over much capital will be needed, and for some time many men will be out of employment. The period will be one of intensive reconstruction and scientific exploration. Since no Government officials can undertake such work successfully, nationalisation is impossible; to pool receipts and abolish piece-work would be to encourage inefficiency and keep alive concerns better dead; and therefore private enterprise must continue. But the measure of prosperity which the industry may recover and the capital which, to live, it must obtain from the public, will directly depend on the elimination of present and future political interference. The only alternative is to admit economic defeat, declare the industry sheltered, and pay it a subsidy based on an artificial standard of life. As a result every other industry, and rightly, would demand the same standard. Then follows inflation, and in its train that old vicious circle of rising prices and higher wages which cannot even be contemplated by a country like ours, whose very existence still depends on the profits we must make in open competition with the rest of the world. GEOFFREY ELLIS. HE -E Pr ACKNOWLEDGMENT. Mr J. H. Wellard, whose article on 'The Art of Translating' appeared in our January Number, regrets that he inadvertently omitted to acknowledge his obligations to Mr Basil Anderton's essay on 'The Lure of Translation' (in 'Sketches from a Library Window '), from which he cited some of the versions used by way of illustration. SOME RECENT BOOKS. America Economically and Otherwise-Great Navigators MR GEORGE PEEL has done a rare thing in making a 2 E offsets, with a gradual comparative increase in our prosperity which shows that we are recapturing, if not the old ascendancy, something not far from it. There is probably a greater mass of unemployment in America than here; but the man-in-the-street is not aware of it because they have no system of labour bureaux there, and the statistics are not published. Agriculture is depressed there; and although the rich are vastly more wealthy than here, there seems to be an even greater proportion of deep poverty in the United States. As Mr Peel points out, the United States are 'politically democratic, but economically plutocratic'-significant conditions. It is, of course, impossible, within this compass, to do more than briefly suggest his argument; but we frankly commend this book for its admirable qualities of style and argument and the cheerful, truthful story it has to tell. Again we are in America with the next volume. Mr Philip Guedalla has an amusing pen; and, if he could only feel a little more, what fine books he might write! As it is, his glittering wit and the glimpses he gives of circumstances which forthwith pass and are forgotten, leave one stimulated for a while but afterwards perhaps just a little depressed. One feels so often that with him the immediate effect is the thing; and that is a pity, for he is a capable writer, and, as his 'Palmerston' showed, can fill a large canvas. In 'Conquistador' (Benn) he gives impressions, lightning glances, of his varied experiences during a rapid lecture tour through the United States. Evidently he saw a great deal in that mighty country with its multitudinous varieties of humanity and climates; but it all is as light and easy-going, sometimes as flippant, as the gossip which is just too evidently prepared. He has brilliant passages; on Niagara, 'fixed in the immobility of perpetual motion'; on the Statue of Liberty, 'small beyond expectation, a greenish miniature of her enormous fame'; and a lovely passage on the old English pictures bought by Americans and exiled from home. If all the book had been written after that spirit; but it is no use longing for the unattainable; and anyhow we thank Mr Guedalla for a volume which can be enjoyed without a vast expenditure of brain. Undoubtedly the best book yet issued in the 'Golden Hind' series is this of the editor, Mr. Milton Waldman, 'Sir Walter Raleigh' (Lane). Happy in his subject, for Raleigh has been amazingly misunderstood and mistreated since his own day, this is the opportunity for historical justice. Mr Waldman has accepted the chance with discretion and enthusiasm, and, often in his telling, expresses himself with beauty. The only respect in which we have misgivings rests on his inability to show how Raleigh came to be so very much hated by the majority of his contemporaries. As poet, sailor, soldier, strategist, coloniser, adventurer, statesman, he played his parts brilliantly: serving his country and Queen with strength of body, heart, and mind; and Mr Waldman without overpraise is able to reveal the courage, readiness, resources, sometimes the sublimity, of the man. Yet he was hated and despised by rich and poor; and hooted as he was being taken by road to his trial. Why? Possibly he was pushful, self-centred, lacking in humour. The mystery has not been solved by Mr Waldman ; and if that old disfavour was unjust, then Raleigh remains one of the most misused of the martyrs of history. For that reason Mr Waldman might as well not have suggested that in his trial and at his execution Raleigh was posing as a stage-figure. Who can say whether it was so or not? Let us, therefore, give the great man benefit of the doubt. James the First, who murdered him, is shown by this book to have been monstrous in his meanness. His positive treachery to Raleigh in the last desperate adventure to Guiana, when he revealed their plans to the Spanish enemy, is as black a stain as tarnishes any king of any country. It is risky to endeavour to realise imaginatively, with appropriate dialogue and character drawing which must be mainly invented, the personality, adventures, and associates of such a man as Nathaniel Bowditch, as Mr Alfred Stanford has done in the volume entitled, 'Navigator' (Dent). Naturally American readers will enjoy it more than those on this side of the Atlantic, for its colour and circumstance are very local; but there is, as they say, good stuff in the book; and besides the portrait of Bowditch, who did so much for the shipping fraternity through his work 'The American Practical Navigator ' still a standard-text for those who travel by sea or in the air-it portrays with sympathy the life of a home in Salem in the younger days of New England. We prefer the better documented work of Dr Charles Hose, much of whose story, 'Fifty Years of Romance and Reality' (Hutchinson), has been told already in his work on 'Natural Man.' The repetition, however, does not stale; and we are given a fine record of public duty thoughtfully done. At the age of twenty-five, the author was administering a province under the second Rajah Brooke of Sarawak; and, by his extraordinary tact and resourcefulness, justifying his appointment; for he was able to bring together in friendship tribes that almost since Adam had been warring and keeping their feuds alive through the pleasant practice of head-hunting. He is an illustration of Mr Kipling's old tribute to the young subalterns set in authority in India, and justifying their responsibilities and their race. Dr Hose, unlike many other 'Jungle-wallahs,' kept his mind alert by making science, anthropological, biological, and botanical especially, his hobby and living interest; and although while governing and making his investigations, travelling along rivers and through forests, he might easily have died-and he had a narrow shave from providing a pretty adequate feast for one gigantic crocodile-he survived to make valuable discoveries; among them the true cause of sleeping sickness, Berri-Berri, and, in another department, the oilfields in Borneo, which proved of invaluable help to the right Cause in the War. To write 'The Story of Civilisation' (Sampson Low) in such brevity as Mr Harper Cory has attempted, is to venture the impossible. The style of his book, undoubtedly, is not simple enough. The first two chapters suggest, with their occasional babyishness of phrase, that it is intended for small children; but, as it progresses, it is expressed with a grown-up range of words. Except that he makes too confident assertions over prehistoric circumstances, his detail is generally fair. As an introductory study for men and women, therefore, it may be helpful by leading them on to the authorities; but scrappiness and want of order mar its value. Now that most of the Captains of the Great War, |