Full Up and Fed Up"; The Worker's Mind in Crowde Britain. By WHITING WILLIAMS. New York, Charles Scribner Sons, 1921.-ix, 324 pp.

Mr. Williams in his series of studies of the mind of the worker i the several industrial countries is performing a more important se vice than the hasty scanning of any one of his entertaining books o articles will reveal. His is the rare affliction of being too entertain ing, too engrossing on the surface, to make sure that any but the re flective reader will see his implications. However, he has in hi record of personal experiences a fund of psychological raw materia which others also may profitably analyze for some time to come. find this to be his biggest service-his bringing together of masse of evidence regarding typical states of working people's minds. The social psychologist who appreciates real data will find Whiting Williams as useful in matters of industrial behavior as he might find Westermarck on marriage or Sumner on "folkways".

In the present volume, Mr. Williams is in England and perhaps his only positively new conclusion is that the labor problem is international in its causes and solutions. This discovery is less novel than the way in which it is reached. Mr. Williams actually joined temporarily the ranks of coal-miners, steel-workers, and shipbuilders, out of work because diplomats had been unable to come to sensible terms about indemnities, reparations, tariffs, and the rest. He experienced the fact of world-community as a laborer in the British Isles; and henceforth matters relating to disarmament, economic conferences, and stabilized exchange are being watched by him as vital factors in industrial relations. And the way in which these interrelations are brought home to Mr. Williams' readers is bound to be as educative a force as the way in which the same truths are abstractly treated by a Keynes or a Vanderlip.

The book is, however, of significance primarily as a psychological document, and it is as such that it should be read. Occasionally one detects a tendency to make psychology bear an undue proportion of the burden of explanation. For example, when Mr. Williams makes the point that labor agitators may be "men who were doing hand jobs when they were fitted and anxious to do head jobs", one pauses to wonder. Again, one pauses when he implies that Robert Smillie of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain became a labor leader because he " grew up in conditions which made it extremely easy to set fire to the tinder of his boyish purposes and idealisms by

the stories [about bad mine conditions] that might easily have been told him by his father and grandfather."

Perhaps infantile fixations, chronic fears, repressions, and others of the so-called Freudian mechanisms can explain the labor leader. But it would seem safer to conjecture, in the absence of better evidence than this, that there are actual economic causes and reasoned economic convictions which also impel these leaders. To believe that the convictions of many hundreds of labor leaders are only rationalizations becomes somewhat of a tax upon one's credulity.

In another place Mr. Williams does indeed cite the testimony of one of his working mates that "management and capital just cannot be trusted. With the lure of profits, it finds it too easy to be dishonest. And an employer is quoted who says the "obstacle is in the short-sighted employers as much as in the short-sighted workers and leaders of workers." With evidence like this to weigh, it would seem that the psychology of the labor leader is to be grasped only in the light of additional factors such as those having to do with economic interests and the economic structure.

It is difficult but necessary, it would seem, continually to distinguish between the impact of economic difficulties upon people's minds and the analysis of that impact on the one hand, and the peculiar nature of those economic difficulties on their structural and objective side and their analysis on the other. Whether or not Mr. Williams has this distinction constantly in mind is not always apparent. However, from his study he finds that a continuous job is essential to the worker's sanity of outlook. He finds that continuity of employment is conditioned by international, political and economic factors. Beyond this, his study does not go and is not intended to go. My point in this connection is only that the inquiring student must of necessity go on to investigate and analyze the character of these economic factors in international affairs and to ask how they are being dealt with; to which questions psychological inquiry does not, and, as I see it, never can, supply the entire answer. Mr. Williams has set himself a real task-he is out to give employers and those individuals who are mentally active enough to help. constitute "public opinion ", a sympathetic insight into the manual worker's mind. His essential and invaluable conclusion is that we must have faith in the workers and "must fortify that faith with better understanding of their service", and then provide a "manifestation of that larger faith in terms of recognition to the workers at their work". No collegiate course in industrial psychology can

be given to best advantage without liberal reference to this as well as to Mr. Williams' earlier volume. And no executive in search of understanding can afford to ignore them either.

N. Y. SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK

NEW YORK CITY

ORDWAY TEAD

L'Irlande dans la Crise Universelle (1914-1920). By Y. M. GOBLET (Louis Tréguiz). Second Edition. Paris, Félix Alcan, 1921. vi, 462 pp.

