BOOKS ON THE TABLE

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22419, 4 June 1938, Page 18

BOOKS ON THE TABLE

At the moment there is only one prima ballerina in London who earns a three-figure salary per week. The other big lights are content with £3O or £4O a week, and really expert dancers are glad to get a tenner. ... One of the biggest failures of recent years was Feridoon, which cost the Aga Khan £ 17,000 as a yearling and was afterwards sold to France for £ 12. It is now drawing a horsecab. ... About 100 successful surgeons earn between £4OOO and £BOOO a year; 200 earn between £2OOO and £4000; 30 or 40 are up in the £BOOO to £12,000 class; and a handful make £20,000 a year. . . . Every European officer [in the Indian Civil Service] is entitled to four free passages to and from India at first-class rates for himself and the same number for his wife. An annuity of £IOOO a year is earned after 21 years’ active service, that is to say, when the officer is about 49. . . . Shirley Temple is probably the biggest box office draw in the world. She began at 50 dollars a week. She is getting about £BOO a week, and should last for a couple of years. She was, however, already on a diet at the age of seven. Her milk teeth were falling out, and false ones were having to be put in. But when she retires at the age of 10 she will have made a huge fortune before she goes to school. The odds against her making a come-back later on are enormous. No child prodigy ever has done- so. . . . The Rev. “Tubby” Clayton at All Hallows. Barking, has a net income of £1949 a year. ... By contrast, the Rev. W. F. Geikie-Cobb has a net income of only £672 at St. Ethelburga’s, Bishopsgate. . . . From “Other People’s Money,” by Charles Graves. (Ivor Nicholson and Watson Ltd, 304 pp. 7/6 net. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.). Mr Graves has been exploring the revenue and expenditure accounts of a wonderful variety of businesses, trades, professions, arts, sciences, and rackets. Many of his discoveries are surprising, many amusing; some are disturbing. What it costs to train a boxer: what a railway porter can earn, or a bar-tender; the money in golf, or London flats, or grouse moors, or the Royal Academy; what the British Government spends on entertaining foreign visitors, and what a hairdresser gets in tips; the finances of the market in pets, Christmas cards, or icehockey players—Mr Graves has spent two years finding out about these things, a few among many. His book awakens the strong appetite of curiosity and satisfies it. * • • Lieutenant Nutter took us under wing while Valentine spent his tinje romping around picking up girls in music halls and cabarets, singing at the top of his lungs, drinking down whole bottles of vodka, and crashing into the hotel lobby at 4:00 a.m., cursing as he tripped over saws and hammers. One evening Lieutenant Nutter took us to a party with a lot of Red Russians—mostly curlyheaded Jews in horn-rimmed spectacles who worked for the railroad and crammed down great bowls of caviar between ear-splitting renditions of the Internationale. We went to a music hall where everyone sat at little tables drinking and smoking while a group of dancers in patent leather boots and Cossack hats yipped round the room to a shriek of violins. At 12 o’clock Valentine joined us overcome with mirth. It seemed he’d taken one of the restaurant waitresses to the movies and in the middle of the film a great black-bearded Russian had come tramping in looking for his wife. He’d brandished a pair of revolvers until the man who ran the projector flashed a notice on the screen asking the married lady who was in the audience accompanied by a gentleman other than her husband to please go to the box office immediately. And with that, howled Valentine, half the audience got up and left. From “Men Are So Friendly.” by Nancy Swift. (Victor Gollancz Ltd. 189 pp. 7/6 net.) Two American girls go travelling, mostly East, and meet a great crowd of people, mostly men, and practically all of these give trouble in one way or another, mostly one way. That is why, when the sisters reach home again, one of them has this book penned up in her and the other, if some polite soul asks her for her impressions of the world, can only sigh, “Ah men!” Mr Webb Miller, whose name is large in the world, calls . this “the wittiest and funniest book of its kind since ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’.” What is the use of arguing about it? * • • I must record that, for my own part, when I review the evidence of under-nourishment, miserable housing, and lack of the amenities of civilised living generally, alongside of sybaritic luxury, which obtrude themselves upon the notice of any casual observer in any great city of most of Europe and America, I find it difficult to convince myself that we really could not, -if we cared to try, distribute our resources in a way which would give greater aggregate satisfaction than this. Second . . . the question whether market processes are to be regarded as indicating theoretical or merely practical optima ... is by no means one which economists, as students of market processes, can afford to treat with indifference. It has, indeed, a very direct bearing upon their own future. For if it should bo admitted that the market is, and always must be, a distorted and imperfect embodiment of the economic norm, then it would be inevitable and proper that interest should shift away from the market and' all its works towards the possibility of improving upon the known alternatives to it. For the prolonged study (even from the positive angle) of a method of distributing resources which is convicted of always distributing them badly is not a pastime to which minds that are blessed with a sense of practical responsibility will happily betake themselves. From “Lament for Economics,” by Barbara Wootton. (Allen and Unwin. 322 pp. 6/- net.) Mrs Wootton is fond of saying things like “the non-fulfil-ment of this condition renders inoperative, irrelevant, and unreal the whole corpus of economic studies as defined by Professor Robbins and as embodied in the classical analysis and its. contemporary elaborations and refinements”; or, “The whole of the traditional theory of international trade, e.g., as elaborated at length by Professor Taussig, becomes ridiculous.” She finds the economists sadly given over to the support of the capitalist distributive system, or inclined to abstract theory at the expense of realistic and constructive research. She drives home her attack with energy and ingenuity and argues, on parallel lines, for the more "practical” basing of economic study, for its direction

