HATE-POLITICS ?
SIR,—I am puzzled by Mr. Scott-James's review of Shall Our Children Live or Die? so Puzzled that I wondered for a moment if he and I had been reading the same book. How can he, a just and careful reviewer, find in this book a "vengeful mood," or "violent digressions in the sphere of hate-politics "? Hate, between nations, persons or parties, is in fact the thing that Mr. Gollancz rules out altogether as bad, because it clouds judgement and obscures reason, "but above all, simply because it is bad." I took this to be the main moral of the book. I have heard plenty of comment on this book ; disapproval from some who find in it too little hate, praise from Christian pacifists, Roman Catholics and other church- men, from many ordinary non-political readers, and from non-socialist business men who say that in it they find the socialist case presented with moderation and without class hate. I hope you will let these views, and my own impression of the book, balance your reviewer's a little. It is, surely, throughout an impassioned plea for charity in human affairs.
[Our reviewer writes: Miss Macaulay overlooks my comment that Mr. Gollancz " implicitly " asks for the class-war everywhere. I said I did not expect him to admit this. Nor does Miss Macaulay, because she is apparently carried away by his plea for Christian love—a plea which, to my ears, rings disharmoniously with the incessant use of a jargon so familiar in literature of the class-war.]
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