This book is an intensive, methodical and dispassionate survey of all the factors which have affected the interests and opinions of the Irish people since 1914; while the preliminary section (pp. 1-63) reviews the political developments during the preceding twenty-one years. The author traces the shifting policies of the British government, the slow but patient progress of the Nationalist Party, and the sinister activities of "l'orangisme ulstérien "—the " dernier carré de la vieille garde tory en Grande-Bretagne aussi bien qu'en Irlande" (p. 446). The Ulster decision to threaten physical resistance, dating from 1912, the destruction of the Nationalist Home Rule Bill in 1916, the ungenerous treatment by the British War Office of Irish participation in the European War, the conscription struggle, the calculated contempt and cruelty of the Castle policy after the rising of Easter, 1916, are set forth with the utmost objectivity and the most scrupulous analysis of the sources. Then the author surveys the Convention of 1917, the collapse of which he attributes to the menace of partition. Of this he says (p. 251): "The Asquith cabinet had admitted partition in the Amendment Bill of 1914; Mr. Lloyd George had sanctioned it in 1916; he had made it the essential article of his Plan of May 16, 1917, of which the Convention was only an alternative; and on February 25, 1918, he recommended that the Convention grant Ulster a right of veto equivalent to secession. . . . The Orange representatives, therefore, were risking nothing in participating in conversations they could interrupt at pleasure."

The controversial question of the origin of the "outrages" is handled well by M. Goblet. On the basis of such sources as are accessible to impartial students, he assembles evidence irrefutably demonstrating the provocation to resistance and the vindication of their liberty, which the Irish people suffered many months after the rising of 1916.

For the period subsequent to the General Election of December, 1918, the material is far more abundant, and the reader is better able to corroborate M. Goblet's exposition, because of the closer attention given by the press of the world to the various negotiations and the course of the war between England and the Irish people. M. Goblet's record of the activities of the American Commission on Irish Independence in Paris during the Peace Conference, it may be said in passing, is a better example of historical impartiality than the references to this matter in many recent books, some collaborative, and others biographical, purporting to review and justify the events of Versailles. Finally, the somber narrative of the "Liquidation of the Universal Crisis in Ireland" (1919-1921) is brought down to the early months of 1921.

Despite the author's restraint, it is not difficult to perceive the conclusion his studies have led him to formulate as to the outcome of the Irish struggle for independence. From January 21, 1919 (the date of the Appeal of the Irish National Assembly to the Nations of the World), "the British Administration no longer governs Ireland-it can do no more than prevent Ireland from governing herself. Whatever the cause of this situation, its existence is historically established. Henceforth, as a logical result, Ireland will present her case to the world as that of a nation upon which, contrary to its own wish as expressed by the exercise of the franchise, there is imposed the authority of a foreign power, contrary to the new Law of Nations" (p. 360). C. E. MCGUIRE

WASHINGTON, D. C.

England in Transition, 1789-1832: A Study of Movements. By WILLIAM LAW MATHIESON. New York, Longmans, Green and Company, 1920.—xiv, 285 pp.

This book deals with the social, spiritual and intellectual forces operative in England from the beginning of the French Revolution to the passage of the Reform Bill, certainly an interesting and suggestive period, but withal one very difficult to treat adequately. It is not clear why 1789 was selected as the starting point. 1769 would have seemed a more logical place to begin a study of political reform; if economic movements are considered, any year from 1770 to 1785 would have been preferable; if the influence of the French Revolution is to be stressed, the results were not visible until later.

English history teachers have long bewailed the fact that we have

so few satisfactory reference books on the period just after Lecky closed his meaty volumes and just before Walpole began his scholarly work. In recent months Farrer, Brown, Alington and Mathieson have done much to fill this gap, but of the four, the last has given us easily the best work for general reference. Mr. Mathieson is known to us largely by his scholarly work upon eighteenth-century Scotland, but his latest work is a welcome addition to the studies of a significant period.

The volume is a chronological treatment of the period in five chapters of equal length. For that reason, the author is compelled to treat in several different places of the struggle for educational facilities for the poor, of the reform of prison conditions etc. A topical discussion of such movements would have given greater unity and coherence. Moreover, the need for a good treatment of the years from 1815 to 1832 is not nearly so great as for the earlier part, yet curiously enough those are the very years to which Mr. Mathieson devotes half of his compact little volume. In the reviewer's opinion, the introductory chapter is not only the best chapter in the book, but the best summary of the eighteenth-century origins of the many social movements that came to fruition early in the nineteenth. These fifty pages are literally crammed with information gleaned from many fields, but nowhere else so accessible or so well digested. Chapter I, on the other hand, is the least satisfactory. It slights the many evidences of the repressive attitude of the English government during the French Revolution as shown so clearly in that excellent book, Kent's English Radicals, which is damned in these later days by its very title, as being more than faintly reminiscent of Bolshevism. In general, it would have been better had the first half of the book been much expanded to give the author space to dwell upon the significance of the movements which he traces.

Mr. Mathieson's book is not based upon researches in unpublished materials, but he has ranged far and wide in correspondence, memoirs, tracts, and of course in the ubiquitous Hansard. His touch is sure, even in the midst of detail. Three slight errors are noted: Cook (p. 9) should be Cooke; 1798 (p. 66) is a misprint for 1789; and the first Annual Indemnity Bill was passed in 1727 not in 1743. We regret, more than the errors of commission, the omission of a bibliography and the brevity of the index. In spite of all this, this work is the most satisfactory compact treatment of the social movements of the period.

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

WILLIAM THOMAS MORGAN