MUSSOLINI AND HITLER

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22337, 26 February 1938, Page 20

MUSSOLINI AND HITLER

MR WARD TRICE'S STUDIES

I Know These Dictators. By G. Ward Price George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. '256 pp. (8/6 net.)

Certainly Mr Price knows them.; No other foreign journalist has had access to them so freely over a long period, and to no other have they spoken, at important moments, so fully and openly. They have used the "Daily Mail," which Mr Price represents and helps to direct, as their most regular press channel of communication with the Englishspeaking nations; and very naturally so, since (until recently, at least) no other considerable English newspaper has given them so much favour and support. Mr Price writes this book, then, as an intimate and as a sympathiser; but "sympathiser" is too cool a word for his admiration. There is room for such a book, even if a great part of it is filled with emphasised trifles.

"This is an anniversary in my career, announced the Chancellor, as we sat down. "It is ten years to-day since I was released from prison at Landsberg." , , .. Not many statesmen refer in public to their early reverses. Hitler, with the simplicity of genius, has made the unsuccessful Putsch of November, 1923, into the proudest anniversary of the Nazi movement. Instead of being passed over as a failure it is celebrated as a glorious martyrdom. Of each dictator Mr Price gives a lively and detailed personal sketch. Not much of this is new, but no other journalist has used so skilful and confident a touch. The early career and rise of each to power is traced; and then Mr Price devotes four or five chapters to the methods, special problems, aims, and achievements of each. These chapters are well done, though.they skip and slide past and over awkwardnesses and are helped by doubtful assertions. For a single and simple example, the effects of the Nazi agricultural policy are strangely summarised thus:

It provides the whole nation with fresh, home-grown food, far greater in nourishment-value than the imported foodstuffs upon.which the majority of the population of Great Britain depend.

The great defect of Mr Price's book is that he never really comes nearer to consideration of the deepest issues raised by the erection of the power-state than in passages so trivial as this: Personal liberty of action generally means a lot of muddle, which under a system of authority is avoided. The difference between Germany and the democratic countries is like- that between a professional and an amateur football side. The amateurs can pJease themselves, but the professionals have the satisfaction of playing better football.

The chief virtue of the book is the emphasis it usefully lays on the needs which were satisfied by the forms of government adopted and supported by the German and Italian peoples and on the importance of an honest effort to "fit these new national formations into the European family."