A Citizen of the World
Fifty Years of International Socialism. By M. Beer. (Allen and Unwin. 6s.)
Tnis is an extraordinarily interesting little book. It is at Once a volume of memoirs, making very attractive reading, for it reveals a remarkable and charming personality, unassum- ing, scholarly, yet insatiably curious, a student of history and social thought who has kept always in fresh contact with men and affairs, and it is also a fair slice of the history of our time, particularly of left-wing movements, extending over a very wide field of experience for one man—even for a person Of such energy of sympathy, such industry and humanity as Mr. Beer. Very few people, even the most incorrigible of emigres, can have had the opportunities of seeing the life Of Europe so extensively as this book reveals. Mr. Beer in the course of his seventy years has made himself a real citizen of the world : would there were more of them !
An Austrian Jew by birth, starting life in a Galician town • on the Vistula, Mr. Beer has lived successively and obserV- antly in Germany, England, France; the United States, Russia and now in England again. There is no mistaking his preference—more than that—his profound admiration for this country: It is an admiration based upon a long acquaint- ance with our public life (he has lived longer here than anywhere else, was from 1901 to 1911 the London corre- . spondent of Vora:arts), upon a thorough 'study of our history and institutions (he is the author of the standard History of British Socialism), and upon a sensitive appreciation of the political sense, the spirit of freedom and of justice of the English people.
- To an English reader, perhaps, most interesting will be the early chapters which portray vividly the (to us) remote and fantastic life within this Jewish community on the dreary frontiers of Poland, Austria and Russia-country so like the
Middle West in its rawness and its racial variegatedness. Mr. Beer's father was a soldier of Francis Joseph, who served all over the ramshackle Austrian Empire and fought at Sofferino. The son was clearly precocious and clever—it is curious to think of Kingsley's Hypatio being read with avidity in those remote and dreary wastes ; and as he became a compositor and printer in Germany, journalism became the key that opened to him so many doors and such interesting experiences all over Europe. There are reminiscences of meetings and talks with Jaures, the EngliSh friends and disciples, of Karl Marx, Professor Beesly and Hyndman; a long and authentic dis- cussion with Lenin of the greatest interest—Mr. Beer notes how the ordinary commonplace-looking man of 1902 had developed into the unmistakable leader who spoke with authority in 1911—a long interview with Zola, talks with Engels and with Marx's children, memories of the London School of Economics in its very beginnings, for Mr. Beer was one of its first students when they were eight meeting in two rooms in the Adelphi, of Berlin during the War and of Moscow after it.
In short, it is a fascinating little book. Will Mr. Beer, having written the standard work on British Socialism, in- tended first for German readers, now add to his kindness a short_ history of German Socialism for. his English readers ? It very badly needs doing ; and there is no one better qualified
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