Ten Angels Swearing, or Tomorrow's Politics. By Francis Williams. (Routledge.
55.) THIS tract takes its title from a remark attributed to Lincoln and it is an excellent and most timely text, no matter who first said it. "If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything, and if the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right will make no difference." Still less weight will be given to self-appointed angels giving testimonials to themselves. Much of what Mr. Williams has to say has been said before—by Mr. Williams as well as by others. But the deplorable fact that our political personnel is so lacking in any popular appeal, that nearly all are cyphers as far as the man in the street is concerned, makes his lively account of how one becomes a Conservative or Labour M.P. painfully timely. So, too, was his ingenious use of the psycho- logical term " perseverance " for that odd frame of mind in which the pays legal appears to have little or no knowledge of the pays reel. The merits of the educational system that fosters character on a basis of economic selection will be more critically scanned after Singapore and the Narrow Seas. Mr. Williams, though a stout defender of the usefulness of the poli- tical party, is not narrowly sectarian in his judgements. He has a good word for the practical political sagacity of many trade union M.P.s and does not think much in this harsh world of Mr. Herbert Read's anarchism. Altogether this is a lively and useful piece of contemporary polemic. One fault alone seems serious. If Mr. Williams has distinguished in his own mind between State and nation, he has not managed to make his accep- tance of that distinction clear on p. 143.
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