Page images
PDF
EPUB

RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOKS

THE MODERN WORLD: A Survey of Historical Forces. Vol. V., India. By Sir VALENTINE CHIROL. With an Introduction by the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. FISHER. Benn. 15s. net.

In this comprehensive work Sir Valentine Chirol has collected together the fruits of many years' interest in, and knowledge of, India. He considers first the historical background of "that vast congeries of peoples we call India" (to use John Morley's phrase), the Hindu and Mohammedan phases of domination, and the contests between Portuguese, Dutch and English for the trade of the Indies. The main part of the book, however, is concerned with the intricate problems that are presented by the India of to-day. The author preserves a sure balance in his consideration of the relative responsibility of British and Indians for the rise of the present anti-British movements. He does not ignore the mistakes made by various British administrations of various political views; but he gives full credit where he considers it due to the many British officials and civilians who have given the best part of their lives to unselfish service for India as well as for the British Empire. In his concluding paragraph Sir Valentine remarks that he has necessarily laid more stress on British duty to India than on any rights to which Great Britain may consider herself entitled after her long service there; but he "must be allowed to conclude with an expression of his faith in the undiminished value of British rule in India as a great agency of permanent progress "if Great Britain has the courage to continue to do her duty as in the past. "For it is in India, if anywhere, that, unless our own civilisation is to be brought to shame, a synthesis must be found-and can hardly be found unless British rule endures-between the East and the West, if an irrevocable clash is to be averted in which neither could escape disaster." The book is a most valuable addition to Messrs. Benn's series of surveys of the countries of the world to-day. MY APPRENTICESHIP. By BEATRICE WEBB. With Illustrations. Longmans, Green. 21s. net.

a

Mrs. Sidney Webb here sets out to describe "the craft and creed of social investigator "; but above and beyond this avowed aim there is an extraordinarily interesting and vivid narrative. Beatrice Potter was the daughter of a Victorian "industrial magnate" and of his brilliant wife, a woman of great intellectual calibre. The future Socialist leader was brought up in the midst of an intellectual society which gathered around her mother. Herbert Spencer, the "synthetic philosopher was one of the oldest friends of the family. In later years Beatrice Potter, with her large sympathy (so carefully concealed in this book) was his one support, when, as she saw, his was become "a great mind run dry." Her first glimmering of a Socialistic idea

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

came to her from considering her father's business, in which he (unusually for a Victorian father) sometimes used her help. She had for some time been energetically educating herself, for she felt herself grossly ignorant, and her education had certainly been unconventional. It had consisted largely of indefatigable reading of everything that came her way on any and every subject. When she saw what seemed to her to be rather callous references to the price of labour in her father's business reports, she began to consider the life of the workers, and finally went to Bacup in Lancashire to investigate their living conditions for herself. There she came into contact with Charles Booth and helped him with his great work of analysing household budgets in London. And so she came to the founding of the Fabian Society and her meeting with Mr. Sidney Webb, which was to end the period she calls her apprenticeship. Of the partnership which followed, we shall be able to read in another volume. Many are the great names which appear in this volume-Canon Barnett, Joseph Chamberlain, Huxley, Comte and Galton, to name a few. The book has intimate social interest, autobiographical interest, and interest also as a piece of history, because, disguise it as they may, the modern Labour Party owe most of their initial emergence to the investigations of certain intelligent members of the "comfortable classes" like Mrs. Sidney Webb.

LETTERS OF SIR WALTER RALEIGH, 1879-1922. Edited

by Lady RALEIGH. With a Preface by D. NICHOL SMITH. Two Volumes. With a Frontispiece and 8 other Plates. Methuen. 30s. net.

