great Chinese leader had done him. We have here his own story—born in Russia, climbing upward in America in the hard immigrant way, earning his living as a dentist, passing through a long devotion to Marxism to disillusionment and thence to another philosophy, struggling slowly and painfully to express in writing the results of his study and his final conclusions. This seems to be a case of unswerving honesty of thought and pur- pose receiving at last an appropriate reward, and the account of how it happened, told in a readable and interesting manner, makes an unusual book.
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