people have far higher intelligence than most professors. But still the reading of books is to some extent a sign of intellectual interest, and, however often it serves as a drug, it does in most cases rouse the mind to activity. And the English, we believe, are the greatest book-readers in the world. Certainly, in no other country does one see so many people reading, not merely papers and magazines, but real books, as one sees in our trains, tubes, trams, and 'buses. 'I never was one to care about the insides of books,' said a servant girl, and there are people, even outside the subcommittee, who like books best wellbound and arranged upon the parlor table like spokes in a wheel, with the Holy Bible as hub, But our habit of covering books in something stronger than yellow paper perhaps proves more than that we

were once a

wealthy nation. Perhaps it proves that we feel a certain affection, a kind of reverence, for a book as such, and it is for the sake of the insides after all that hitherto we have protected and adorned them so carefully. Even in these poverty-stricken days, do we not call upon our artists to design a 'wrapper' to cover the covering and protect the protection?

The praise of books is too vast a theme for us to enter upon, and too well-worn. Three passages only from England's own great dynasty of great dynasty of writers we would recall rather than attempt so high a panegyric. First we would remember the Poor Clerk of Oxford in Chaucer's Prologue - prototype of all poor students, from whose reluctant poverty the subcommittee now proposes to extort a tax:

For him was lever have at his beddes heed
Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed,
Of Aristotil, and of his philosophie,
Than robus riche, or fithul, or sawtrie,

But al though he were a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;
But al that he might of his frendes hente,
On bookes and his lernyng he it spent,
And busily gan for the soules pray
Of hem that gaf him wherwith to scolay.

No such prayers will be offered by poor scholars for the souls of the subcommittee that recommends a luxury tax on books. Denouncing a restraint on the publication of books, Milton cried: 'More than if some enemy at sea should stop up all our havens, and ports, and creeks, it hinders and retards the importation of our richest merchandise, Truth.' As worse than the submarine menace, Milton would have now regarded the recommendation of our sub-committee. "That early and invincible love of reading,' said Gibbon, 'I would not exchange for the treasures of India.' Gibbon would have condemned the sub-committee as darker traitors to the national happiness than if they had recommended the surrender of the Indian Empire.

not

We are aware that, so long as the war lasts, taxation must continuously increase, and that even if peace came to shock and shatter the established habits of years, the national taxation would still be enormous to the point of exhaustion. We only protest against the decision of a sub-committee which supposes that the requirements of the spirit are indispensable, and that knowledge, inspiration, judgment, and spiritual comfort should be taxed as luxuries on the same level as turtle soup, caviare, and champagne. English people are not so gross as the subcommittee assumes, and they will demand that to the last possible degree, even to the edge of national bankruptcy and over it, the spirit shall remain nurtured and free. Are there no deer left in the forests, no

In the fury of the war of nations, which hastens the ripening of so many incipient political and economic processes, the German Social-Democratic Party has been imbued with the national spirit. History, in repeating its patterns, does so on a larger scale. The wars of Bismarck brought about the reconciliation of the liberal middle class with Prusso-German philosophy of the state. The world war is reconciling the socialistic laboring classes with the German nation's idea of the state. And the stages of development repeat themselves in the same way. The Liberals have considered themselves opposed to Prussia, although it is the latter who by her economic policy has paved the way for the commercial and social rise of the middle class from the first stages of national consciousness. The SoThe Socialists, likewise, had persisted in hostility to the Empire, long after it VOL. XI-NO. 552

had adopted policies of social and national economy, which not only improved the conditions of labor in practical ways but also applied a large part of socialistic theory. State and parties used to lead separate existences in both historical respects, because they had not discovered their close relation. What is more, it is evidence of the real similarity of historical precedents that Liberalism and Socialism found their way back from analogous foreign methods of thinking, into the terms of our own thought of the state. French liberalism and English ideas dominated the system of thought of the progressive middle class in Germany, as it did that of the socialistic laboring class. Both classes distrusted their own body politic because it was not reorganized according to the foreign pattern. Both were taught by war that their demands for public organi

zation could be complied with and carried out on a national scale. The liberal middle class has since then laid aside its consciousness of separation and merged itself in the nation as a whole. The present war has placed socialistic labor at the beginning of a course which will carry it toward the same result. The nationalization of German Social-Democracy may well be one of the greatest achievements of this war.

