The Maccabaean

modified; whatever changes the war may make in the currents of trade, they cannot hold their new direction forever. But the spiritual marks left upon the race will abide till the end of time, and no subsequent events will be able to erase them." Not a doubt but what all the various contrasts of war are to be found in the millions of letters which soldiers have sent home since 1914. This praiseworthy collection preserves to American posterity the main angles of the soldier's outlook upon war.

Guild Socialism

Proposed Roads to Freedom. By BERTRAND RUSSELL, New York Henry Holt & Co. $1.50.

R. RUSSELL is a Guild Socialist. This is a compara- M tively new school of utopians, different from Marxian Socialists, Anarchists and Syndicalists. Mr. Russell devotes a chapter to each of the latter three sects, showing the historical origin and development of each in a clear, simple and unbiased manner. With equal fairness he shows the weakness of each. The arguments contained in this portion of the book are such as have been worked out by many thinkers and have been often presented, but we doubt if the exposition has ever been accomplished with such lueiditv. or such absence of heat and unnecessarv effort.

The weakness of Marxianism has become almost universally recognized. Marx predicted that the growth of big business would continue on an ever increasing scale, until the middle class would be entirely wiped out and there would be left only the few plutocrats in control of the trusts and the millions of wage-slaves in servitude to them. What we see is big businesses actually multiplying, immense corporations, but at the same time the number of stockholders in the corporations goes on also increasing, so that a company like the Pennsylvania railroad for example, has something like half a million shareholders. Marx’s analysis of the origin of profits was grotesque. His vice, like that of the economists of his age, was spinning theories out of his head deductively, instead of studying the facts of economic life and shaping explanations on the basis of observation. He, however, cast a spell upon his followers by the seeming inevitability of his deductions. And this spell has continued to the present day, so that a Marxian is a peculiarly atrophied individual, one who has finished thinking and has ‚nothing more in that field to achieve. He has only to drive his conclusions into the minds of others.

Mr. Russell has a good deal of sympathy for anarchism. Its freedom is more attractive to him than the grim stability of Marxian socialism. But it must remain an ideal toward which we may approach but which we can hardly hope to reach within conceivable time. Mr. Russell shows clearly how impracticable the complete abnegation by any society of law and the use of force to compel respect for law is in the world as it exists. The anarchists would have to take measures to prevent those who were opposed to anarchy from imposing their will by force upon the rest of the community. If the anarchist society refused to use force for this purpose, there might arise a private organization that would undertake to oppose the tyrannically minded band and so we coyld have conflicts without end and no power able to put an end to them.

Syndicalism, like anarchism, has not much use for the state. It would achieve its end directly. That is, certain well organized unions would impose their will upon the whole of society by a sort of internal blockade, shutting off

the flow of goods necessary to the life of the community. The weakness of syndicalism is that it has in mind only the welfare of the producer; or rather, it sees society only from the point of view of the producers. It challenges the community to a trial of strength and in this contest it may for a time win advantages, but only so long as the majority is apathetic and only imperfectly awake to the meaning of the fight and to the technique by which the fight is waged. But once thoroughly aroused and there can be no question but that the sııneriar farre that nf the mainritv unli nrevail

Te EM MMHUTAMIR AUG DABAL VA LEE EACH ie} WWIEA p+uVY@&lie Now what is guild socialism, Mr. Russell’s favorite brand? It is acommunity run by guilds. The state is not wiped out. It remains to adjust differences between guilds with one another and between them and the entire community. Factories will be federated into national guilds which will deal with marketing and the general interests of the community. The means of production will be the property of the state. They will be managed by guilds and in each factory and osıld the manaoers wall ha alarteı hv the warkmen.

> Dusine > ine Fi ie Practical ways of working out the ideals of guild socialism are not given by our author. The ideal is held up before us, and if we say, “Behold, it is good,” perhaps something will come of it. There are many good ideas about the state, international relations, work and pay, crime and other matters in the book. And deserving of the highest praise are the calm, tolerant temper in which the book is written, the keenness of analysis displayed by the writer and the perfect luciditv of his presentation. AI

The readers of Tue MaccABAEAN most of whom are no doubt familiar with the poetry of the well known English and Yiddish poet, P. M. Raskin, will be glad to learn that two new volumes of his poems are about to appear, a collection in English under the title, “Songs and Dreams,” published by the Stratford Company of Boston, and one in Yiddish entitled “Jewish Songs,” published by Max Maisel, of New York.

Taxation of the Jewish Commonwealth

(Continued from page 219)

principle holds natural resources to be Nature’s gifts to all and therefore common property; their annual values to be expressions of social progress and therefore a social income; and their abuse, by making them private property and capitalizing their values, as tending to divert private earnings to nonearners and to foster social evils by excluding producers from the natural resources they need. Its specific methods are to tax land ownership in proportion to the market value of the land taxed, and at a percentage so high as to discourage the owning of land for any other purpose than to use it, yet low enough to encourage that purpose, thereby making possible the total exemption from taxation of all improvements and products.

In other words, his own words, Henry George proposed “to abolish all taxation save that upon land values.”

By adopting this policy for their Commonwealth in Palestine the Jews would secure to each of their people there the full value of his own earnings, and to all the people of the Commonwealth the normal usufruct value of their natural resources; they would discourage land speculation, encourage production, reward industry, and make their Commonwealth prosperous. They would restore in principle and effective operation the Jubilee reversion policy in a form suited to the political and industrial complexities of our day.