"Is America Worth Savine?" By Nicholas Murray Butler. T. Fisher Unwin. 10s. 6d. net, "Cuaracter and Orion IN AMeRtca."
By George Santayana, Constable Ca. Ld. 10s. net, When Robert Burns took Moss-gid Farm it was shrewdly remarked that it was the poet and not the farmer who had chosen the place. Which was right? Which saw the the real Mossgiel rho, "in our most hackneyed quotation, shall decide when doctors disagree? And here they are at it.
Nicholas Murray Butler is the best-known College President with! one exception in the United States; and but for that exception he might have been President of the Republic (Mr. T. R. Glover writes in the 'Daily News"). But, it was said, America was a little tired of academic rulers by the; time the Republicans went into Convention at Chicago last summer. So he stays at Columbia University, as a famous story reminds us. On his appointment' another College President gave him a reference to a verse in the Psalms, which proved to be: 'He that keep th Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.'? Columbia, it is suggested, has more Hebrew students than ever sat at the feet of Gamaliel.
Mr. George Santayana's story is different. He belongs to Harvard and ordinary Americans say: You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much." It is like that inherent sense of the superiority of Oxford, which Cambridge men always admit and Oxford men accept- Mr. Santayana was born in Spain, and only went to the States at nine years old, and after about 30 years of Harvard, where he was Professor, he left the country for Europe. His publisher tells us his mind is of the Latin tradition; his early training was Catholic; he is not quite a New England Puritan.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.