BY JOHN

SPARGO

During the strenuous weeks of the campaign, while rushing from meeting to meeting, I found it helpful to while away the tedious journeys involved reading two books of a wholly different nature. They were peace, O cynic!Mary Baker Eddy's "Science and Health; With Key to the Scriptures," and H. G. Wells' new romance, The War in the Air (The Macmillan Co.). Of the first of these books I shall only say that I found it very amusing. Setting the contradictory passages against each other was, in its way, as interesting as putting a picture puzzle together.

Wells' new novel is a delightful return to his old romantic mood. As its title implies, the story deals with the triumph of aerial navigation, and the use of airships in war. To those who are familiar with the earlier works of this latter day Jules Verne it will not be necessary to give any assurance of his unique fitness to make a romance out of such a theme. The hero of the story, if hero he may be called, is a greengrocer's son, Bert Smallways, a type of the degenerate, inefficient product of modern England, who, by a queer chance, finds himself up in the air in a runaway airship-the first truly practical airship-without the slightest knowledge of its mechanism. By a most plausible chain of eventsMr. Wells is always so plausible!—he is drawn into the world-wide war, which, beginning with Germany and the United States, soon involves all the civilized world and ends in the dominance of China. The description of this aerial

I have long intended to mention in these pages Simon O. Pollock's little volume, The Russian Bastile (Charles H. Kerr & Company) one of the issues of the popular Standard Socialist Series. As an introduction to the study of the Russian revolutionary movement, as described in such works as Walling's for example, Mr. Pollock's little book is to be warmly commended. It gives a very sympathetic and interesting sketch of some of the principal chapters in the history of the movement, and a good deal of useful biographical information concerning some of the most prominent revolutionists. The little sketch-for it is no more than a sketch—is illustrated by a number of interesting photographs which greatly add to its value. The author, Mr. Simon O. Pollock, is an authority upon the subject, and is at the present time acting as one of the counsel in the famous or infamous!-Poureen case.

work opens with an exhaustive account of the co-operative banks now so common throughout European countries. Mr. Fay seems to have been at no end of trouble to get complete information from reliable sources, and he adds a very exhaustive bibliography which will enable the student who so desires to check the account for himself. There are other chapters on co-operative workshops and co-operative stores and the various agricultural co-operative societies in Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy and France. This chapter on agricultural co-operation is perhaps the most suggestive and permanently useful for American readers. It will be a great surprise for most American readers of the book, I imagine, and especially for Socialists, to learn from Mr. Fay the extent of this agricultural co-operation. There are co-operative societies for purchasing the costly agricultural machinery and implements, co-operative dairy farms; co-operative factories for the production of bacon, cheese, wine and spirits, sugar and fruit preserves; Cooperative agencies for marketing products, for insuring stock, improving soils, and so on. Of each of these a most detailed account is given, and there is a valuable appendix in which a full account of the laws relating to co-operative societies in the principal countries is given. No reference is made to the co-operative societies in the United States.

In reviewing Arthur Morrow Lewis's Evolution, Social and Organic, in these pages some months ago, I had occasion to make some reference to his somewhat superficial knowledge of Herbert Spencer's work as indicated by the chapter of his very useful little volume devoted to that great thinker. I regret that I must make a somewhat similar objection to his treatment of Carlyle in his latest volume, Ten Blind Leaders of the Blind (Charles H. Kerr &

Co.). In a chapter which contains much useful and illuminating criticism of Carlyle's "Great Man" theory of history, Lewis observes: "Because Carlyle occasionally expressed radical sentiments (usually in private) his uncritical admirers have failed to note how reactionary he is (sic!) at bottom, though his defense of the brutal treatment of prisoners should have warned them." My friend Lewis had better not throw stones at the "uncritical" until he himself is removed from the house of the uncritical with its tremendous glass areas! It will not do to copy too closely, and without much careful thought, the brilliant, but often biased, pronunciamentos of John M. Robertson ("Modern Humanists," Chapter 1). I, too, enjoy Robertson's fine critical severity, and was pleased to see his familiar hand in Lewis' pages, between the lines. But one must take Robertson "with a grain of salt," just as one must take Carlyle himself!

Echoing Robertson, Lewis falls in the lamentable error of insinuating that Carlyle had not the courage of his convictions, that he expressed radical sentiments "usually in private." This is moonshine, of course. Carlyle had many weaknesses, but lack of the courage of his convictions was not one of them. Nor is it evidence of other than an uncritical mind to say that Carlyle was at heart a reactionary. I have long since realized how much our youthful enthusiasm and worship exaggerated Carlyle's "radicalism," but if it was uncritical for us then to mistake the isolated trumpet blasts of the great Sage of Chelsea for a system of radical thought, it is equally uncritical to mistake his occasional dyspeptic lapses into pessimism and conservatism for fundamental reactionism. The truth is that Carlyle represents in his person and thought the chaos, the change of the age of transition in which he lived, inclining now to the flow, and now to the ebb, of the great tide of thought.

