SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Notice in this column does not necessarily preclude subseptent review.] Likrty. By Sir James Crichton-Browne, M.D., Major-Genera Long, Will Thorne, M.P., the Dean of Durham, G. K. Chesterton and Professor Armstrong, F.R.S. (Eveleigh' Nash. 6d. net.)— Either as an attack on War Prohibition or as a defence of " Beer, glorious Beer," Liberty is equally ineffective. From first to last it is an attempt to avoid meeting the real issue. Before glancing at these " essays in sanity " more particularly, a word must be said as to the introduction. Here the author trips up in his first paragraph. The implied accusation against the Spectator, amongst others, of having advocated a policy of unpreparedness in the years before the war is really preposterous. It is groundless and absurd. If the raising of the Spectator Experimental Company, the founding of the National Reserve, an unceasing demand for Naval Prepara- tion, a plea for maintaining a reserve of a million rifles in this country in view of a possible improvisation of troops, and a whole-hearted support of the National Service movement are not to be reckoned as preparation for war, it would be interesting to know what measures Mr. Williams, who edits the pamphlet, would include under this head. If Mr. Williams tells us he was not thinking of the Spectator, why did he use words which cer- tainly are wide enough to include us, and why also did he permit one of his writers to single out the Spectator and attack it by name—a specialized attack which has few or no parallels in the brochure, and is therefore the more marked and significant ? It is of no use for Sir James Crichton-Browne to say that " Compulsion is a poor substitute for Free Will." We agree ; but we are at war, and if we have been obliged, after a most splendid voluntary response, to compel the remainder of our eligible citizens to fight, why should we not—even though the majority of the population are beyond the temptation to drink, or proof against it—compel the minority to refrain from wasting our food supplies by turning them into intoxicants ? It is of no use, again, for Mr. Will Thorne to describe so graphically and in a tone of recommendation the vast potations of beer necessary to maintain a briekmaking friend in good working condition, which he shows on his own reckoning to be at least six quarts—i.e., twenty-four glasses—of strong beer a day, while the nation at large is being urged to adopt a voluntary ration in which the allowance of grain and sugar per head per day is about one quarter of that contained in the six quarts which he prescribes. This is an inconsistency which must be apparent to the shallowest intelligence. Either beer is food—as Sir James Crichton-Browne alleges—in which case it should be rationed ; or it is not food, or only to a negligible extent, in which case the brickmaker would be well advised to take his nutriment in an unfermented form and forgo the injurious effects of alcoholic drinks, while at the same time " playing the game" in the matter of rationing. (Here we may note in passing that none of these protagonists of Liberty have the hardihood entirely to disavow the injurious action of alcohol on heart and brain.) In quoting Dr. Magee's famous declara- tion that if he had to chose whether England should be free or com- pulsorily sober, he would choose freedom, the Dean of Durham omits to clear up the point, which is more pertinent at the moment than the Archbishop's contention, whether if the question were between security from starvation and drunkenness, he would still choose drunkenness. We do not believe that he would, even for the sake of an exercise of free will ; but here again the real issue is weakly eluded.
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