ROUND TABLE REVIEWS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LII, Issue 295, 9 December 1918, Page 4

ROUND TABLE REVIEWS.

THERE are several weighty articles in the September number of the Round Table, and they lose little of thenpoint or value through the great Allied triumph which has come about so much more quickly than was anticipated at the time when they were written. The first of them discusses the unity of civilisation as foreshadowed and developed by the course of the war. Its author dwells upon the unity ■alretady achieved by the Allies, notonly in the conduct of the war operations, but in industrial and economic co-operation. "While Germany has been exploiting and enslaving her satellites and victims -within the ring of her military power, the Allies have been, engaged, undsr the spur of necessity, in building up a fabric of in.ternaltionial economic organisation devised not for aggrandisement but for mutual aid, which will stand as an integral part of the new order to meet the need s of the free peoples at the moment of peace." In what has been thus accomplished we have the provisional framework of a permanent [structure of international friendship. The .great lesson of the war is the need for moral and spiritual unity,for a new world within to match .the j new' world without. Here the writer I utters a warning note. The writer betokens the -end of an epoch of human' history—"the epoch that opened with] the discovery at the end of the 18th century, of the means for vastly in-J creasing the wealth of mankind, and closed abruptly at of .the 20th because the governments and peoples of the world had used these discoveries, predominantly and with increasing concentration, to forward, designs dictated by individual or national selfishness. Prussia led the way down' the decline, and to her the judgment of mankind, which future ages will confirm, has already apportioned the blame." Prussia, however, wa s not •th,s only, if immeasurably the worst, sinner. -""Business is. business" has j often proved no less adequate a cloak than "war is war" for the domination of the strong and the oppression of the helpless. "The only true and enduring foundation for the new order, and for the League of Nations which already in men's *minds has become its symbol, is the conscious adoption by. both governments and peoples of dards of conduct an'd methods of dealing which," discarding the shibboleths of the _spjunting,house, look not t? profit and aggrandisements, but to mutual service and self-sacrifice."

Another striking article is on "The Spirit of the Russian [Revolution." The, writer looks upon -what has happened in Russia as but an incident in the great process of the regeneration, of Eastern (Europe. There was so much futility in Russia, such vagueness, that only the handful of extremists who usurped power seemed to have definite iaeas and aims, and those ideas .and aims were borrowed for the most part, from German social-democracy. "From the point, of view of the Russian, people Bolshevism is not so a doctrine or a political system as.a strange mood —a mental phase through which j the people had inevitably to pass in | emerging from such an autocracy to j attain (the full stature of conscious naI tionality in a modern world." The recovery of Russia is certain, we are I assured, and the new Russia will "become in' our collective civilisation a power of an, entirely new quality, and will be found a source of anxiety, perhaps, but also of great intellectual and moral stimulus to the peoples pf the West, who are fighting their way out into a world of new and broader endeavour." In a third article the 'wonderful unifying effect oT"the war upon the American' nation, is dilated upon, while yet ,a fourth offers some pertinent criticism as well as appreciation of the programme of Indian constitutional reform outlined in the MontaguChelmsford report. TW break-down of as at present constituted and burdened with overwork forms the subject.of a suggestive paper on "The Better Government of the ■' United Kingdom." It is contended, that •, the machinery of government has not kept pace with the growing" needs, of the nation. There i e bycr-centralisation, and devolution of some kind is' needed to give full effect to the principle that public - opinion should control public affairs.