A

In his new book, Three Years of World Revolution, Paul Lensch, SocialDemocratic deputy in the Reichstag, defines this transformation with a neat formula: "The state is becoming socialized and Social-Democracy is becoming nationalized.' The process has not affected all the strata of this great party to the same extent. minority remains bound by the tradition of class-warfare and hostility to the government. Among the majority, moreover, in addition to farseeing and thoughtful elements that guide the course of the party, and along with others who step on untrodden ground only with hesitation, are many, swift to act, who eagerly seize upon new ideas and spread them with enthusiasm. To these active thinkers Paul Lensch belongs. In his book, Social-Democracy, Its Aims and Destiny, which has aroused much discussion and controversy within the party, and in his prolific journalistic writings, especially in the Glocke, an organ of the new movement, he contends with skill, eloquence, and great power of vivid presentation, for a fresh survey of socialistic doctrine and practice. His most recent writing presents a theory of the war farreaching in its significance, and attempts to deduce new arguments for the alteration of the 'inner frontiers' of the German Social-Democratic Party.

Consistently with its origin and

historical connections, the war presents itself to us in Austria as the culminating chapter in the solution of the Eastern Problem. To the German Social-Democrat, Lensch, it is a phase in the history of English imperialism.* Germany has become the opponent of Great Britain. Lensch traces the underlying causes of the conflict according to the example of Marxian doctrine. Germany has grown up, like England, under the influence of the protective tariff in Europe, into a model of modern capitalism. It has become representative of a higher form of economic development. Characteristic of this new capitalism is the merging of industrial and commercial capital with banking credits under the control of high finance. This merging indicates an organization which has extraordinarily increased the economic and political vigor of capital. England's economic structure rests on the wealth of the independent capitalist and unrestricted freedom of competition. The bundling together of capital of various kinds, prudent application of it upon the country's resources, prevention of competition in the domestic market in order to assure a superior position in the world. market all this indicates a higher degree of capitalistic organization than has manifested itself in England. There they were contending over the elementary, anarchical stages of capitalism's development. As long as the other countries remained commercially backward, or, like France, adopted the English capitalistic system, England enjoyed an ascendancy, the foundation of which was the political domination of vast markets

It is the habit of German journalists and speakers to make England the scape-goat for all they consider blameworthy in British policy; a fact which has its significance as an indication that Germany recognizes the psychological value of the relatively smaller group as an object of antagonism.-EDITOR.

overseas. Free trade was the natural expression of English superiority; inasmuch as it held all markets open to English competition, it would perpetuate the ascendancy of Great Britain. Hence the other aspiring economic fields adopted the protective tariff. Under this system Germany has developed another form of capitalism, which has kept pressing England harder and harder in the world market. The newly-organized form of society and the old anarchical, individualistic economic and governmental policy finally clashed, since in the age of imperialism, which is also the age of capitalism in its maturity, the struggle for the money market and the world-exchange had to be carried on with an ever-increasing proportion of government control. This led to the Great War, according to Lensch the most tremendous worldoverturning since the great migrations. In this upheaval Germany is the revolutionary side, England the counter-revolutionary.

This vast revolution which has set in in the form of a monstrous war is preparing a new world. It is liberating unprogressive England with the violence of a thunder-burst. England, according to Lensch, is getting an even more fundamental experience of the workings of revolution on the present scale than is Russia, because she was the most backward in her social system. Concentration of shattered industry, the overthrow of established methods of working through the suspension of rules applying to corporations, organization of capital for industrial use with government assistance for the purpose of acquiring foreign markets, the beginning of the coördination of the Empire's governmental and customs policies, vast preparations for the control of all industries essential to

the continuance of the war and their necessary raw materials, are separate chapters in this remoulding of England.

