Page 13 Advertisements Column 1

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20920, 29 July 1933, Page 13

AN AMERICAN DANIEL. Interpretations, 1931-19."52. By Walter Llnpmann. Selected and edited by Allan Kevins. Allen and Umrin. 361 pp. (10/6 net.t In America, where economic heresy has for years been preached by the greatest political party and accepted for truth by the people, there has sometimes seemed to be raised against the chorus Mr Lippmann's sole voice. After the stock market fell to pieces in 1929, and American banks began to fail at the rate of so many a week, it must have been a disturbing one. Since 1930 he could have been forgiven a little gloating, but he did not indulge in it. His "Interpretations" of the current scene in 1931 md 1932 show him still preaching that a country cannot sell unless it will buy, that it cannot spend more on its inhabitants than it is prepared to collect from them, that the solution that seems the easiest usually leads to trouble. All this he says so simply, so shortly, that none of the readers of the great newspaper which publishes his articles can fail, if they read, to understand. This collection of his day-to-day writings has particular interest at present because of the light it throws on the problems with which Mr Roosevelt is struggling; because events in Germany have shown that Mr Lippmann was right when he said, in effect, that fantastic ideas of revenge must be abandoned, and common sense used, if that country were to be saved; and because he pleaded for an American attitude on war debts which now seems a little more possible than it did when he wrote. The chapters on purely American problems—on the ideal of wealth, the overlooking of dishonesty, on Tammany, on the crime problem—are interesting, but less so, perhaps, than those which deal with Great Britain's crisis of 1931, with international relations, and with such problems as Manchuria. Mr Lippmann is an extremely interesting interpreter, and, as events have shown, an unusually far-seeing one. OVERPOPULATION. Revolt of Women. By Hamilton Fyfe. Rich and Cowan. 275 pp. (7s 6d net.) Mr Fyfe is of the opinion that war, economic misery, feeble pessimism, and the general weariness in well-doing of the age are due, above all else, to reckless and feckless multiplication of births. The saviours of the human race are. according to him, the women who refuse to accept maternity ns their natural and inevitable fate. I-Ie gathers up statistics to show that salvation by adequate birth-control is coming almost too late, yet just in time, to prevent the destruction of all that makes life worth living. On the other side he devotes two chapters to consideration and dismissal of the religious and political objections against the Malthusian position. Amongst these reasons in favour of the doctrine against breeding one looks in vain for the graph or algebraic equation which expresses the "right"' standard or norm of increase In any given population. Without this—and no one in the world has yet provided even a shadow of it—the insistent use of the word "overpopulation" seems to possess merely a non-transfer-able and emotional significance. It might be further objected that Mr Fyfe has not been able to conduct even a qualitative debate of the idea of a child well-born on the one hand and a social environment ready and worthy to receive such a child on the other. Since, however, not many authors are able to do that, the criticism seems hardly worth while. But that so lew even want to do so is, it may be said,, our loss.