The State and the Nation. By Edward Jenks. (Dent. 4a.
net.)—This is an expansion of the author's Short History of Politics, giving " a popular statement, in simple terms, of the main lines of social and political evolution." It is an interesting and impartial review of a very large subject, from primitive man to the League of Nations and Syndicalism. Mr. Jenks insists rightly on the importance of knowing how society came to be what it is before we attempt to reform or change it. He suggests as an historic law that "those political communities or nations have been most successful which have most com- pletely absorbed into their political institutions the social in- stitutions of their earlier history." Tennyson's idea of " freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent" is much the same. Evolution, in other words, is far better than revolu- tion. The idealist who tries to impose a new social system on his fellow-men without regard to their inherited prejudices is heading for disaster.
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