The Maccabaean

ANY examination of Mr. Zimmern's book (Nationality and Government, with other War-Time Essays. Robert McBride & Co., New York, 1918 ($3.00), pp. xxiv, 364) should begin and end with the statement that it is a very good book, that everybody should read it, and that Zionists should read it often, both for edification and profit. It is, to be sure, not properly a single book at all, but, as its title indicates, and its preface explains, a collection of essays or kindred topics written during the war. Even the kinship of the topics is a general one. They have in common only the fact that they all deal with the problems of the world as modified by the great war, by the tendencies discernible before the war, and forced into burning immediacy by the war. What makes it, in spite of admitted imperfections, a whole book and a valuable one, is the singleness of purpose—one may almost say of enthusiasm—that animates the volume.

Mr. Zimmern looks forward to a world, if not regenerated, at any rate profoundly changed by its ordeal of fire, and reorganized not on a revolutionary basis, but upon a thorough-going adjustment of existing institutions. But, above all, it is to be a world definitely set against the two great evils of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the crass imperialism that would choke the soul of all peoples by forcible absorption into a dominant one, and the equally crass industrialism that would deal with labor not as an equal partner in the commonwealth, but as human material of production, to be efficiently and exhaustively exploited. And it is a mark of the breadth of his vision that the world he contemplates includes Germany.

We shall fail to get an adequate impression of the contents of the volume without listing the names of the various essays—each of which, we must remember, was written for a separate occasion and has a unity all its own. They run as follows: “German Culture and the British Commonwealth,” “Nationality and Government,” “True and False Nationalism,” “The Passing of Nationality,” “Education—Social and National,” “The Universities and Public Opinion,” “Progress in Government,” “Progress in Industry,” “The Labor Movement and the Future of British Industry,” “Reconstruction,” “The Control of Industry After the War,” “Capitalism and International Relations,” “The New German Empire,” “Three Doctrines in Conflict.” Merely to undertake to discuss such a list of topics demands boldness and comprehensiveness of intellect. Mr. Zimmern discusses them with undoubted ability and sincerity, and it is quite obvious that without revision they all form sermons to the same text, since the text was at all times foremost in the speaker’s mind.

That text, as framed in the preface, is the necessary combat of liberalism on two fronts—one directed against Greed, as incorporated in the Prussian militaristic state, and the other facing the economic and social theories loosely known as Socialism of which Mr. Zimmern supposes Bolshevism to be a more or less inevitable outgrowth. The term “liberalism,” he tells us, was selected in preference to “democracy” (p. xv), because it denoted a habit of mind, a philosophy, rather than a constitutional system.

Now, the doctrine of a fight on two fronts is not a new one. It was a favorite one for many years with the comfort-

able classes that were aware of gross injustices in our economic system, but seemed to feel their injustice only when they threatened to provoke drastic protests from the classes oppressed. There was always a suspicion of insincerity in the efforts put forth by these Laodiceans to ameliorate the condition of the masses. Whatever can be said of Mr. Zimmern, his earnestness and sincerity are apparent and unchallengeable. He has heard the bitter cry of the disinherited and he has definitely thrown his lot with those who are determined not to let a handful of engrossers and usurers win by their adroitness or their good fortune the control of the destinies of millions of their fellow-men. And yet a large part of this book is taken up by a polemic against Socialism in all its forms, its economic postulates, its traditional methods, its acknowledged aims.

The time, of course, has long past when the term “socialism” could be used as a bogey to frighten timid reformers. Mr. Zimmern’s analysis is not to be compared with the diatribes of Mr. Mallock in the last decade. He is temperate, he is well-informed and he is moved by an intense desire to see obvious wrongs righted and the world turned into a pleasant place to live in for workers as well as for others. He thinks it can be done by the carrying out of the idea of a commonwealth in which by wise governmental supervision, the worker will receive his share, but not more than his share, of the produce of his hands, and the enterprising capitalist will not be deprived of the surplus reward that his skill, his foresight, his superior intelligence give him claim to.

After all, the chief indictment that Mr. Zimmern brings against Socialism is its lack of passion for liberty, its lack of enthusiasm for the ideals and aspirations that have winged the human spirit for some scores of centuries. “Man,” he says (p. 352), “is a spiritual being”; and socialists, it would seem, are in the habit of treating man as a calories-consuming automaton, that moves dully in the direction of provender, much as insects direct their movements toward the nearest bright light. For that reason, the writer directs a great many of his keenest shafts at the much-discussed economic “interpretation” of history, fathered by Marx, and made into one of the foundation stones of the Socialist temple.

Nor will it be sufficient for Socialists to recall that in their time they have been stigmatized as unpractical idealists, whose view of the perfectibility of human nature was quite too rosy to have any validity for a gray-colored world. Mr. Zimmern can point to utterances enough on the part of Socialists in which the doctrine of economic determinism has been made to negate with cynical exhaustiveness the existence of anything better than hunger as a mainspring of human actions. Socialists are often young, are often crude, often intellectually specialized to a portentous degree; and even the doctors of the faith are not wholly free from these vices. Eager pamphleteers have been permitted to shake economic determinism in the face of a world, which soon ceased to be shocked by it, and became frankly bored.

Mr. Zimmern is right in holding economic determinism to be false doctrine, though he does not question its utility in infusing the spirit of a new research into the study of