Superficially, indeed, by the method which my friend Lewis adopts, Carlyle can be either proved to be a radical or a reactionary, according to the bias of the critic. All that is needed is the patience to collect suitable passages to prove one's case as men search for Bible texts for a similar purpose. And that is an easy task, out of Carlyle's forty volumes! But the critic who goes deeper than the word to the spirit, who comprehends the drift of his thought as a whole, and disregards the occassional contradictory utterances often mere spasms of torture -will not fail to see that Carlyle was, even when he himself neither knew nor suspected it, one of the great radical forces of his time. Surely, as a Socialist, Lewis ought to recognize that Carlyle's prophetic perception that the new era was bound to be industrial in its character, that its problems must be industrial problems, and its politics industrial politics, was of far more fundamental importance than his attempt to formulate an industrial policy, resting upon the genius of some industrial Cromwell. When an Individualist of the most extreme type, such as Mr. Robertson is, fails to perceive this great fundamental merit in Carlyle, we can readily understand him, but how understand the failure of one who has learned his lesson at the feet of Marx? Was it nothing that Carlyle, in his day, penetrated the shams of Manchesterism, and exposed the folly of its gospel of cheapness? Did not even Marx himself draw from that same great mine of criticism for his indictment of Manchesterism?

Lewis's little volume is, despite this protest of mine against his too ready acceptance of a warped and biased judgment of Carlyle, a very worthy addition to our literature. Many comrades, and others interested in Socialism, will find its perusal an advantage. At some later time, I hope to return to this interesting volume, to a consideration of Lewis'

treatment of some of the other leaders of the blind with whom he deals.

Mr. John Graham Brooks, whose earler volume, The Social Unrest, exasperated many of us by its tantalizing manner of stating half-truths, and by its sweeping generalizations which could neither be proved nor disproved, since they were derived from facts and personal experiences which were not open to the investigation of the reader, is out with a new volume, As Others See Us (The Macmillan Co.), which does not appear to have yet received the amount of attention to which it is justly due. For it is a good book and a very suggestive one, albeit it deals with a subject of less vital and urgent importance than the earlier volume. Mr. Brooks has a lively, scintillant, literary style, and he gives us a most vivacious resumé of the most important criticisms of American institutions and the American character which have been made by such distinguished foreign critics as Brissot de Warville, the Duc La Rochefoucauld -Liancourt, Chateaubriand, Lafayette, Talley rand, De Tocqueville, Cabet and Chevalier, from France; Robert Owen, Harriet Martineau, Dickens, Thackeray, Cobden, Cobbett, Matthew Arnold, and others, from England.

As the reader scans this list of names, selected somewhat arbitrarily from Mr. Brooks' much longer and more cosmopolitan list, memories of much sensitive anger upon the part of Americans who resented the manner in which some of these distinguished foreign visitors held up American institutions and customs to the ridicule of their countrymen will rise in his mind. Well, Mr. Brooks takes these criticisms and considers them in what Matthew Arnold (himself one of the offenders) used to call "the dry light of history." He finds an element of truth in them, much larger than was admitted by Americans of the generation

to which the criticisms referred. In the last two chapters he considers what he regards as evidences of national progress. He partakes of our national optimism, and rather glories in yet, withal, he rather regrets our overmastering selfconfidence, and regards it as being, in its extreme forms, an obstacle to progress. He would have just a little more humility-just a spice of it, enough to make us more willing and ready to learn from other lands. The book is well illustrated with portraits.

VICTIMS OF THE SYSTEM, by Dorothy Johns, is an attractive little booklet that will be of interest to every Socialist in the movement. Mrs. Johns will long be remembered as the brave little woman who was thrown into jail during the fight of the comrades at Los Angeles, California, for free speech. During the period of her incarceration Mrs. Johns made a "stepping stone" of what a less clever woman might have found a check to her activities and her enthusiasm. She became acquainted with the inmates of the Los Angeles jail and discovered the causes leading to their misfortunes. No Socialist will be surprised to learn that these causes can all be laid at the door of Capitalism, at once the father and punisher of "crime." This little book by Mrs. Johns contains some excellent data for socialist propaganda and is well worth the small price (15 cents) charged for copies. Published by the author, 649 South Main street, Los Angeles, Cal. -M. E. M.

ADDRESS

I have