This Changing World
by
[Houghton Mifflin, $2.00]
FOR fifty years Mr. Fels has been looking at life steadily, seeking to see it whole. Fifty years is an epoch, and Mr. Fels, sharply intelligent and insatiably curious, has wasted no fraction of it. His book is a Gospel of Hope. There is, he believes, a universal life Purpose, and in its pursuit mankind is moving organically forward. Step by step through the ancient jungle of rivalries, jealousies, and fears, we are evolving a capacity for living together, working together, even for serving together. Independence is giving way to interdependence. In the domain of economics the author sees the slow adoption of a programme whereby, through intensifying the narrow incidence of taxation and enlarging wages at the expense of profits, universal well-being may be secured. Manufacturers will enlarge their markets and hold them Business men will reach their secure and perfect balance in small profits and large sales. Once economic fear is gone, thrift will be a mere vermiform appendix, and the surpluses which bulwark corporations against hard times will, when hard times are permanently banished, melt away into pay envelopes. Of the triteness of this outline there is no trace in Mr. Fels’sbook, which graphically describes the obstacles to Purpose, and energetically combats them.
But to think as Mr. Pels does, a man must once For all accept mankind, weak and strong, clever and simple, black or tan, as brothers. Brotherhood is universal, and triumph means the common victory of all. The fruits of individuality, architecture, painting, books, poetry, manners, adventures in the perfection of living: what place have they in a society wherein only the common is the good, and economics is condemned to be the handmaiden of politics? Is it not largely true that many most precious things are created by the few, and only by the few can be enjoyed in their perfection? And again, if the whole emphasis of life be placed on distribution, will not creation dwindle?
The interest of these things is at blood heat. Mr. Fels’s book, like a temperature chart, measures its rise.
E. S.