Some Open Pages

by clearer ideas and ideals of social good, and for closer co-operation between economists and the exponents of other sciences with a direct social bearing. But Mrs Wootton’s broom and flail are often plied with rash zeal, unreasonably and unfairly. One who is so swift to knock down false assumptions should be more careful not to make any. But it is a lively, stimulating book. • • • Let us be terribly frank in the interests of truth, without which there is no wisdom. This League of Nations in which I believed-—or at least hoped—like millions of others, did not always uphold international justice or establish a reign of international law as many of us thought it would, given time and loyalty. It upheld international injustice rooted in the Peace Treaties which had carved up Austria and Hungary and imposed impossible penalties upon Germany. It was used by France and Britain to maintain the status quo in a world which by any law of nature could not remain in that rigid framework for ever. It did not use the machinery for revision, change, or readjustment but for the stabilisation of ill-drawn frontiers and the subjection of oppressed minorities, or vanquished peoples. There was no elasticity. There was no generosity, because of fear and a guilty conscience. How could the League work for justice with that dreadful treaty behind it? How could it work for peace when for years it was merely an instrument for imposing the decisions of the French Foreign Office after friendly conversation with the British Foreign Office? . . . We put our faith in an illusion always by the hope that there would be a change of heart, and that nations would seek safety in law for their own defence against universal anarchy. From “Across the Frontiers,” by Philip Gibbs. (Michael Joseph, Ltd. 336 pp. 10/6 net.) Sir Philip Gibbs gives a bold survey of post-war history, the bad and greedy statesmanship which has produced the failure of the League and its hope, the growth of Communism, the twin but contrary growth of Fascism, and, particularly, the domestic achievement of the Nazis in Germany; and Sir Philip pleads ardently for an end of the intolerant criticism and suspicion of Hitler and for trust, sympathy, and reconciliation. He is ready to give back the German colonies, to endorse Hitler’s claim to establish Germanism on its Aryan foundations to favour Germany’s Balkan schemes—all because he sees no dangerous ambitions in Germany but only friendship and the will to live in freedom and peace with her neighbours. It seems that Sir Philip wrote most of his book before Germany seized Austria—a seizure which he thought “highly improbable.” He writes a postscript, after that event, which confesses the “ruthlessness” of it and admits that, it must be interpreted by other countries as “a threat.” Not surprisingly, he closes with these words: “Darkness gathers over our European scene. Where is the light?” That it is to be found in the preceding pages the postscript will cause many readers to doubt.