"Questions or tHe Hour.' By V count Milner. (Hodder and Stough ton, 7/6).
After a five year's surfeit of cocksure economists, mostly pessimists, it is delightful to read these wise and restrained yet stimulating and inspiring essays, without the slightes touch of dogmatism or arrogance in them from first to last. Lord Milner himself in a characteristically frank and modest Preface classes himself as an amateur in economies and pleads for indulgence, therefore, at the hands of the professional. In an overbusy life, he declares, he has had no time to master the vast literature of the subjed: or even to keep pace: though he has tried hard to do so, with current developments of economic thought. But these apologies, of course, are to he discounted. Even pedants will admit unhesitatingly Lord Milner's right to be heard.
Separated from the orthodox Conservatives by his advanced views on social questions, separate ed g: ill more widely from average Liberals and Labour men by his glowing faith in the Empire and his attachment to national rather than cosmopolitan ideals, Lord Milner approaches each of his themes with an independence of mind rare indeed in the England of to-day. His first chapter, entitled "The Aftermath of War,' is of an introductory nature. In it he reflects upon our experiences generally since the Armistice. Although an optimist through and through, he has no illusions. He recognizes all the follies "and blunders. which have. marked British administration during these years. He contends, however, tha: our affairs are not in so hopeless a condition as is generally believed and he.seeks to show some of the roads to improvement. ce has no_ patience with the disillusion and lethargy which" have resulted from ill-grounded and dismal conceptions of our financial status. He concludes the chapter thus:
"We were obsessed by the thought of our poverty, of the burden of the debt, and misled by the mischievous metaphor of a pool of capital' which had become depleted? and could only be filled up again by penurious saving. As we must use metaphors, it would be better to think of capital, not as a pool but as a river. It is the flow, the movement, the consumption of capital, which constitutes its utility, and the prosperity of a nation depends not only on the amount of its capital but on the pace at which it is consumed and, renewed. A smaller amount of capital actively employed may mean much more in wages and profits and general welfare shan' a larger amount which is functioning Janguidly. It is not because we have less capital _than at the close of the war that industrial activity has fallen off.
And the revival will only come when we get out of the doldrums about our poverty and think less about mere saving and. more about reproductive expenditure, for which there are, both in this country and the Empire, so many opportunities and such crying need.""
In Chapter LI, "Towards Peace in Industry," Lord Milner seeks to demonstrate the essential identity of interests as between Capital and Labour. Their mutual criticisms and recriminations, he urges, are apt to be idle. "The real gravamen of the charge against our present industrial system is not that it involves an unfair distribution of the product but that it mismanages, misdiracts and therefore unduly limits, production itself." And, as the most glaring illustrations of this, he points to the backwardness or actual decadence of British agriculture and to, the appalling wastefulness in our methods of exploiting coal.
Conscious that his. views are unpopular with all parties in Parliament, Lord Milner tells us in his Preface that he often seems to himself to be "ploughing a lonely furrow." But this also is a bad metaphor, suggesting as it does a somewhat forlorn and unprofitable task, whereas all the five essays in the present volume are essentially helpful and cheerful. Chapters III, IV and V are entitled respectively, ''The Policy of Labour," "Economy and Taxation' and "Our Undeveloped Estate." On each of these topics Lord Milner has really important things to say, and ho says them admirably.—The Bookman."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.