BOOKS.
ESSAYS IN LIBERALISM.* 'Tins volume, consisting of lectures and papers delivered at the Liberal Summer School in 1922, though it necessarily partakes of the nature of Party propaganda, has several contributions of considerable interest.
An excellent paper is that by Professor Pollard on "The Balance of Power." The Balance of Power was, indeed, the source of much evil in the world ; but we must not forget that if it was a somewhat rough-and-ready expedient, or shall we say a very dangerous patent remedy, it was at any rate better than the disease which it was designed to prevent, that is, the hegemony of some great military despot like Louis XIV., Frederick the Great, Napoleon, or the German Kaiser. Pope's famous epigram put the practical case against the balance of power in a nutshell :—
" See Europe balanced, neither side prevails ;
For nothing's left in either of the scales."
We must raise one objection to Professor Pollard's thought- ful paper. Surely he exaggerates very greatly when he says that we Pehnanized the Balance of Power and continued to use the phrase without the least troubling to ask what it meant. Mr. Pollard tells us that he talked about the Balance of Power with officials of the Foreign Office, and so we must presume that the idea was in existence, but by humbler indi- viduals or by newspapers like the Spectator the policy was • Essays in Liberalism: being the Leclares and Papers delivered at the Liberal Emma tielext. at Oiford, 1922. London: COMB. 129. Od..net.] never invoked in recent years. The Spectator was always regarded, and rightly, as one of the strongest opponents of German aggression and of the German attempt to dominate the world, not by the legitimate growth of her commerce and enterprise, but by her armaments and a militarized nation. Yet we never appealed to the Balance of Power as a ground for opposing German ambitions. All we suggested was that Germany was preparing first to dominate the Continent and then to overwhelm us, and that we must be ready to meet the attack. If our preparations were adequate, the Germans would probably not run the risk of so dangerous a gamble. If they were not adequate we courted attack. They were not adequate and the War came.
That, however, is now ancient history. We feel certain, however, that unless some plan for insuring disarmament, or let us say, rather, the stabilization of armaments, can be brought about by agreement, we may yet find ourselves in the lamentable position of having to adopt, if not the Balance of Power, at any rate the Balance of Armaments, lest even a worse fate should befall us. As our readers know, we believe that the way out is a general pact to outlaw any State which, however good its cause, takes up arms without giving a year's notice of its intention to claim by arms what it asserts to be its just rights. If the nations were pledged completely to boycott any Power which fired a shot before the year's notice had expired the nations would not feel that they must be toujours en vedette. The year of notice would be sufficient for preparation or for securing common action against the aggressor.
Another excellent article is Sir Josiah Stamp's "The Out- look for National Finance." lie treats the question of a Capital Levy fairly and well. If the Labour Party had followed his lines they would not have endangered their position with sane people as they have in fact endangered it. Sir Josiah's abstract plea that we borrowed at a time of inflation and are going to pay off at a time of deflation is, no doubt, a sound point ; but, in our opinion, if properly considered, it is an objection to deflation rather than an argument for a Capital Levy. What we have always felt is that we want stabilization now rather than deflation.
The real difficulty about all these currency troubles is the variation of the standard of value. So long as the standard wobbles trade is terribly interfered with. Though trade can deal as well with a depreciated as with an appreciated pound sterling it must have steadiness. What it is absolutely necessary to feel if trade is to prosper is that the length of your measure will always be the same. If it will not first stretch out, and then shrink, like Alice in Wonderland, the merchant finds himself in a terrible dilemma. We lowered all values by inflation. In fact, inflation proved to be the most perfect and most fair, because the most automatic, of all Capital Levies. That levy was paid, no doubt, at a very high rate by the people who owned Consols and all other stocks bearing a fixed rate of interest. But the bitterness of that levy is now past. Therefore, in our opinion, the thing to do, if possible, is to stabilize the present value of money and not to alter it by deflation. We make no profession to be experts, but surely men of Sir Josiah Stamp's economic imagination, for that is the thing wanted, will be able to think out a practical plan for stabilization. When that is done we can proceed with comparative ease to a scheme for dealing with the National Debt which, while perfectly just to the owners of our Loans, will prevent the anomaly of what may be roughly called buying in soft currency and paying back in hard.
We have left ourselves little space to deal with the other articles, but may notice as of special interest Professor Ramsay Muir's most interesting article on " The Machinery of Govern- ment." Altogether, the book is a very, interesting anti useful one, in spite of the rather pathetic straddle some- times attempted between Communistic sentimentalism and old-fashioned Liberal common sense. Again and again one feels how much better it would be if we used the phrase Free Exchange instead of Free Trade. Then we should not see men making Free Exchange, when it is an affair of exports and imports, into a kind of sacred doctrine, and then treating the same doctrine as something wicked, reactionary, and diabolic if applied to other subjects of demand.
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