SOME BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[Notice to this comas does not necessarily preclude subsequent review.) THE Snrrnmann MAGAZINES.—Dr. Addison has the place of honour in the Nineteenth Century for an article on " Housing," in which he gives his reasons for objecting to the curtailment of his programme. " It is fatal to success that our endeavour should be subject to precipitate interruptions or be at the mercy of clamour or of considerations of transient political advantage." Dr. Addison does not believe that private enter- prise will be able to overtake the arrears of house-building or to make slum properties habitable. There is much good sense in what he says about the importanoe of the housing question, but it is characteristic of him to ignore the financial problems involved. There are many things that we should like to do but that we cannot afford to do. Dr. Addison assumes, however, that the Ministry of Health was entrusted with Fortunatus' purse, and that the Cabinet did wrong to take that purse from him. Sir Henry Craik, in " The Nation and Finance," reminds us of the painful facts of swollen and reckless expenditure which Dr. Addison refuses to face. In an article on " The Problem of the Navies : What will Command the Sea ? " Vice-Admiral Mark Kerr contends that " battle fleets are only of use in certain geographical divisions where the bases are not far apart," but are useless " for wars in which the combatant countries are separated by thousands of miles of ocean." The application of this doctrine to the Pacific is obvious, but the question is perhaps more complex than the Admiral supposes. He holds that the British Navy must be maintained for the defence of our sea communications, but that it does not need more battle- ships for that purpose. Mrs. Harold Williams gives a notable account of " The Bolshevik Food System," which has inevitably produced famine. She points out that even now there is a surplus of corn in various Russian provinces, but that it cannot be distributed because " the Bolsheviks will not allow the foodstuffs to slip from their hands." " Bread to them is the symbol of power." Lord Larobourne contributes a powerful and weighty indictment of the "Terrible Traffic in Horses " from this country to Belgium which the Spectator has so often denounced without, unhappily, persuading the Ministry of Agriculture to take really effective measures to stop this cruel and disgraceful trade. Sir Charles Macara, writing on " The Industrial Crisis and the Remedy," pleads for a revival of the Industrial Council of 1911 and for the cessation of Government interference with industry. Captain A. S. Herbert, under the title of " The Socialization of Industry," uses hypothetical figures to persuade himself that the high profits made in very good years might be applied to maintain wages at a high level in lean years ; it is an ingenious article, but the promises are unsound. Mr. G. Holt Thomas records the results of " Two Years of Commercial Flying," contrasting the decline of the now industry in England with the success of the heavily subsidized French services. Mrs. Watts-Dunton, concluding her attractive "Recollections of Swinburne," recalls the poet's passionate admiration for Dickens. Mr. Humphry Ward gives a scholarly and interesting account of " An Art Dealer under Louis XV."—Lazare Duvaux, who supplied the King and the Court, and especially Madame do Pompadour, with the exquisite furniture, porcelain and other decorative work that the favourite loved. Duvaux did not disdain to supply her with " a box of Portugal water " or " six polished steel buckles for her corset," and one of his bills records a loan of three livres which the great lady wished to give to a beggar-woman outside the shop.— To the Fortnightly Sir Oliver Lodge contributes an instructive account of " Einstein's Real Achievement." The basis of the new theory is " a fuller realization of the wide-spreading influence of a medium with finite properties, essentially pervading all space in which phenomena occur, and away from whose perfect but dominating uniformity we cannot escape "—the medium being " physical space-time." Sir Oliver Lodge, as a physicist, declines to admit that the mathematicians have attained tho complete solution of the problem. Dr. Hogarth has a notable paper on " Lord Cromer To-day," in which he tries to deduce. from the late Lord Cromer's record, the kind of advice that he would give in regard to Egypt now. Dr. Ifogarth thinks that Lord Cromer would recommend the abandonment of the Protectorate and the " recognition of the sovereign autonomy of Egypt " ; but that he would desire the " continuance of the British occupa- tion in force sufficient to ensure the permanent maintenance of the new order," " British control of the external policy and foreign relations of Egypt and British guardianship of the neutrality of the Suez Canal." Mr. Claud Mullins writes tem- perately on " The War Criminals' Trials " at Leipzig, which he attended in an official capacity with the British legal representa- tives. He declares that the presiding judge, Dr. Schmidt, took pains to arrive at the truth, and he lays stress on the fact that in five out of the six cases put forward by Great Britain the