The letters of well-known men very rarely express their personalities; but Sir Walter Raleigh was an exception. His letters are racy, vivid, and full of his character, his prejudices, his enthusiasms and his dislikes. These letters now edited by Lady Raleigh cover the whole of his academic life from the early days when he acted as locum tenens at Owen's College, Manchester, and loathed it ("I do not think Owen's College has a soul," he wrote), through his long career as an unconventional Professor of English Literature at Oxford to the war period, when he flung himself heart and soul into the struggle for freedom. Many of the letters written during his earlier years at Oxford explain his success with the English School there, his impatience of formulæ and conventional attitudes, and his extraordinary power of stimulating his students to independent research, which he believed to be the true professorial function.

It is, however, in the war-time letters that his own personality seems to reach its clearest expression, with his faith, expressed over and over again, in the dogged pluck of Great Britain, and his intense admiration for the young flower of his race, giving all for the good of the race. After Julian Grenfell's death he writes "I now realise that the Cavaliers won the Civil War and bequeathed their temper to England. The Puritans collared the Parliament, which was what they wanted. They have it still."

POEMS IN ONE VOLUME. By J. C. SQUIRE. Heinemann. 8s. 6d. net.

Mr. Squire has collected in this volume the whole of his published poems which he feels inclined to reprint, and a considerable number of new poems which have appeared only in periodicals or have not previously been printed at all. A number of his poems of war time are included, and another part of the book consists of satiric verses and epigrams in which Mr. Squire excels. For example, this, on a General Election :

"The battle's set 'twixt Envy, Greed, and Pride :

Come, Conscience, do your duty: choose your side.

[ocr errors]

In contrast to his satiric vein are those poems in which nature and friendship and remembered pleasures predominate, as in "Rivers," where the poet passes in review the great rivers of the world only to return in memory to ;—

"The tiny thread of a pixie waterfall

That lives by Vixen Tor."

JAMES LEIGH STRACHAN-DAVIDSON, Master of Balliol. A Memoir by J. W. MACKAIL. Oxford University Press. 7s. 6d. net.

In this somewhat belated memoir of the Master of Balliol who died in 1916-known to his College as "Strachan"-Mr. Mackail provides an addition to the long list of memoirs of men who have given an example of admirable lives to several generations of undergraduates. Not strikingly distinguished in scholarship, extremely distrustful of innovation-a characteristic which made his relations with his younger colleagues sometimes a little difficult-Strachan-Davidson was so pre-eminently a great gentleman and a sympathetic friend that his influence on Balliol was far reaching and he inspired a true affection in all those with whom he came in contact, whether they agreed with him or not. Unfailing tact and courtesy, coupled with a quiet determination, are the chief qualities revealed in these pages.

PEKING TO LHASA: The Narrative of Journeys in the Chinese Empire made by the late Brigadier-General GEORGE PEREIRA, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., compiled by Sir FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND, K.C.S.I., K.C.I.E., from Notes and Diaries supplied by Major-General Sir CECIL PEREIRA, K.C.B., C.M.G. With Maps and Illustrations. Constable. 18s. net.

Lame, and with an injured spine, aged 56, and having seen active service all through the war, General Pereira, the indefatigable traveller, after paying tribute to his second passion by attending the Derby of 1920, returned again to the wilds in order to travel from Peking to Lhasa. The only previous occasion on which this journey had been accomplished by Europeans was in 1848 when two French missionaries succeeded in reaching the Holy City of the Grand Lama from China. Apart from the usual difficulties of travel in such remote

regions General Pereira had to face a famine in Northern China; he had to face the bands of brigands who flooded the country after the Revolution; on the borders of China and Tibet he found wild tribesmen who owed allegiance neither to China nor Tibet; and he had to reckon on the quite probable opposition of the Central Tibetan government to anyone who actually reached Tibet coming from China. Yet, undismayed, this remarkable man accomplished the journey, charmed every kind of queer customer he dealt with on the way, and was received by the Dalai Lama with courtesy. He then returned to civilisation over the passes into India. Arrived there, he felt that it would be interesting to travel part of the same district from west to east, so he set off north-eastward through Burma and crossing China arrived in Shanghai. Very often in pain and ill, he had still a third journey he wished to make, to travel northward through western China to the remote northern province of Kansu. He had almost finished this third journey when in 1923, on the borders of China and Tibet, he died of a gastric ulcer. The account of these astonishing journeys is told by Sir Francis Younghusband from General Pereira's diaries and notes, and the necessarily bald account is illuminated by the tributes to the charm as well as the courage of the General, whose spirit will remain, says Sir Francis, " as an inspiration to all who follow after him in that distant borderland and to many a lover of travel in every quarter of the world."

THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM. By R. G. HAWTREY. Longmans, Green. IOS. 6d. net.

The author of " Currency and Credit "here attempts to bring economic problems of the day into closer relation with the facts and interests of practical life by applying to them some of the recent discoveries in psychology. His book is a critical analysis of the numerous economic theories held by different schools of thought, and most of them he finds to be fallacious. Amongst others he considers Individualism, Mercantile Imperialism, Collectivism and Nationalization. Other sections include considerations of the different kinds of markets, and an illuminating discussion on Consumption. "The Economic Problem" itself Mr. Hawtrey defines as the problem of organization by which " each member of society can be induced or impelled to do his allotted task by associating it with some motive that appears to him adequate."

THE PIONEERS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By M. ROUSTAN. Translated by FREDERIC WHYTE. With an Introduction by HAROLD J. LASKI. Benn. 12s. 6d. net.

The original French edition of this work was published twenty years ago as a counter blast to the numerous books appearing at the time with the object of depreciating the importance of the work of the Philosophes of the eighteenth century. M. Roustan contends that the influence of the Philosophes was great, and that no amount of

criticism could shake their claim to be regarded as the real forerunners of the Revolution of 1789. The book has not been well known in England, and this English edition will therefore be of interest to students of French history. The author considers the Philosophes in relation to royalty, to the nobles, the parliament, the bourgeoisie and the people. He finds that the only valid charge which can be made against them was that they were misled on occasion by signs of a change for the better in matters of government, signs which misled the whole of France. A case in point occurred when Louis XV. assumed the reigns of government, and the whole of France, the Philosophes included, looked hopefully for a check to abuses.

THE STUDENT'S HISTORY OF IRELAND. BY STEPHEN
GWYNN. Longmans, Green. 5s. net.

This is a condensed and re-written edition of Mr. Gwynn's "History of Ireland" published in 1923. It retains the outstanding merit of the more comprehensive one, that, although written by an Irishman, it preserves generally the balance between the warring religions and warring factions without as a rule any undue bias to either side, except where the author feels that certain events call for a definite expression of opinion even by an impartial observer. In easily read form Mr. Gwynn contrives to make clear the confused politics of the period when Ireland outside "The Pale" was practically independent, and the sketch maps showing the spheres of influence of the great Irish kings and earls are particularly valuable. It is in dealing with more recent Irish events that the author's fair-minded attitude presents a remarkably evenly-balanced picture, rarely found in writings on Irish problems.

A CHINESE MIRROR: Being Reflections of the Reality behind Appearances. By FLORENCE AYSCOUGH. With Drawings by LUCILLE DOUGLASS. Cape. 215. net.

Few books on China written by Europeans give the reader more than the surface of the East, but in this volume, written by a Canadian woman who was born in Shanghai and has lived in China all her life, we are given more light on the mystery that is China. A Chinese mirror is believed to possess many magic properties, amongst others that of making clear the reality which lies behind appearances. Mrs. Ayscough, for example, in describing the Forbidden City of Pekin, remarks that "in order to understand the symbolism in the most rudimentary manner, four important manifestations of Chinese culture had to be kept constantly in mind. I refer to Chinese Philosophy; to the Chinese conception of Sovereignty; to the cult of the Worship of Heaven; and to the extraordinary Educational System by means of which the social structure of China was raised." She then proceeds to consider in detail these problems. The many drawings by Miss Douglass add greatly to the decorative value of the book.

« PreviousContinue »