What those "standards and ideals" were, he conceived to be both felicitously and authoritatively set forth and defined by President Wilson in the "Fourteen Points". Already China had, he tells us, been profoundly impressed by the declaration that "the world must be made safe for Democracy". In the "Fourteen Points" she hailed the detailed specification of that approaching consummation. This feeling indeed was not universal. There were doubters, skeptics, like Kang Yu-wei, who, although known at home as a reformer, ventured to declare: "There is no such thing as an army of righteousness which will come to the assistance of weak nations."

But the course of China was not to be determined by misgivings. President Wilson, says the author, had declared: "These issues must be settled-by no arrangement or compromise or adjustment of interests, but definitely and once for all and with a full and unequivocal acceptance of the principle that the interest of the weakest is as sacred as the interest of the strongest." China could ask nothing more. Confiding in the "standards and ideals" thus formulated, China declared war against Germany and Austria on August 14, 1917, as unconscious as was Mr. Wheeler, when he wrote his book, of the existence of the secret agreements of Great Britain, France and Italy with Japan for the disposal of Shantung. As Mr. Wheeler's volume was published in January, 1919, it furnishes us, beyond the disclosure of his expectations of a different result, no clue to his opinion of what was later done at Versailles.

Mr. Wheeler's text is supplemented with valuable appendices, containing the "Black-Dragon" statement of Japanese policy in China in 1914, the celebrated Twenty-one Demands in 1915, official statements relating to the Lansing-Ishii Agreement in 1917, a summary of treaties and agreements referring to the territorial integrity and sovereign rights of China and the policy of the "open door," and a summary of treaties and agreements relating to Korea. It may be observed that Mr. Wheeler quotes (pages 165-167) a passage from the speech of Dr. Wellington Koo, Chinese Minister at Washington, at the Long Beach Conference on the Foreign Relations of the United States, May 31, 1917, on the question of China's relation to the world's future. No better statement of that question has ever been made, and Mr. Wheeler has done well to reproduce it. He has, indeed, made throughout a judicious and discriminating selection of materials, and has thus furnished to the reader in a comparatively small compass and with intelligent elucidation the basis of an informed judgment.

J. B. MOORE.

Syndicalism and Philosophical Realism. By J. W. SCOTT. London, A. C. Black, Ltd., 1919.-215 pp.

Mr. Scott's very ingenious essay is really two books in one. The first is an excellent and, on the whole, convincing description of the realism of two such dissimilar thinkers as Bergson and Bertrand Russell; the second is an attempt to show that the movement toward social reconstruction which syndicalism vaguely typifies is the direct outcome of realistic philosophy. It must be said at once that the second part of Mr. Scott's book is of greatly inferior value to the first. Every philosopher who embarks upon political speculation runs the risk which attends an unnatural simplification of the data. This danger Mr. Scott has not escaped. Bergson is direct, non-rational, judges by immediate intuition; M. Sorel bids syndicalists to be direct, non-rational, intuitive. M. Sorel is a Bergsonian; therefore Bergson begot syndicalism. It would be admirable if political genealogies could be established in this appealing syllogistic fashion. But, in the first place, outside a handful of intellectuals, M. Sorel is unknown to the trade-union movement of France; and, in the second, M. Sorel, on similar Bergsonian principles, is now a monarchist clerical, still bidding his adherents be direct, non-rational and intuitive. Is this also Bergsonian? Yet if Mr. Scott would study the writings of Bourget and Charles Maurras, he would find that Comte, in a real sense the foster-child of idealist philosophy, is the spiritual parent of French monarchism.

Mr. Russell is in search of the principles of social reconstruction; and his philosophy consists in what Mr. Scott terms "the immediate apprehension of an externally-given." What he then does, still according to Mr. Scott, is "not to determine what certainly is, but how many things possibly may be." In the result Mr. Russell empties the world" in a degree "which amounts to distortion." Exactly as the Principia Mathematica deprives us of our philosophical certainties, so does Mr. Russell's political work deprive us of our political certainties. The method in each case Mr. Scott takes to be the same. We are bidden to take what is "out there" as what is, with the result that all appears in a distorted perspective. So that when Mr. Russell, seeing the way in which personality is stunted by our institutions, makes havoc of them, Mr. Scott, rather after the manner of Berkeley, explains that Mr. Russell has not noticed what may be done with the power to realize what we have already gained." Where Mr. Russell discusses the hideous results of the present laws of marriage,

Mr. Scott, with all the virtue of a pious bachelor, bids us remember how many happy marriages there are. Where Mr. Russell indicates the danger of intellectual oppression, Mr. Scott explains that intellectual liberty does not of itself produce great men. Where, in fact, Mr. Russell urges us to the joy of creative discovery, Mr. Scott is always at hand to insist upon the beauty of what is old.

His attitude seems, apart from its philosophic foundations, to be based upon two assumptions: (1) Politics, he thinks, is a struggle for the general good; economics is but a private gamble. "Economic good", he writes, "is not essentially shareable . . . Political good, on the other hand, stands nearer to those spiritual things which spread undivided and operate unspent." Mr. Scott must indeed have lived far from the world if he thinks that such a divorce of political from economic processes is at all possible. Are the Factory Acts economic or political? In what category would he put the Trade Board Acts? More generally, does he seriously mean to separate justice from the field of economic discussion? Revolution and disintegration may, as he says, be associated with the economic motive; but the economic motive is itself only an index to impulses for which, in the governing class, Mr. Scott would find nothing but praise. And if one urges that all political struggles of importance are at bottom economic, what becomes of Mr. Scott's position?