German accused were convicted and sentenced. The sentences were trivial, but the cases established the principle " that might is not right and that men whose sole conception of duty to their country is to inflict torture upon others will be in danger of being put on their trial "—even in Germany. Mr. J. A. R. Marriott has a lucid article on " The Economics of Communism : Theory and Practice " ; he points out very justly that, while most Socialists repudiate the practice of Bolshevism, their economic creed rests on the same foundation as Lenin's and is just as unsound as his. Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton gives a lengthy and interesting account of " The Work of the Society for Psy- chical Research," and summarizes the " established facts" which the Society has, she thinks, made clear. Thus, " appari- tions involving some veridical element have been seen, both of the living and the dead." Professor L. P. Shanks discusses the career and the work of Baudelaire, who was born in 1821, and Mr. Herbert Vivian writes pleasantly of " The New Venice," where, he says, a great modern port and a new industrial quarter are now under construction, in readiness for the commercial developments of the near future.—In the Contemporary Lord Meston, in an article on " Changing Pastures in India," discusses the situation cautiously and somewhat hopefully. Mr. Gandhi's extremists, he says, represent Hindu orthodoxy, intolerant of any Western ideas ; but ho seems to think that the new Moderate party may yet prevail, if we give them encouragement and help. Bishop Welldon writes on " The Future of the Classics," emphasizing the supreme value of the humanities and the wisdom of encouraging classical studies "among all boys and girls who are intellectually capable of deriving true profit from them." Mr. M. T. Z. Tyau, a Chinese writer, describes " The Moving of the Waters in China "- that is, the gradual spread of Western ideas and the growth of modern industries. A new phonetic alphabet has come into use, and many newspapers use the spoken language in place of classical Chinese. Mr. Tyau is an optimist and an ardent Republican, and he believes that China will regain her stability. Captain H. B. Usher states " Mesopotamia's Claim on Great Britain." " We cannot just dump the Emir Feisul at Baghdad and then bow ourselves out." An understanding with Mustapha Kemal is, he thinks, necessary if we are to have peace on the Tigris. Miss Dorothy Thompson gives a lively sketch of affairs in " Amazing Hungary " ; she says that the reaction against the Jewish Bolshevik terror at Budapest has led to a vigorous anti-Semitic movement. Miss Vernon Lee has an attractive essay on " Dionysus in the Euganean Hills," suggested by one of Pater's Imaginary Portraits.— The National Review has a plain-spoken article on " Lord Chelmsford's Viceroyalty," by an anonymous critic who does not admire the ex-Viceroy. Major Lefebure pleads for " Chem- ical Disarmament " in Germany, on the ground that her enormous dye factories were used for the production of poison gas and may be so used again, though the Peace Treaty forbids it. Mr. H. E. M. Stutfield, under the heading of " Are You a Jesuit ? " puts the case against the order strongly and clearly. Professor Wilden Hart describes " A Holiday in Poland." He says, incidentally, that he and his wife stayed at the best hotel in Warsaw for a week, and that their bill came to only twenty- six shillings, thanks to the absurdly low exchange. He urges British manufacturers to study the Polish market. Mr. J. H. Schooling's review of " Ten Years of National Finance " deserves careful study. Mr. W. Roberts's article on " Lists of Sub- scribers " is an interesting account of the eighteenth- century prac- tice of publishing mainly by subscription—a practice which Pope did much to establish by his wonderfully successful version of the Iliad, the subscription list of which extends to many pages.— Mac/wood' s has a further instalment of its spirited " Tales of the R.I.C.," which show in detail the nature of the methods practised by Mr. Do Valera's " army " at the expense of unpro- tected women and unarmed men in the South and West of Ireland. Mr. C. E. Montague contributes, under the title of " A Trade Report Only," a spirited sketch of experiences in an " unhealthy " spot on the Western Front. Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. Vickery gives an account of the suppression of a false prophet in the Sudan—one of those capital papers " From the Outposts " for which Blackwood's has a well - deserved repu- tation. Mr. Hope Dawlish's paper on " Two Hotels "—one in the Legation Quarter of Peking, the other at Cologne under the British occupation—is picturesque and instructive.—The London Mercury is unusually interesting this month. It includes the first part of a mediaeval tale, " Peronnik the Fool," which Mr. George Moore mentions as the work of Heloise in his Heloise and Abilard ; " A True Story " of a wreck, written by a plain sailor-man with no thought of publication ; a critical essay on Mr. Belloc by Mr. Edward Shanks ; and a whimsical memoir of James Lackington, an eighteenth-century bookseller, by Mr. Maurice Hewlett. To humble the pride of dramatists and actors, the magazine reprints the recent judgment of the Chief Registrar of Friendly Societies, who had to determine whether the Academy of Dramatic Art could be legally regarded as a society " instituted for purposes of the fine arts," and who ruled that it could not, inasmuch as dramatic art was not one of the fine arts. Thus is a much-debated aesthetic problem settled, in the eyes of the law, by an official who has a lively sense of humour and does not disdain to quote Gautier or to hope, with Lord Campbell, " that the society may long flourish, paying its poor rates." The poetry, too, is good. There is a spirited poem by Mr. Vachel Lindsay, entitled " I know all this, when gipsy fiddles cry," and there are some stately verses on `` Memory " by Mr. Shanks.
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