The Roving Editors. By W. J. Sowden. (Adelaide : W.
K. Thomas.)—The editor of the Adelaide Register was one of the Australian editors invited by the Government to visit the Western Front in 1918. He eves in this interesting little book his impressions of a six months' tour, during which he travelled 40,000 miles and saw something of Great Britain and America as well as of the fighting line. He was surprised at the enthusiasm with which British women had replaced the absent men, at the high prices of meals in London restaurants, at the innumerable munition works and the mighty Handley-Page aeroplane which took him for a flight over London. But he seems to have had a still greater surprise when he visited Ireland and found, instead of poverty and distress, a prosperous people living in comfort and taking no heed of the war. " It was a sad, sad sight," he says, to see " many thousands of strong young men " idling at home in Ireland, while all the young men of Great Britain and Australia were away fighting. Mr. Sowden confesses his inability to solve the riddle, " Why the amazing difference between the North and the South ? " Nor can he explain why many Americans and Australians "still give Home Rulers money to help a country which, on the average, is more fertile than their own, and the land laws of which are the most liberal on the face of the earth—so liberal that a prosperous Irish farmer recently sold his New Zealand properties because he could do better on the land of his own country." Mr. Sowden may well be puzzled.
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