Eleanor Lansing Dulles

MCCLURE, WALLACE. World Prosperity. Pp. xxxix, 613. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933.

NEWBOLD, WALTON. Democracy, Debts and Disarmament. Pp. xiv, 343. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1933.

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3.00. This is a survey of the international economic depression, regarded largely from the viewpoint of England, by a man who has found that economic activities &dquo;are much less drab affairs than the professors would have their students believe. Somewhere between Pigou and Max Pemberton you will arrive at the truth&dquo; (p. 53). But, despite innumerable recent studies of the depression, this book is unique. Many have suggested that the present depression is the final phase of capitalism, since the day that Karl Marx first suggested such a possibility, but few since that time have surveyed the economic development of the world since the age of Amsterdam’s greatness, weaving politics and economics into a continuous thread that stretches onward to the crisis of 1933. In the light of that survey, the author concludes that &dquo;the technique of tool and machine has ordained that society, unless it is to suffer shipwreck, must not go back from finance capitalism to paternal property, but forward to the planned economy of collectivism. The applied ethics of medievalism, erected into eternal truths by papal encyclical or Nazi decree, condemn to death by starvation the millions of modern Germany&dquo; and of other developed countries (p. 324). But whether one agrees with the conclusions of the author or not, the book is fascinating and provocative. It has some of the rugged flavor of independence of Victorian writings, which is understandable when one realizes that Walton Newbold, originally a student of George ITnwin at Manchester, has been in turn a Fabian, a member of the Labor Party, and a Communist-and has found each creed equally unsatisfactory. Not every day do we have