In war the British Empire is undergoing a process of rejuvenation, the centrifugal power of which is impressive. The social upbuilding of a new England will be the most significantly revolutionary fact among present happenings. Indeed, the new era does not open upon a prospect of peaceful times, but rather upon bitterer struggles for the ruling of the world. The adoption of the German system in an English world-dominion protected by tariff walls would give British capital employed in foreign enterprises a far vaster field of operations than she has in little Germany. The capital of the British Empire, strengthened by the gigantic profits of its great domestic market, would be hurled with unheard of weight on the foreign markets. The world's danger of war would increase. If England retains the conquests which she has made in this war, she will be, especially through the weakening of Russia, lord in Asia and Africa. The world will be so thoroughly dependent upon her that the other nations (including Japan, which is dominated by American influence), will be virtually for hire by Englishmen. The war has thrust the German people into conflict with English world-dominion, thereby revealing her mission in the history of the world and declaring that her interests are those of all peoples. Germany has become, to quote the Hegelian definition of universal history, the protagonist of 'Progress in consciousness of freedom.' Germany must break the English monopoly in order to preserve a colonial empire adapted to her economic needs.

The German people can carry on the fight for freedom-and upon this

point Lensch lays special stressonly if doing so liberates the nations of the world from the fear that in place of the English, a new German world-domination threatens. Lensch would be, moreover, no Social-Democrat if he did not emphatically repudiate any policy of annexation and demonstrate its harmfulness. A single glance at the grasp of affairs shown by the greater part of the German middle class, lovers of freedom and democracy, is sufficient to strengthen one in the feeling that the newlyaroused national zeal of the SocialDemocrats is, in many respects, excess of zeal. Lensch is naturally no PanGerman. For a Social-Democrat the gap is too wide. However, if he does not also emphatically decline the 'western orientation' of Germany, and thereby borrow from the stock ideas of Pan-Germanism, the whole course of his demonstration presents a brilliant and lively, although not always comfortable combination of the SocialDemocratic platform and the range of international ideas. The Marxian formula, that at certain stages of economic development the systematic regulation of property is antagonistic to the development of new productive enterprises, is an argument used by Lensch in considering the exclusion of Germany from colonial expansion an exclusion forced by England and her allies. This application of the formula presents a false analogy and suggests to the reader the effort of a Pan-German to effect a compromise with the Marxian system, in order to vindicate the justice of the Pan-German position to the Social-Democrats by appealing to the great master of socialistic theory. Lensch's political opinion deals almost exclusively with conceptions of governmental policy, just like the stinging political terminology

of the Pan-Germans. Along with the portrayal of the dangers of English imperialism as transformed in the war, the reaction from the growing Socialism of the laboring class is given passing consideration. One catches a flash of arguments that lead away from the narrow, one-sided emphasis of theories dealing with policies of force. But this aspect of political development interests the author less. It is soon thrust aside. The unadjusted struggle for the rulership of the world has a more lively appeal for Lensch's imagination. The forces within every nation that hinder imperialism, which had become apparent before the war, were suppressed by the catastrophe. The inclination toward an agreement of interests had been cherished, but directly because of the bitter experiences of the war, this whole set of political tendencies remains in the shadow, regardless of the urgent necessity that men learn to live side by side without devouring one another. Still these ideas belong to the forces for development which are politically alert, and they represent a substantial policy. The English jingo, the infatuated Frenchman who dreams of Alsace, and the PanGerman neglect them. These types represent, in fact, a distortion of the national into the nationalistic. The Socialist, whose feeling for the nation and its greatness expands, is a promising phenomenon. However, one prefers to see him upon clearlymarked national paths than in the thorny nationalistic thicket. But the task of world-policy, which Lensch reserves for the German people,- of razing to the earth the structure of English tyranny, will seem to other wise thinkers along national lines, to have been already accomplished. The German people have realized in this war the greatest achievement possible