(2) Mr. Scott has also a special hypothesis about the history of socialism. It began, in its Marxian form, as a logical account of the inevitable future. People took a prophecy for a revelation. But time showed clearly that Marx was mistaken, and “reformist" socialism became the accepted creed. Discontent with its progress resulted in a rejection of political action, and syndicalism is the natural outcome of that rejection. It is born of disappointment and bears upon its face the marks of grievance of which the first is hostility to reason. Such, in brief, is Mr. Scott's theory. But it does not betray a very profound acquaintance with the history of socialism. Rather does it read like a neat examination-summary of Mr. Kirkup's too well-known manual. The fact is that Marxian socialism, as an historic hypothesis, has had more justification from the events of the last four years than any other type. Certainly no one in the socialist camp, with the evidence at hand from Germany and Russia in revolution or from France and England in reconstruction, believes that simple political action has any final value. It is a literal fact that you cannot transform the state by the ballot-box; its processes are far too subtle for that. Every state reflects the power of its dominant economic class; and

the over-simple refinements of the majority principle mean, in practice, only that the minority cannot rely upon the police. Nor has syndicalism any connection with theoretical socialism at its outset. The connection comes when men try, like Pelloutier, or Griffuelhes, to supply it with a philosophy. It is true enough that they express discontent with parliamentary government. But so does the average Englishman; and in America "politician" is a term of reproach. Marxism, at bottom, is only one of half-a-dozen radical solutions for a malady which, far from being confined to the disinherited, has been diagnosed by perfectly respectable conservatives like Mr. Wilson and Lord Hugh Cecil. The malady is the result of a world too big for its power of organization. So far from syndicalism being an antithesis of thought, it is one of the few intelligent efforts that have been made to discover a way out of our present impasse.

Mr. Scott, as a good pupil of Sir Henry Jones, is himself quite naturally an idealist, which has come to mean, politically, one who tacitly accepts things as they are with a pious hope that, if we do our duty, they may one day be better. It is, says Mr. Scott, "a policy of what has been called the intensive realization of life, a cultivation of the power to realize what we have already gained, rather than of the endless desire to be gaining more." This is an eloquent sentence; but for whom is Mr. Scott speaking in that "we"? Does he include therein the thirty per cent. whom, in London, Mr. Booth found living upon the verge of poverty? Does he include the one in three in London who die in workhouse, hospital or lunatic asylum? Does he include all outside that fraction of the population to whom an adequate education allows "the intensive realization of life"? Mr. Scott suffers from that woeful inability of his school to come to grips with the facts at issue. He is so content with the progress made that he is satisfied to await an Utopia which can hardly now be more than a few aeons distant. What does the intensive realization of life" mean to the men and women whom Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have described in their two incomparable books, to the people of Mr. Paterson's Across the Bridges or to the slum-dwellers of Chicago and New York? Could we but annihilate time, idealism would be the most inevitable and luxurious of philosophies; but its incurable defect is that in its pursuit of the pure instance it loses hold of the world in which, as it happens, we live.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

HAROLD J. LASKI.

The Meaning of National Guilds. By M. B. RECKITT and C. E. BECKHOFER. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1918.xvi, 452 pp.

Guild socialism is rapidly becoming that type of political philosophy which it is indispensable to understand. It is an interesting attempt to combine the virtues of the socialistic outlook with the merits of syndicalism; but it omits from the one its over-emphasis upon the political state and from the other its virtual denial to the consumer of any share in government. It has thus an attractiveness for liberals who have become convinced from the pressure of events that some sort of collective-mindedness is the inevitable path of the future but yet shrink from that worship of the state to which socialism proper is prone. It has not, of course, any message of comfort to bring to admirers of the classic individualism. It starts out from a condemnation of the wages-system, and its primary article of faith is the necessity of destroying the capitalist state. In place of this it envisages a bipartite community, governed industrially by a system of guilds, which are hierarchically combined into a guilds congress, and politically by a system of geographical representation upon the lines of the House of Commons. The details of the adventure are, naturally enough, the subject of anxious debate. Some exponents, like Mr. Penty, reject altogether the continuance of large-scale industry and pin their hopes to a revival of the medieval handicraft system. Others, like Mr. Cole, assume that the great industry is inevitable and seek the means of combining efficiency with freedom.

This book is intended as an introduction to the subject for the general reader. It can hardly be said to have great value. Its philosophy seems to be derived mainly from Mr. Chesterton, and its history is a blind reproduction of Mr. Belloc's more fantastic nonsense. Where the book is general, its hypotheses are too large and too little documented to be of much assistance; where it is specific, anyone who has read Mr. G. D. H. Cole's admirable Selj-Government in Industry will have nothing to learn from the author's suggestions. What is best in the book is its atmosphere of eager enthusiasm and its careful study of a too little known literature. But it is unoriginal; and the writers know too little of the general problems of the modern state to make their analysis of its future appear convincing.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

HAROLD J. LASKI.