BOOKS.

1.11E NEW BOUM I.* l'Ew men are better known in the changing Germany of to-day than Herr Walther Rathenau. He is a bold and original thinker, with an epigrammatic style. He is a strong force msking for a non-materialistic view of life. He is not only a captain of industry, but is Minister of Reconstruction. He is a castigator of his countrymen's failings, and he has bluntly told them that they can and ought to pay the reparations which are the penalty of their wickedness and stupidity. He is perhaps the most spiritual figure in Germany. With his far-reaching and extremely " viewy " ideals he is morally poles apart from such a captain of industry as Herr Stinnes.

He was brought up in the great era of German industrial expansion, as he is the son of Emil Rathenau, one of the leaders of that development. He made a name for himself by certain chemical discoveries which led to his establishing factories of his own, and eventually he attained the position which he still holds of controller of the famous Allgcmeine Electrizitats- gesellschaft. During the war he was remarkably successful in his organization of the supply of raw materials. Thus it will be seen that he is a practical man as well as a scholar and a moralist.

The book before us, considered as the product of a man who

The New

Oa w Society. By Walther Ilathenan. Loudon; Williams and Itorgate.

t.]

has proved his practical qualities, is certainly a strange thing.- Herr Rathenau is "a kind of a Socialist," and yet he pours scorn on most of the ways and thoughts of those who profess them. selves Socialists :—

" In order to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it may look like, what it ought to look like, and what it will look like. We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a deeply-endangered oulttue. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap Utopianism will grow dumb—those phrases which offer us entrance into the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture, and gaudy, standardized enjoyments—phrases which assure us that when we have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts, the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of refined handi- craft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter we shall see the rise of an era of humility and philanthropy. In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony fath that lies before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it ; for out of this, at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity."

Herr Rathenau aims at a condition of society in which no one will have any money that has not been earned. He notes that this criterion cannot be strictly observed, but he wants it to be observed as nearly as may be. His ideal is for ever being corrected while he thinks and writes by the conviction that human nature will bring to naught much that ought to be. "No rich people and no workless income," he says, "will have to be contracted, so long as men are what they are now, rather into the formula, 'There ought to be none.'" In business terms, what Herr Rathenau really wants is, as he urged in a previous work, Die Neue Wirtschaft, that industry and commerce should be unified and standardized in one great Trust working under a State charter and armed with wide powers. As a man of science he naturally also advocates an intensified application of science and mechanism to production. Meanwhile he is almost more tolerant of capitalism in its present form than he is of Socialists who mistake words for facts. A society which cannot outgrow capitalism as we know it deserves, it seems, the ridicule which Herr Rathenau bestows upon it f Capitalism, in Herr Rathenau's thought, is a necessary stage in the evolution towards Socialism.

He predicts that, as the evolution continues and something approximating to civilized society emerges, four classes will still survive : First, the feudal nobility whose "ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany " ; secondly, the aristocracy of officialism ; thirdly, the descendants of what was once the leading class in culture and economics ; and fourthly, the middle-class land-owners and the substantial peasants. The survival of these four classes seems to him to be fairly , well assured, but he speculates on the rise of yet other classes. He thinks, indeed, that there will be a continuous birth of new classes, one representing anarchism, another standing for a dictatorship, still another for absolute monarchy, and so on.

If Herr Rathenau's vision is justified, Germany—and any industrial country for the matter of that, since his principles are of general application—has a stony road to travel.. He does not for a moment imagine that the evolution towards a socialized society, which he encourages because he regards it as inevitable, is going to mean peace and contentment. Here is his forecast :—

" Tho future community is poor ; tho individual is poor. The average standard of well-being corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one would expect from an income of 3000 marks. But tho requirements of the population are not mediaevally simplified—they could not be, in view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial and professional vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they are more- over intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of Mario Antoinette. All things of common use are standardized into typical forms. It must not be supposed, however, that they are based on pure designs and mo&ls. The taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and since the former has no authority to back him he will have to compromise. The corn. promise, however, consists in cheap imitation of foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and no legislation can preirent its products from finding their way (in reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no one will want to do without certain things ; fashions still prevail, and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be constantly changed. How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of men and women and to purify their taste ? Probably very little, for good models will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar. horrors, are to satisfy the desires of the soul. Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but these things are disconnected specimens ; all they can do is occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure sorne object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books, musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside tho prescribed routes are rarities ; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's own are legendary things. Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigor- ation has dried up; • all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and befouls ; frivolities' substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly proletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the popular mind has, as it were by universal agreement, resolved to conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as great as it can possibly be. The loaders and office-holders of the proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture. Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to give thorn, and imagine that the loans they take up from the civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social gains of the future. The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by its building. In the now order, little is being built. Apart from certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for decades have to content ourselves with new sub- divisions and exploitation of the old buildings ; old palaces packed to the roof with families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement."

A gloomy picture indeed ! And the only reason we can give for the fact that Herr Rathenau accepts it with something like good spirits is, as we have said, because he regards it as inevitable

—inevitable, however, we ought to add, on the assumption that the German character remains as it is now. That assumption, he says, is a reasonable and fair one, but not certain. A thought- ful and competent judge to whom Herr Rathenau submitted his forecast remarked "This is Hell." Herr Bathos= offers as consolation the consideration that a future generation living under such conditions as he describes would have become more or less adapted to their circumstances.

A former Editor of the Spectator used to say that Socialism meant that every man would have one boot. That is to say, nobody would be destitute, but nobody would be satisfied. Herr Rathenau seems to be very much of that opinion. As a brain-worker himself, however, he does sae that creative brain- work can be carried out only in favourable circumstances— a reservation which Mr. H. G. Wells has also been careful to make. He therefore foresees a new grading of society :— " For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to speak. The average man who cannot understand equality of human dignity, equality before Goa, thinks nothing of demanding equality in externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to his strength, it creates over- burdened, misused natures, driving the one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind, in will and in heart—let him begin by altering Nature In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or remission of work. Work of the highest class, creative and intellectual work—the most self-sacrificing that is known to man because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life, including his hours of leisure and recreation—this work demands extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or Occu- pations, and contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If mechanical and intellectual_ w,ork are to be placed under the same specific conditions, 'Under which the highest standard of output is to be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different."

After all, it seems that at the end of the stony path. we shall have arrived, if not at the point from which we started, at a point remarkably like it. Gradations, dames, fine distinctions, snobbishness, contempt, dislike, and jealousy will flourish under new names. For our part, while appreciating Herr Rathenau's spiritual motives, we shall continue to hope that a fully "socialized" society is not inevitable.