Our Bookshelf.: Miscellany

Abstract

MOST thinking people at the present time busy themselves more with questions of the future than of the past. A popular series on ‘Today and To-morrow’ sells its ten thousands, while manuals of history are left to the few. The volume before us, however, will not attain great success, nor is it of much value, because it is a collection of scraps, not co-ordinated in any way and not throwing any clear light on the question which its title suggests. There is a confused flicker like the varied lights of cars and bicycles and lorries on a wet road in the dark. But it is difficult to tell where they are all going, and some of them are obviously going in opposite directions. The communist Nexo, for example, tells us that food must be found for the starving proletariat, while J. B. S. Haldane remarks on the “general prosperity which has nearly banished underfeeding as a cause of ill-health”. Both statements no doubt are true in their different connexions and with different applications. The reader is therefore left to find out for himself what is the general drift of civilisation from the disconnected views of the various eminent and interesting persons who have been got together by an enterprising American newspaper. It need scarcely be said that they all have a vivid vision of something, but in each case it is just the one thing that happens to interest the particular writer, and none of them has written at sufficient length even to develop his own thesis-to a general conclusion.

The Drift of Civilization.

By the Contributors to the fiftieth Anniversary Number of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, including Charles G. Abbot, Richard E. Byrd, Albert Einstein, Guglielmo Ferrero, Sir Philip Gibbs, Maxim Gorky, Rudolf Maria Holzapfel, the Very Rev. Dean Inge, Count Hermann Keyserling, J. B. S. Haldane, Paul de Kruif, Stephen Leacock, Martin A. Nexö, Michael Pupin, James H. Robinson, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells. Pp. 254. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1930.) 7s. 6d. net.