PAMPHLETS ON WORLD AFFAIRS
The Prospects of Civilisation. By Alfred Zimmern.
The British Empire. By H. V. Hodson. " Mein Kampf." By R. C. K. Ensor.
Economic Self-Sufficiency. By A. G. B. Fisher.
(Oxford University Press. 3d. each.)
THESE are the first of a series of pamphlets in course of publication by the Oxford University Press. Their object is to provide objective and dispassionate statements on problems of world politics by writers of acknowledged weight, as a counterblast to propagandist distortion and popular exaggeration.
Professor Zimmern opens the series with a warning against despair:
" The optimism of 1919 was premature and misplaced. Its greatest error was in its failure to recognise the dimensions of the problem that lay before the civilised peoples. It imagined that that problem could be solved within a few years or decades by the setting up of a new type of political machinery. But the pessimism of 1939 is even more misplaced, since it is discouraging the peoples from persevering in a task which it is unmanly to evade and for which, thanks to the teaching of experience, they are now far better equipped than they were a generation ago."
The underlying psychological reason for the failure of the 1919 system was, according to Professor Zimmern, the failure to recognise the innate conservatism of the human mind, whereas, he says:
" What we need to solve our problem is not the greatest possible change, but the least possible change, a change just sufficient to enable small-scale man to enjoy the material benefits of the large- scale world."
Rightly enough, Professor Zimmern stresses the fact that one of the main problems is to transfer to political and international life the codes of conduct which in private life most people take for granted. This, it is true, is a problem which can and should be presented in a way which is gratify- ing to our instinctive conservatism, but in itself it is such a tremendous task that it must inevitably take many generations to fulfil. And meanwhile there is " the political problem of Europe today . . . the political immaturity of the German people."
This brings us to Mr. Ensor's appreciation of Mein Kampf.
The process of education whose need Professor Zimmern postulates has to take place in the somewhat unpromising en- vironment created by a Germany nourished not only on vague dreams of world-dominion, but also on the more con- crete ambition of finding space for a German population, which the Fiihrer hopes will a hundred years hence amount to 250,000,000, to live as farmers.
Professor Fisher's pamphlet emphasises the strategical aspects of the policy of economic self-sufficiency, but points out that the policy itself is dependent for its success on other countries not pursuing it. Mr. Hodson gives a concise, but compre- hensive, picture of the British Empire, whose strength must be one of the best arguments for Professor Zimmern's counsel of avoiding despair. The brevity of these pamphlets is one of their greatest merits, for it enables the essentials of a problem to be discussed without the weight of detail whose signifi- cance only the best-trained minds can appreciate.
%W. T. WELLS.
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